The Last Days of Disco

Plot synopsis:
In the "very early 1980s," Alice Kinnon and Charlotte Pingress, two recent college graduates, work in a New York City publishing house as poorly paid readers. After work one night, they are able to enter an exclusive disco nightclub, where Alice is hoping to socialize with Jimmy Steinway, who works in advertising and uses the nightclub to entertain clients. Jimmy is ill-tempered because he has been barred from bringing clients to the nightclub and is eventually kicked out by his friend Des McGrath, who works as a manager at the club but whose job is in jeopardy for allowing Jimmy and his clients inside. After Jimmy leaves, Alice takes Charlotte's advice to go home with her second choice, Tom Platt. At work the following morning, Charlotte and Alice talk with other editors about how to fast-track their careers. They also decide to move in together with a third girl, Holly, as they cannot afford to pay rent on their own. Despite Alice's reluctance, the women eventually settle on a railroad apartment.
Returning to the club, Alice is upset to learn that Charlotte has designs on Jimmy. She is further upset when Tom tells her that when he slept with her, he had a long-term girlfriend he was separated from and his one-night stand with Alice convinced him to return to her. Des then begins to pursue Alice.
At work, Alice decides to pursue the publication of a book on Buddhism, written by the Dalai Lama's brother, that Charlotte had previously recommended rejecting, and Alice gains the editors' respect. It is discovered that the author is not in fact the Dalai Lama's brother, but Alice maintains the book is one of the best she's ever read. Meanwhile, Charlotte, now dating Jimmy, is openly insecure about Jimmy and Alice's apparent friendliness.
At the club, in front of a group of various friends, Charlotte loudly announces that Alice has gonorrhea, after figuring it out when Alice refuses to drink. Charlotte later apologizes to Alice but tells her not to be embarrassed, as it will make men think of her as more accessible. In fact, after learning this, Des does become more interested in being with Alice, and they start dating casually.
Alice has dinner with Tom to confront him about giving her gonorrhea. He initially denies it, arguing she could have contracted it from someone else, but Alice tells him he was her first sexual partner. He then admits he also gave her herpes.
Meanwhile, Josh Neff, a D.A. and friend of Jimmy's who also frequently attends the club, asks Alice to lunch to pitch a book to her. At lunch, he confesses he is interested not in writing a book but in Alice. Alice and Josh go on a real date, and he tells her he is on medication for manic depression. Upon returning home from the date, Alice discovers Charlotte being taken away in an ambulance after a miscarriage and being told by Jimmy that he is moving to Barcelona. At the hospital, Charlotte asks Alice if Jimmy ever expressed interest in being with her; when Alice admits that he did, Charlotte reacts with tears and tells her she will be moving out.
The nightclub is raided by the police for tax fraud, and Des tries to run away despite Josh's promise to protect him, believing that Josh's interest in Alice will cause him to act unfairly. They later discover that even before the club was raided by the police, disco records were no longer selling and attendance was down.
Alice and Charlotte learn that their employer has merged with a larger publishing house and that layoffs are to be expected. Some time later, Charlotte, Josh, and Des are seen leaving the unemployment office. Josh tells the group that he is going to Lutèce for lunch, treated by Alice, who is celebrating her promotion (her book was published after she switched it from nonfiction to self-help). Des and Charlotte talk about how their big personalities are too much for normal personalities like Alice, Josh, and Jimmy. Des also says that pairing off monogamously detracts from their glamorous lifestyle, and Charlotte agrees.
On the subway on their way to Lutèce, Alice and Josh discuss their future prospects. As the end credits begin, they break character to dance to "Love Train", and are eventually joined by the entire subway station of passengers when they arrive at their destination.

Tags: clever

Review:
No, not a rehash of Boogie Nights, but the third instalment, following Metropolitan and Barcelona, of Whitman's `yuppie' odyssey.This New York yarn centres on publishing assistants Charlotte (flawless snotty American accent by Kate Beckinsale) and her best friend/biggest rival Alice (Chloe Sevigny).
A bit like Friends, only without dumb Joey and flaky Phoebe.Although, aesthetically and visually Whitman's film doesn't quite ring true  clothing looks too 90s and they'd never be able to talk so much in a club  the dialogue is fresh and chances are you'll be grinning from here to Bolivia when the "Love Train" rolls through the subway at the end.Ben Walsh.
I think the song "Bette Davis Eyes" would have been a good choice.If you are looking for a celebration of Disco, this film isn't it.
This film really does feel like theater in many ways, especially the funny and clever, tightly written dialogue.Superb performance by almost the entire cast (the one exception being McKenzie Astin, who was fairly awful, but was barely onscreen so it was shrugable), raised the film to a level above its potential.
Kate Beckinsale was the perfect bitch, so annoying that I wanted to pull her out of the screen and shake her repeatedly;) Christopher Eigeman nearly stole the show as Des, he played the character perfectly, his voice and tone always on edge, the defensiveness and womanizing, the stories he told, all a brilliant package.
But Chloë Sevigny more than held her own, with her best performance that I've ever seen...everything from her line release to her body language stuck out; she became Alice.This film is a definite must see...a great soundtrack, great sets, brilliant writing and better acting.
If not, not.This movie is FAR more like Stillman's others (Metropolitan and Barcelona) than like anything you've seen about disco - which is simply the background.
I was surprised that these yuppie characters were so freely admitted to Studio 54 (the set of the film), but perhaps it indicates disco's waning popularity by the early 1980s.
I have met people who have lived through the Disco era and waxed poetic like Josh towards the end of the movie.
I just fell in love with this film and its characters, characters who could only exist as they did and together in that very late disco period.Actually, Stillman got some things wrong, and maybe he did so on purpose.
Their post college adolescence is over.My favorite parts - Robert Sean Leonard as an environmental lawyer who seems sensitive at first yet denies his sexual partners certain vital "need to know" information, a hilarious deconstruction of Lady and the Tramp as only Harvard grads could do it, and the closing credits superimposed on what could almost be called a music video featuring "Love Train" that sends the film out on a joyful hopeful note.
With an investigation in the disco's financial dealings and the end of disco approaching the friends attempt to carry on as normal.Director Whit Stillman tends to go for comedies that look inward and have strong comedic dialogue that follow social observations and comment on different cultures and periods.
But the story is almost non-existent and this is a slight problem.Overall a clever, funny look at the life of a couple of party girls around the time disco started to suck.
However, I can't ignore the fact that the audio mix was terrible, 90% of the shots in the nightclub were too bright, the general vibe of the time period being depicted was wrong, the dialog sounded like it was from the 1930s (complete with numerous lengthy monologues), the street fashion was almost completely inaccurate, and that pretty much every male character in the film talked in almost the exact same manner.There were at least five points in this movie at which I said to myself, "What the hell is this film?" This is one seriously bizarre production.
It's clear that either the writer was never actually there in the late 1970s and early 1980s or they have no memory of it and had to reconstruct their 'experiences' based on watching old black and white movies.Ultimately, if you want to watch a warm and fuzzy film filled with lengthy overly-formal dialog then this is the one to see.
They might surmise that disco was incredibly dull,frequented by boring individuals with no redeemable features to their characters ( there was hope for the Chloe character), with clothes and music as bland as the 90s,and maybe there was some connection with disco and going to Harvard.I thought Studio 54 had plumbed the depths shallow, superficial films about disco- this went one step further, and it was all the way down.
( By the way, Boogie Nights and Summer of Sam portrayed disco beautifully).There were shreds of a plot- (sort of like St Elmo's fire but not; far less interesting) and and there was a problem with the editing -so one had to guess what the time intervals were between various "events"- .And unfortunately, you just didn't care one or another about the characters; they were fairly unconvincing, in fact.Fairly interesting dialogues, but nothing you haven't heard before in a film or indeed on a college campus ( if you were unlucky).And what arrogance to think that disco's role was to be a somewhat exotic backdrop for these uninteresting neurotics.
I stayed with this film: cos I was thinking this has got to get better and I was amazed that a film could be so bad.This was about a group of lame, empty, self-obsessed Yuppies, whose horrible dancing was the most entertaining thing in the movie, and who I suspect were responsible in their own sweet way for the demise of disco ( why would you go to dance disco in a tie and suit?).
Rather than a movie about the demise of the disco it's more about a group of uninteresting recently-left-college-and-got-jobs-in-New-York embryonic yuppies.
In particular Bernie (the owner cum drug-dealer and money-launderer) and Dan (Bernie's right-hand man who ensures only the `right' people are allowed in) would surely have made for a good story.I assume the eulogy to disco offered by one of the characters towards the end was meant as a joke.
I don't mind a movie with no plot, but I need something to keep me interested--which this film does not deliver.The acting is uniformly stiff.
Only Kate Beckinsale occasionally rises above the mediocrity with a crisply acted scene.I suppose there are people who talk the way these characters do, but I've never met them.
The characters try to elevate disco to cosmic meaning, but the film makes the inside of the club look dull.
The TV miniseries "Tales of the City," famously set in 1970s San Francisco, had several totally believable period scenes in clubs & bars, as have many other movies in which discos figure heavily into the backdrop (Carlito's Way comes to mind).
(Chloe Sevigny is generally about to fall asleep, so she didn't make much of an impression either way.)I thought the commentary of the "intellectual" character Dan marked the low point, until I reached Kate's non-ironic rendition of "Amazing Grace." Really.
I didn't care about any character, the plot was nonexistent, and--for a movie that was set in the late seventies/early eighties--the look was exceedingly nineties.Frankly, I can't say enough bad things about this movie, but I can sure try.
well it's not that I need a plot to enjoy a movie, just that the dialogue used to carry this one emanated from characters I really didn't like.
Two New York chicks, Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), live in New York at the time when disco was extremely popular.
This could have been given more time, and made the movie more interesting.Good things with the film are the gals.
All those great disco-songs were in here, which was a real treat.But the music doesn´t save a movie, that contains way to much uninteresting dialogue for it´s own good.* * ½.
I feel certain that "unusual" all by itself goes a long way toward getting a good review from people who have to watch an unending parade of painfully similar, simplistic and bad Hollywood films.His dialogue is uniquely his in much the same way Woody Allen's is in his movies.
6. it's too long!I actually enjoyed watching two of the main characters get severely beaten up by a redneck in a "disco sucks" T-shirt.HOWEVER: what saves this movie from a 1 or 2 is of course the wonderful Chloë Sevigny, who's playing the lovable alternative reactionary girl who of course gets a job promotion and "the right" boyfriend in the end, while the others' splattered lives can only be seen as disappointments..
I love movies about the glitsy disco days so, from my thinking a movie's gotta have something missing if it can't even hold my interest on an interesting subject matter.I also enjoy movies that are dialogue driven but in this movie's case, for some reason, the extreme talkiness detracted from my enjoyment for some reason.
And, it doesn't really show you what partly brought about the demise of those heady days; A thing called AIDS.Dazed And Confused, Thank God It's Friday, Saturday Night Fever, even 54...These are better 'coming of age' or 'rites of passage' movies, which are set or actually made during the aforementioned time..
The characters were drab and not as Des professed "larger than life".it's difficult to say what the film should have been, but one thing I'm certain of is another director could have come up with a far more entertaining movie given this idea and budget..
Yes, yes, I got the point of their lives being boring and shallow and that the characters being portrayed this way was intentional, but that doesn't make it an interesting film by any stretch of the imagination.
The dialogue was elementary at best, the set designers obviously have never been in any kind of club (except for maybe chess club-i mean, who talks at a normal level in a club?), and the music, although some songs were decent, could have included a MUCH better selection of unforgettable songs in a rather forgettable decade....This movie is a HUGE WASTE of time, and i'm that much closer to becoming a bitter old man because of it...
Matt Keeslar does very well as the slightly disturbed, taking no for an answer Josh.There is cynicism is in the real life moments of drugs, sex, disease - but the film is quite naive and sweet in how the good guys get the goodies in the end.The mood is well done - the disco club exciting, but the conversations in the club were almost incomprehensible over the music.
The only thing it had going for it was a good performance from Kate Beckingsdale.Chloe Sevigny is such a dull and emotionless actress that I couldn't stop wondering how she ever gets parts in films..
The Last Days of Disco is essentially an incidental theme to Stillman's third film, the plotline really revolves around young Americans falling in and out of love at the same time as commenting on the various mores of their social set.
I do not mean it as an aesthetic judgement, just a sort of an essay in translating in logical terms the hard to pin down effect it had on me, for all the shallow characters on display, it is affectively rich.It is a film difficult and at the same time deceptively simple to summarize - the only way I feel I can do it is pin down the tone as I see it: Chloe Sevigny plays Alice who is not in Wonderland or Oz (even if the occasional characters appear in Discoland) but actually seems more like Voltaire's Candide, candid even when confronted with her "best friend"'s common, constant, bitchy smugness, who in fact turns into some kind of likable caricature in the end, likable that is when you think she is some kind of irony's scapegoat: she simply HAS to end up in TV, that is the crippled purgatory she deserves.Along with Alice, Josh (Matt Keeslar) has his Candide moment in the end, as outsider spokesman for the disco era: I do not think Stillman is ironic here - and the reason why is that in the comedy of human flaws Stillman wants to present us, we get our ironic portion of that in Chekhovian levity, so I do not think that anyone would end up something in a flat note.The film ends in a lively manner that is also nostalgic and shorthand, that is affectionately shorthand as, one supposes, all Stillman's films are.
The reason given by the writer and director (this is my opinion based on the way I saw what was showed on the screen) Whit Stillman why Disco was through is that everybody focused on their work, they didn't have much time to go party, to dance and everybody's frustrated in their relationships (sexual relations and/or not helpful friends).
Chlöe Sevigny ("Boys Don't Cry"), Kate Beckinsale ("The Aviator"), Mackenzie Astin ("The Evening Star"), Robert Sean Leonard ("Dead Poets Society"), David Thornton ("Alpha Dog"), Matt Keeslar ("Splendor"), Chris Eigeman (I didn't remembered any other work with him but he's got a tremendous job in this movie), Matt Ross ("American Psycho") and Jennifer Beals ("Flashdance").
Your opinion of the movie will depend on whether you think that dialogue was put into the characters' mouths to satirize the dopey, witless, shallow denizens of the discos.
Do not see this film unless you are attracted to snotty waspy rich ivy league grads waxing intellectual.Period.After about 10 or 15 minutes, I asked my wife, "They've introduced all the 'bad' guys, so when are we going to meet the good guys.'"About two minutes later, after watching a dark-haired little pixie 22-or-so year old blather on intelligently and pretentiously about this or that, I decided I had had it up to here (pointing to well above my eyebrows) with this stuff.
Stillman is interested here in expanding some of his favorite motifs such as, of course, disco, intellectualism (for lack of a better word), wit, snobbery, and relationships, and sacrifices very little for a mainstream audience:  thus, a lot of loose ends, difficult to follow dialogue, disagreeable characters, and a generally scattered storyline.
Wrong.If this movie is meant to be a comment on the virus like spread of Reagonomics into every aspect of American culture throughout the 80s, then having a grand Disco as the setting pretty much mandates that the film be a broad parody.
Eigeman always comes out looking good, however, and delivers some of the funniest lines in the film.After playing a kind, upper-class helper in Cold Comfort Farm, Kate Beckinsale is a surprise as Charlotte, a girl with a "big personality" who puts Chloe Sevigny's Alice through hell for much of the film.
Alice (Sevigny), a self-contained sylph dithering about making the right decisions - don't be judgmental, be sexy, always at the bidding of her more popular but stuck-up friend Charlotte (a fresh-faced Beckinsale, looking ghastly under the slap), both girls work in the same publishing house and mingle with the likes of Tom (Leonard), a spiffy environmental lawyer, Jimmy (Astin), an enterprising adman, No.1 and No.2 prospects on Alice's infatuation list, then there are Josh (Keeslar), a young assistant district attorney and Des (Eigeman), a college-dropout who becomes one of the managers of the said nightclub, both take a fancy on the quiet but intelligent Alice.Gender study and sex politics are thrown into the mix where philandering and mendacity (using "gay excuse" to break off relationships), gender double standards (you are a titillating slut, I will not forfeit our chance of a one-night-stand, but afterwards, we are finished.), treacherous friendship (Beckingsale is totally in her wheelhouse as the paradigm of the so called "green tea bitch", avant la lettre), even venereal disease, collectively roil the dynamism of their pairing-off games, to somewhat wacky but consistently buoyant vibes, however, a byplay relative of an undercover police investigation is only patchily introduced as a frivolous plot device, fails to emphasize what is at stake, and the manic-depressive Josh, accorded with a forthright quirkiness and spontaneous elocution, potentially the most fascinating character among the posse, is wasted by the wooden, stilted performance from the blandly handsome Keeslar, whose recapitulation of the film's tenor near the finish-line comes off as a deleterious overkill.However, club-scene hasn't died out, has been continuing luring new generations of hipsters and scenesters with theme-specific variations to this day, over three decades later, THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO is, to each their own, a sparkling eulogy of Whitman's own youthful abandon and disillusion, and on a sociological level, a zeitgeist-reflecting conversation piece that thankfully doesn't belie its maker's undue conceit and guile..
I loved Whit Stillman's other films and enjoyed Last Days of Disco as much as Barcelona and Metropolitan.
Most people's lives are filled with mostly dialogue, just like this movie.
Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but in a limited way, the Last Days of Disco is as good a meditation on the end of its era as The Great Gatsby is about the end of the Jazz Age.Some people won't like this film because they'll have a hard time relating to the yuppies who are the major characters, but the character development (or lack thereof) is one of the movie's major strengths.
If you like The Last Days of Disco, you will almost certainly enjoy his two earlier films, Metropolitan and Barcelona..
The movie never picks up, never gets more interesting, just like the lives of these characters.I can't call "The Last Days of Disco" a bad movie, because it isn't.
I've seen two of Whit Stillman's three movies -- Metropolitan and now Last Days of Disco.
Once again, Eigeman does a great job with a multi-faceted character, while Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale hold the movie together relatively well at its center..