Speak Film and Enter · Nate Johnson, Dylan Watson, and Adam Borremans

Episode 637: The Last Days of Disco (1998)

·1 hr 3 min·2 clips

They're applying college degrees to Scrooge McDuck, Lady and the Tramp, Bambi, Spider-Man, the tortoise and the hare.

1. Speak Film and Enter's Episode 637 reviews Whit Stillman's 1998 comedy The Last Days of Disco, set around 1981-82 in a Manhattan disco, as the second film of its July slate. 2. Hosts Nate, Dylan and Adam split on the film: Nate picked it as a longtime Stillman fan, Dylan is new to Stillman, and Adam turned it off around the 40-minute mark before finishing it the next day. 3. The central debate is whether Stillman's deadpan, stilted dialogue is a flaw or a deliberate joke, and Dylan says it took him about 45 minutes to "get" the style. 4. The At a Glance segment lists an $8 million budget, a $3 million box office, 73% on Rotten Tomatoes, 6.7 on IMDb and 3.8 on Letterboxd, and places the film alongside Stillman's Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona and Love and Friendship (2016). 5. The hosts name the Lady and the Tramp conversation, in which Kate Beckinsale's and Chloe Sevigny's characters trade rehearsed-sounding monologues, as the scene where the film's humor and its flaws converge. 6. They also praise the line "Wednesday was my gay day," the disco monologue as "the only honest bit anyone spoke," and the running joke about an ad man who loses his job after failing to get clients into the club. 7. Nate argues the tame, office-attire dancing is deliberate, since the yuppies in suits stand out against club-goers in a tin man costume, and he describes Stillman's tone as "the sincerity of insincerity." 8. Adam's "intelligent idiots" observation holds that the characters have vocabulary and degrees but reference only Scrooge McDuck, Bambi, Spider-Man and the tortoise and the hare. 9. Another observation is that drug use and drinking are only mentioned or implied rather than used as plot devices, and the hosts also note Gavin Belson's actor delivering the line "The first printed book was the Bible." 10. Suits Stillman fans, dry-comedy viewers, and anyone curious about 1980s yuppie satire.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Speak Film and Enter