Mon, Nov 17, 2008

: Saturday Night Fever

Director: John Badham

Is it weird that I’ve never seen this? It’s a movie that supposedly everyone has seen and many people don’t like because disco has such a bad rep. But I was surprised and even a little astonished. I thought this was some dumb dance movie, but it’s really a character study about a young Brooklyn man trying to figure out his future. He enters a disco dance contest and dumps his sweet-hearted former partner for a hot new girl and eventually realizes he’s a jerk. The film’s surprisingly foul-mouthed and even violent, with fight scenes and pretty much a rape at one point, but it’s got such an authenticity that it didn’t bother me. I really felt like that’s the way it was in Brooklyn back in 1977. People talked like that, had families like that, and so on. It’s a very interesting film and probably underrated. The dancing’s not really my thing and I didn’t pay much attention during some of the longer scenes, but the music’s actually kind of cool (maybe because it’s new to me). How the heck did the Bee Gees sing so high? Were they on helium?

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