"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Robert Sean Leonard’

The Last Days of Disco

Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
AFTER 2 WEEKS IN LIMITED
RELEASE, THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO
EXPANDED TO 168 SCREENS…

June 12, 1998

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO is a category of movie that arguably had its heyday in the late ’90s: the beloved indie auteurs given the money to do their thing with more production value. In this case it’s the third film of writer-director Whit Stillman, whose $250,000-budgeted debut METROPOLITAN (1990) received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay and an Independent Spirit Award for best first feature. His second one BARCELONA (1994) cost under $3 million, but for this one he got $8 million to work with, more than either of his movies had grossed.

It’s still a movie mostly about people talking, but it costs money to have a huge club set, period costuming and a soundtrack of disco hits (just ask the producers of PROM NIGHT about that last one). The movie chronicles Alice (Chloe Sevigny, KIDS, GUMMO) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale, VAN HELSING, PEARL HARBOR) – both readers at a New York City book publisher – and some of the other people who hang out at the same unnamed disco as them over a period of maybe a year or two in “the very early 1980s.” They fall in and out of relationships, fuck things up, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)

Driven

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
tn_driven
chapter 2

2001posterreleased April 27, 2001

DRIVEN is a weird footnote in the overlapping filmographies of Sylvester Stallone and Renny Harlin. It’s no CLIFFHANGER, and it’s not trying to be. If anything maybe it wants to be the ROCKY V of Formula 1 race car driving. Or whatever type of race cars they’re driving in this one. They’re not NASCAR I can tell.

Okay, stop the presses, I just looked it up (it turns out I’m on the internet right now). I guess Formula 1 is very secretive like the Masons so Stallone couldn’t get enough info on them and switched the movie to be about “ChampCar” racing. I guess that’s why they didn’t make a big deal of what type of racing it was in the movie, ’cause nobody was gonna get excited about something called “ChampCar.”
(read the rest of this shit…)

Tape

Saturday, November 3rd, 2001

I have to admit, the digital video is starting to look more promising. For a while there I was about to declare it my arch-enemy. It never looked like a real movie. It always looked like crap. But it was winning over directors like Spike Lee, lowering their standards. Either it looked muddy and ugly (like Bamboozled) or like a TV special (like Original Kings of Comedy). Even in the best cases it just looked like cheap film stock (Chuck and Buck) and in the only case where it looked really great (Julien Donkey Boy) it was because they transferred it to film and then back to video and then back to film, or some crazy shit like that that nobody else is gonna bother to try.

I’m still skeptical but I must admit that the technology is improving, making it more acceptable. They’re even using digital video for important works like the next Soderbergh film and the third installment in the Mariachi trilogy. I saw an ad for Star Wars Part 2 and although it looked more artifial than part 1, I would never have guessed it was all shot on some super high tech rich guy camcorder. (read the rest of this shit…)