Killing Them Softly

The thinly veiled allegory in “Killing Them Softly” is that the American system of economy and culture is broken, and the people pulling the strings may as well be sleazy, stupid criminals. I say that’s bull, not because I necessarily disagree with Director Andrew Dominik but because his broad analogies, over stylized film and nonsensical story prove nothing.

It’s about two gangsters, Frankie and Russell (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn), who are hired to rob a mafia poker game. The logic behind this is that one of the bosses himself, Markie (Ray Liotta), planned such a heist before, and if it were to happen again, they’d know who to blame.

But the bosses, whoever they are, aren’t completely stupid, because they hire Jackie (Brad Pitt) to find Frankie and Russell and just treat Markie like a patsy. The thought process is, Markie and the boys need to die because a message needs to be sent to other members of the mafia that their money is safe and that the black market economy isn’t in danger.

This alone does not make a compelling argument for how American Capitalism works or doesn’t. So “Killing Them Softly” is set around the 2008 Presidential Election, and these gangsters are very well informed on politics. Car stereos are always tuned to talk radio, airport and bar TVs are switched to C-Span, and wherever you go, you hear George W. Bush or Obama talking about the economy.

Simply put, Dominik is reaching. Jackie seems to think he’s picking winners and losers by allowing some parts of this mob economy to fail and be eliminated and others to be bailed out and kept alive. But the specifics as to who dies and why seems vague, namely because this mob doesn’t operate in realistic ways at all.

There’s no sense of community here. There are no women, no backstories, no bosses, and no organized crime against the law-abiding society. There are only rules and senseless beatings. One of the mob’s messengers (Richard Jenkins) explains you can’t get anything done today without passing every money exchange and hit by a committee, which doesn’t seem plausible, only a plot device. Even the sleazy and unlikeable vermin that make up “Killing Them Softly” are constructed as such so that the movie can linger on their bile, like in one scene when Russell hears every dirty, meaningless word and threat out of his partner’s mouth in a slow motion, drug-soaked haze.

“Killing Them Softly” is disgusting, less so for its violence, which during a drive-by murder and car wreck is fetishized beyond belief, but more so for its repulsive characters and cynically repellent ideas about American politics.

2 stars

Oslo, August 31st

Addictions run deep. We may find a way to begin recovery, but soon we get addicted to our own guilt and depression. Even if we are given a break, do we deserve it?

“Oslo, August 31st” is a quietly expressive film about a man whose greater problem than addiction is normalcy. It’s an artistic, but down to Earth film that exposes the pains of recovery and the burdens of society.

Joachim Trier’s film follows one day in the life of Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a recovering addict. What was he addicted to? Cocaine, heroin, booze, parties, women, you name it. The important part is that he was addicted. Now he’s contemplating suicide, but he’s close to finishing his rehab program, he’s 10 months sober and he even has a promising job interview.

When he goes into the interview, the manager asks what he’s been doing for the last five years, and he finally can dodge the question no longer and admits he was a drug addict. As a person struggling through job interviews myself, it’s amazing how powerful and honest this scene is. Tell lies to get the job yet be trustworthy and open at the same time? How the hell do you do that? Any job you’ve weaseled your way to get is one you probably don’t deserve, and that’s Anders’s position on both this and the rest of his life.

Lie gives a powerful performance in appearing wounded and broken yet completely functioning. What’s harder for him is keeping a straight face as he hears from others how his problem is a greater problem for them. What they see in him is someone who avoided the tough choices of having kids, selling their parents’ house, socializing in uncomfortable situations. He took the easy way out.

Trier finds a delicate mix between hard-hitting character drama and more figuratively metaphorical reflections on life. There’s a scene where Anders sits in a coffee shop listening in on other people’s conversations. One girl reads off a list of things she wants to accomplish in life, and his mind wanders to follow the people he sees on the street back home. It’s enough that for a moment he’s left his own body and taken another, even one that is troubled, mundane or beautiful.

“Oslo, August 31st” is named as such because it allows us to recall a time and a place, but more importantly a feeling. In that moment of pain or comfort, we need to know we’re rooted down somewhere. Trier’s montages and visual poetry are artistic and beautiful, but the film grounds us and quietly, observantly, lets us know who we are.

3 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Taste of Cherry

Just about every Abbas Kiarostami movie is to an extent about people driving around. The people in the cars drive and they talk, and sooner or later they get somewhere, maybe not geographically, but existentially at least, or so you would think. His movie “Ten” was all about conversations people had in cars. In “Certified Copy,” the images reflected on the windshield were more interesting than the discussion. I know Kiarostami is a gifted filmmaker, because I can see the absolute fire in some of his scenes. When he wants to, he’s capable of arresting filmmaking. But there is a very fine line between extremely careful and slow plotting and just filling time.

“Taste of Cherry” walks this line ever so studiously. It waits a full 25 minutes before revealing its main character’s intentions, and even then it doesn’t seem to amp up the suspense. I admit I looked at the plot description ahead of time, so I knew Mr. Badii’s (Homayoun Ershadi) trepidation and dilemma from the start, which is maybe beside the point. He is contemplating suicide, so he drives around seeking a laborer, a loner or someone naive who will help him without question.

His request is simple. There is a hole in the ground on the side of a secluded hill. Come by at dawn, and Mr. Badii will be in it with a heavy dose of sleeping pills. If he is alive, wake him and help him out. If not, bury him. Either way, Badii will pay well.

My thought is that if this were an easy thing to ask, it wouldn’t take the movie so long to ask it. Kiarostami shows great trepidation for a reason. His purpose is not to approach a fate for this man. He asks, how do you get someone you’ve just met to have faith in you, to take your life in their hands?

Badii’s first potential servant is a teenager in the military. After some uncomfortable, one-sided small talk, this kid quickly regrets his decision to accept this ride. Badii invokes God, logic, pity, monetary incentives and even his country loyalty as a Kurd, to get him to agree to this impossible assignment. But it’s no use. All the small talk in the world could not change his mind.

Kiarostami elevates this material somewhat by denying us the typical melodrama reaction shots, often showing us long, unbroken stretches of the car traveling instead. It’s a symbolic representation of what Badii says early on in the film to explain why he’s committing suicide. We can comprehend his pain, but cannot feel it, so the specifics are unimportant.

“Taste of Cherry” ultimately asks us to change our perspective on life. When this film was made, it was daring for an Iranian to make a movie about suicide. It still is. Here is a film that is arguably boring, polarizing, and if not all together maddening in its perplexing ending, and yet it requires a new outlook to appreciate fully.

Off the Red Carpet: Weeks of 11/14 – 11/28

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving holiday. I took off last week so I would too, but I still saw plenty of movies, including “Life of Pi,” “Lincoln,” “Magic Mike,” “Arbitrage,” “The Deep Blue Sea” and “This Must Be the Place.”

“Zero Dark Thirty” and “Les Miserables” screened for Academy audiences

There were a few Oscar bloggers getting kind of antsy before Thanksgiving that this Oscar season was in a momentary lull. But fear not privileged pundits! These movies have now screened for you even though everyone else, myself included will have to wait until at least Christmas Day, if not 2013. Both “Les Mis” and “Zero Dark Thirty” now seem like very likely Best Picture contenders if not winners, and there were plenty of critics to fawn over each of them. Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain have all entered the acting fray as well.

Indie Spirit Award Nominations Announced

“Silver Linings Playbook” and “Moonrise Kingdom” each lead the pack at the Indie Spirits with five nominations a piece, including for Best Feature. The remaining three films were “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Bernie” and the unbeknownst to me “Keep the Lights On,” which scored three nods. Scott Feinberg gives a very helpful analysis that they may not amount to anything in the grand scheme of things, but I like the Indie Spirits because they tend to recognize a handful of movies you’ve never heard of as well as the ones you have that won’t get the recognition they deserve at the Oscars. (Full nominations via Indiewire)

Gotham Awards honor “Moonrise Kingdom”

The Gotham Awards are the first awards show of the year, so that’s the reason above all why they matter, especially since they’re not televised. They’re known as New York’s answer to the Indie Spirits, and by honoring both “Moonrise Kingdom” and the documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” they’ve given serious pushes to both films and a push in the opposite direction to “The Master,” amongst others.

Photo Credit: The Hollywood Reporter

Hollywood Reporter Actress Roundtable

In my previous installment of Off the Red Carpet, I plugged THR’s Actor Roundtable but wondered what happened to the women. Well, they got their own discussion period (although they were interviewed by two men and placed on non-threatening couches with more muted, soothing, womanly colors) after all. This crop of seven includes Anne Hathaway, Rachel Weisz, Amy Adams, Marion Cotillard, Naomi Watts, Sally Field and Helen Hunt, all of whom have very good chances at an Oscar nomination this year, and three of whom I am absolutely in love with. (via The Hollywood Reporter)

The Atlantic continues beating of “Cinema is Dead” drum

A number of critics recently have been bemoaning the so-called decline of the movies in the pop culture zeitgeist, but this article by The Atlantic featuring some pretty shocking quotes from Martin Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker is probably the most depressing yet, acknowledging that film prints and the ability to produce a celluloid copy of an old movie are being completely fazed out by major studios. What’s more, she claims contemporary restoration people have no idea how some of these movies are supposed to look. This concerns the Oscars because the Academy themselves have had to sponsor events to celebrate movies shown on film. (via The Atlantic)

Also, Anthony Hopkins has some predictably bad words to say about awards season in an interesting interview with Huff Post, and Angelina Jolie is trying to get Ewan McGregor an Oscar based on how impressed she was with his work in “The Impossible.”

Continue reading “Off the Red Carpet: Weeks of 11/14 – 11/28”

This Must Be The Place

David Byrne’s lyrics to the song “This Must Be the Place,” from which Paolo Sorrentino’s new film borrows its title, probably sums up my feelings watching the movie better than I can. “I feel numb – burn with a weak heart/I guess I must be having fun/the less we say about it the better/make it up as we go along… it’s okay. I know nothing’s wrong.”

“This Must Be the Place” is a beguiling film of quirky pleasures, unexpected themes and surprising depths. It’s the story of an aging ‘80s rock star named Cheyenne (Sean Penn) who in a state of depression goes on a road trip across America to hunt down the concentration camp guard who tortured his father. But it’s definitely not about rock ‘n roll, nor about America or Nazis or a lot else. And yet it’s a bizarrely funny movie with muted tones, surreal ingenuity and one of the wackiest performances of Sean Penn’s career.

Bathed in black nail polish, clothes, eyeliner and a mess of hair that outdoes even The Cure’s Robert Smith, Cheyenne is in his own world. He’s got a diminutive gaze of melancholy and depression along with his look that other Goth kids, like the teenager Mary (Eve Hewson) who hangs out with him, can only try and emulate. His lilting voice and occasional giggle is uncharacteristic of a rock star, but it’s the type of voice that people pay attention to when he speaks, like when he silences an elevator full of jabbering women on the subject of lipstick.

And yet the rest of his hometown of Dublin doesn’t seem to mind he’s in his own world. He maintains a healthy sex life with his blue-collar wife (Frances McDormand) and carries on conversations about women and music with others around town who don’t seem to care he is or was a rock star.

Cheyenne however doesn’t do much these days. He hasn’t played music in 20 years and he seems not at home in his strangely pristine and trendy mansion (“Why does it say ‘cuisine’ on the kitchen wall? I know it’s the kitchen”). Even his pool isn’t filled. His wife assures him he’s just confusing boredom with depression, so when he gets news his father has died and learns of his past during the war, he starts his American road trip to hunt down this Nazi war criminal.

Sorrentino, an Italian working in English for the first time, has a skewed view of Americana that’s probably more American than most patriotic films claim to be. These small towns in New Mexico and Utah each have their own rock star quirks, and it’s as if all of their oddities are projected onto Cheyenne and back. He takes a trip to see the world’s largest pistachio, performs “This Must Be the Place” with a 12-year-old, talks with David Byrne himself as he executes his latest project and even meets the man who invented the rolling suitcase (a wonderful cameo by Harry Dean Stanton).

We never see Sean Penn sing, nor do we hear the songs that made him a star, so more time is focused on these minor figures he encounters. But it’s an important distinction, because these numerous caricatures help turn Cheyenne into a real person. It seems as if deep down behind all the makeup, gimmicky vignettes and cinematography that makes every image look like it would be an appropriately bleak album cover, “This Must Be the Place” is a simple coming-of-age story about a rock star he isn’t now and never was.

3 stars

Magic Mike

Careful ladies. Girls’ night out just turned into evening at the art house.

Along with the equally stylish “Haywire” earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh has again taken a no-nonsense genre picture that in another director’s hands would just be sugary fun, if not forgettable, and transformed it into something with intellect and class.

Now if you ask me, if you wanted to make a movie about male strippers, you couldn’t have a better director behind the helm than Soderbergh. The guy is the master of the mid-range shot and can make even the simplest exchange look like a sexy music video set piece. Soderbergh isn’t coy enough to cast Sexiest Man Alive Channing Tatum and former Sexiest Man Alive Matthew McConaughey and not include some juicy fun erotic dances. But even an average watcher only in this for the physical pleasures will see the film’s canted lens and intense low angle shots and sense there’s something disturbing going on here, not entirely an empty montage of sexy fun.

Tatum plays Mike, an independent construction contractor, entrepreneur and male stripper, in case you thought I was kidding about his business ventures. He builds custom furniture when he’s not dry humping a cougar’s face for money, so all around he has this keen understanding of women and people in general. He meets the 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) on the job and instantly ropes him into this noisy, colorful underworld of tough, yet spotless characters and seductive environments of booze, drugs and girls.

Mike develops a crush on Adam’s older sister Brooke (Cody Horn) and reveals he’s more than just a stripper with a heart of gold. Tatum’s performance is confident, yet subtle enough that even amidst Soderbergh’s elaborate cinematography, he still looks somewhat like a guy in distress.

“Magic Mike” is an art house bromance in a lot of ways. It’s an identity crisis movie between two male strippers, one entering into the world at his lowest point and the other trying to leave it. Both Mike and Adam become friends and rivals, and their chemistry is thankfully more than skin (or leather chaps) deep.

But it does have its visceral pleasures. McConaughey is on fire as the flamboyant gangster type in charge of the stripper joint. He seems to know how to use a prop or wear a skimpy workout outfit better than anyone else. He commands an extended take in which he instructs Pettyfer to take off his clothes like a man and make love to a wall.

There are only so many times a stripper routine can be sexy before it looks sad. “Magic Mike” recognizes that and makes for a colorful film that acts accordingly and will surprise in ways you didn’t expect.

3 stars

Life of Pi

Can a movie make you believe in God? With something like that, I don’t know if any single piece of entertainment has a prayer, even a movie as jaw droppingly beautiful and inspiring as “Life of Pi.”

Ang Lee’s movie shows us how a wondrous journey through nature can be a symbolic experience, and Yann Martel’s book shows how a story with fantasy and excitement may not prove the existence of God, but will allow us to recognize him and greet him like an old friend.

“Life of Pi” instills in us the fascination with religion and spirituality that its hero Pi shares. As a young boy in India, Pi discovers Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Some of their legends resonate with him as superhero comic book stories, exciting fables with drama, suspense and action. No one faith seems to speak to him above all, but the joy these tales bring allows him to feel the presence of a higher power throughout the world.

As a teenager, Pi (Suarj Sharma) is forced to relocate his family’s zoo to French Canada and is shipwrecked on the long sea voyage. He’s the only human survivor on a small lifeboat, but stuck along with him is Richard Parker, a playful name for a quite fierce Bengali tiger.

Their journey ashore is a long quest for survival, and the whole story seems to take place on an infinite plain of existence. The film’s 3-D allows sky to blend seamlessly with sea, the ocean’s depth stretching endlessly into the distance to create a luminous space of ethereal beauty. We see Pi’s raft resting on an untapped surface, and he seems to be a part of a naturalistic dreamscape, floating aimlessly in the cosmos of Mother Nature.

Telling this story is an adult Pi (Irrfan Kahn) to an audience of one, the book’s writer himself, Yann Martel (Rafe Spall). The writer has heard that Pi’s story will make him believe in God, and in essence, this story is an ultimate test of faith. A true believer is stripped of everything that is dear to him: his family, his home, his love and his health. Ultimately, he keeps his faith. God seemed to be there watching him the entire time.

To me, a Lutheran, this sounds an awful lot like the Book of Job. To other faiths, there may be similar stories. Martel and Lee take the symbolic story and provide it with grounded drama of visceral pleasures. There’s the tiger viciously devouring a hyena right in front of Pi’s eyes, the comedic excitement in watching Pi piss on the boat’s tarpaulin to mark his territory, the cataclysmic treachery of seeing a tanker engulfed underwater or the naturalistic tranquility of observing an ocean of meerkats in their natural habitat.

“Life of Pi’s” visual beauty alone speaks wonders. It is safe to say that “Life of Pi” is perhaps the best looking 3-D film ever made. The CGI used to create such a lifelike tiger and endless landscapes of water, sunlight, wildlife and greenery is impeccable. Different scenes fade in and out in layers over one another like characters and images floating in our memories. The evening lights of fish, lightning and insects jump out from the screen that would otherwise be specks of color on a 2-D plane. The 3-D gives us a POV that shows we’re only on the far side of a pointed pole from that wild tiger. And it immerses us in a moment that conveys the gravity of how small we look in front of that boat sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

But Lee communicates through his visual poetry what Martel could only presume with words; that tiger seems to be keeping us alive. It’s a moving, spiritual sentiment so impossible to estimate and even harder to envision on film. God will be there when we need him and leave again without warning. He appears not to be our friend but to let us know he is there. In another movie, the dangerous encounters would be set pieces, but here it seems to be nature speaking to us.

“Life of Pi” moved me deeply, both on a technical and emotional level. Few films can claim to be truly beautiful and have sincere stories in the process. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but in the end we’re left with faith. “Life of Pi” has granted me such faith in the movies and in the world.

4 stars

TRON (1982)

It’s amazing how far computers have come. It has now been 30 years since the original “Tron” came out in 1982, and the film looks so different from the computer generated animation we have today that you have to wonder how anyone could call this movie a precursor or inspiration for the entire style of filmmaking.

Rather, what I see in “Tron” is a cult film that set the spark for what the movies could be. It recognized that computers could do what hand drawn animators had been doing for years, but it could use live action actors and do things differently, if not better, than a pencil and paper ever could. What makes “Tron” durable today is that although no film looked like it in 1982, still no film looks anything like it in 2012. Its rudimentary technology is all its own, and as other films took filmmaking in different directions than the ones it established and passed it by altogether, “Tron” remained distinctive and unique, forever a gem in its own pocket of history.

Director Steven Lisberger was inspired to try and make a computer-generated movie when he saw the motion within the classic video game Pong. He was the first to truly imagine that this technology could be used in film, even though his pitch was little more than a 30 second clip demonstrating what computers were capable of creating. All the major studios rejected him, but Disney opened their doors as they sought to take more daring projects. The only problem there was that the hand drawn animators employed at Disney felt that this movie, if successful, might put them all out of a job, forcing Lisberger to receive outside help from computer companies to finish the film.

“Tron” was not the first film to use CGI, but it was the first to do so extensively, extensively here meaning just 15 minutes of footage. The remainder of the film is essentially animated, but it models its cyber-punk look off something called “backlit animation” that was popular in the ’70s. This process required photographing actors in black and white in front of black backdrops such that animation could be projected in the background. So what you get are 3-D people standing in front of plainly 2-D drawings, all of it amplified with neon color to make the image pop. So occasionally, it looks as though the characters are walking on thin air with the space itself on an entirely different plane. Through the technology known as rotoscoping, animators can digitally add or remove color from the frame. But because these computers could only handle so much data and digital processing at a given time, a lot of the detail in the background would be lost, and rather than have it look poor, the animators would simply black out that segment of the frame. “When in doubt, black it out,” they would say during production. To make the process even less complicated, anything that required these visual effects were done with a completely stationary camera, one that was quite literally nailed to the floor. But you wouldn’t notice because there is constantly so much activity and color on screen.

Even the CGI sequences were less examples of how to do digital animating today but how to apply conventional animation techniques to computers. Computers could not render motion with digital imagery, so “Tron’s” famous light cycle sequence was completed by inputting coordinates of where an object was supposed to move next into each individual frame and spliced together on film. That this looks so seamless and exciting on screen is a testament to just how tireless the effort was on this film. Continue reading “TRON (1982)”

Rapid Response: The Green Mile

I was wondering why I had waited so long to see “The Green Mile,” possibly because it has become TNT fodder, possibly because the critical through-line on it has been that it’s “The Shawshank Redemption” with magic, and possibly because it’s on that list of potentially overhyped IMDB Top 250 movies. But none of those reasons really justify how much I loved it.

Now granted, it has its flaws, but whereas “Shawshank” is a much more hopeful movie about survival and perseverance, “The Green Mile” has a wholesome spirituality that wins you over with its inherent goodness. Ultimately, its characters are flawed and even cruel and sadistic, but only one of whom do we really dislike and feel is in the wrong. Director Frank Darabont’s gift is in making a film that embraces its fantasy head-on to make for a wonderfully moving tearjerker.

I myself did not know about the film’s fantasy element, so I will not spoil it here, but it involves the miracles surrounding a massive death row inmate named John Coffey (the late Michael Clarke Duncan) and the prison’s head guard, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks). The movie approaches the giant that is Coffey with the same trepidation that a person would walk the Green Mile before being executed, so it’s a patient film that takes its time over its three hours and allows us to savor every moment. Coffey’s story is one of deep anguish, and in a way, he’s the real emotional center of the film, not Paul.

Paul’s problem involves dealing with one of his prison guard colleagues, the pestilent and cowardly Percy (Doug Hutchison), who is the mayor’s spoiled nephew and feels entitled to be an arrogant little shit. He just wants to see one of these guys cook up close, and he even wants to know what it is to torture someone in one gruesome death sequence. What I like about Percy’s character, if anything, is that as vicious and awful as he is, he reveals himself as ultimately human, pissing his pants out of terror in one scene and revealing that he’s not entirely one-dimensional. We get a sense that he doesn’t entirely deserve the cruel, ironic fate he receives in the end.

Part of me believes that because Paul and his fellow guards are no saints either. They put Percy and their most difficult inmate, Wild Bill Wharton (Sam Rockwell), through both mental and physical brutality. But these characters’ flawed depth allows Hanks to exhibit deep, everyman pain and guilt as only Hanks can. His final conversation with John puts an insurmountable amount of emotional pressure on him that I hadn’t previously imagined.

Some of the scenes, such as the flashback to John’s murder, the execution scene of Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter), and the present day tags with Paul as an old man, are a bit heavy-handed and even unnecessarily long, but I’ll remember “The Green Mile” for its more serene moments, not its twists. The use of “Cheek to Cheek” in “Top Hat” is an absolutely beautiful capper. Seeing the mouse Mr. Jingles fetch the thread spool is one of those all time great movie moments. And the rest of the movie is not short of miracles, big or small, either.

Rapid Response: Saturday Night Fever

It’s not a coincidence that within minutes of watching “Saturday Night Fever” with my family the conversation turned into just when disco died. “It came and went so quickly,” my Dad recalled. “The early adopters were around for a while before it became really cool, but by the time you bought all the ridiculous shirts and all the records, it was already gone.”

Something like “Saturday Night Fever” then belongs to that black hole of movies that, regardless of their quality, became dated as soon as the fad they depicted vanishes completely. Its soundtrack is a collection of all the disco songs that have actually survived (and are tolerable) through the decades, and the fashions and attitudes, be they the big cars, bug hair or big collars, are a relic of a time that today just seems so alien.

And yet the reason above all why “Saturday Night Fever” succeeded and still somewhat succeeds today is in its title sequence. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” plays as John Travolta struts down the street, and it seems to explain effortlessly that part of the ’70s cool was just the swagger in your step, the swivel of your hips and living moving as if the music was always playing.

Today the film represents the tentpole model for teenage stardom stories in the vein of something like “Flashdance.” A troubled and poor young teenager who happens to be a talented dancer/singer/artist enters a contest to win an arbitrary prize, and along the way they juggle relationships, a distant family that doesn’t understand him/her, an older sibling who is admirable but now seems lost and some sort of tragedy separate from all the montages and performance numbers.

This is precisely the format of “Saturday Night Fever,” but its improved by just the style with which it glamorizes these icons of ’70s culture. Director John Badham loves the low angle shot to show off hair, clothes and bodies during dance scenes and otherwise. The dance numbers are all handled minimally with full-bodied wide shots and long takes to show just how Travolta can really move. It also splashes obscene amounts of color in the frame and gets down and dirty itself in swift tracking shot close-ups as Travolta shimmies about the dance floor.

His moves in the King of the Floor scene are so absurd they must all have a corny name (the punching bag, the hair dryer, the Russian soldier, to make up a few), but I like the scene because disco is one of those rare dance styles, like the classical forms of tap, where the individual is often more impressive than the group, and these numbers feel almost like updates on the Fred Astaire favorites. Travolta makes these moves look simple, elegant and effortless.

It’s also fun in the sense that the dialogue is absurd. There are throw away lines that a modern audience must gawk at in their extreme racism, sexism and vulgarity. “Women have to choose to be either a nice girl or a cunt.” “Dream good, jerk off better.” “You make it with some girls, they think you gotta dance with them too.”

Travolta was already famous for his role as Vinnie Barbarino in “Welcome Back Kotter,” and he even had a part in Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” but “Saturday Night Fever” made him a temporary superstar, landing him a dumbfounding Oscar nomination in the process. And it’s shocking, because Tony Manero is absolutely repellent, regardless of how many girls are hypnotically drawn to him. Did the New York guido attitude grow out of the disco ’70s or did the disco ’70s grow out of it? He shows absolute disdain for all of his lady callers, he oafishly eats with his mouth open, he nearly rapes his dance partner, allows another girl to be raped and ultimately watches his friend die in a hammy “Rebel Without a Cause” ending that just plain doesn’t work.

“Saturday Night Fever” belongs to the ages. It is a bad, cliche movie but arguably an essential one in understanding the full scope of American pop culture history.