“I consider you a person of some integrity—except, you know, in your relations with women.” That must be the most important line spoken in any Stillman film pinpointing the many ways his movies marry sociological study, comedy of manners and a rather clear moral position. If The Last Days of Disco is Stillman’s masterpiece is because it’s the one that most clear articulates the ways one witness unaware our slow decay towards barbarism, the idea that ultimate links all his four historical films. One stumbles upward, while the world around it just awkwardly disappears. It is as beautiful elegiac as it is witty because Stillman sincere belief that “the yuppie scum” deserves its elegy too. There’s plenty of behavior beauties…

"'Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh, for a few years - maybe many years - it'll be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented and caricatured and sneered at, or - worse - completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and people going like *this* but we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco . Those who didn't understand will never understand: disco was much more, and much better, than all that. Disco was too great, and too much fun, to…

This time I found the story ~moves~ less than I thought it did, or rather it moves less because of direct Cause —> Effect. Stillman’s balancing of personality affects and types is what really gives the story its movement. Alice’s curious never-quite-sure tone against Charlotte’s smart ass, (sometimes unintended) snarky and pathological explanations that come out as both funny and overcooked. The most unnatural of those moments being when she half-apologizes for exposing Alice’s gonorrhea. “People hate when you criticize them, it’s human nature, I think that’s why my parents got divorced.” When she says this in the beginning it’s a perfect example of her faux-objectivity, always speaking in a distant/knowing sort of way but really that “knowledge” only ever…