Saturday Night Fever

One of the most iconic films of the seventies is Saturday Night Fever.  With its numerous dance scenes and colorful club scenes, this film immortalized the disco era.  Its soundtrack was the highest selling until Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  And it was the debut of many young actors, including John Travolta.

John Travolta stars as Tony Manero, a nineteen year old kid in Brooklyn who lives for lighting up the dance floor on the weekends.  Working at a small hardware store, he has no higher aspirations but dancing in disco clubs and making it with girls.  In his spare time, he goes to a dance studio to work on his moves for the upcoming competition.  He dumps his partner Annette (Donna Pescow), the girl who always hangs around him and his friends, for a girl with some different moves.  Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) is planning on moving to Manhattan and is already working there, hobnobbing with some big names.  She is more cultured and ambitious than Tony and isn’t afraid to let him know it.  But the more the two clash, the more they connect, and not just on the dance floor.

While most people will instantly recognize the music and that white suit with fondness, many might not expect the film to become so gritty and dark.  That’s right, Saturday Night Fever is far from a feel good dance flick.  Throughout the film we are shown an increasingly dark side of living for a weekend full of dancing, booze and girls.  The car the guys drive is where they take girls they just met out for a quick throw while parked on the curb.  Tony’s family has fallen on hard times and isn’t very supportive of his partying lifestyle, even less so after his older brother decides to leave the priesthood.  And one of Tony’s friends, Bobby C (Barry Miller), gets more and more desperate for friends and advice after he gets a girl pregnant.  These Saturday nights can get pretty rough.

What most people watch this film for is the dance scenes and the music.  They are quite a sight to see; disco balls spinning, floors lighting up in perfect rhythm with Travolta’s moves and polyester everywhere.  The soundtrack is one of the best that comes to my memory.  This film has does some wonders mixing music and images that are so true of its era.  The most colorful dance scenes are to classic Bee Gees songs, including Staying Alive, More Than a Woman and How Deep Is Your Love.  You’ll also hear If I Can’t Have You by Yvonne Elliman, Disco Inferno by The Trammps and that disco version of Beethoven, A Fifth of Beethoven.  One of my favorite uses for a song is when a disco version of Night on Bald Mountain plays as the boys pull some scary stunts on the Brooklyn Bridge.  This film has does some wonders mixing music and images that are so true of its era.

At the Academy Awards, Saturday Night Fever was only nominated for one Oscar.  A very young and lean John Travolta was nominated for best actor for his portrayal of Tony.  Between the intense choreography and more goofy moments (“Attica! Attica!”), Travolta molds Tony into more than a dancing kid.  He turns his lack of ambition into teenage angst and his rocky relationships into anger and finally a catalyst for change.  There is so much more dimension here than you’d expect from a disco crazed kid from Brooklyn.

While the Academy had little love for the film, it is remembered as an essential.  It is a part of Roger Ebert’s great movies lists, as well as on the AFI’s 100 Songs list.  In my mind the best dance flick of all time.  Most of all, I love the way it preserves the disco era in all its colorful, polyester glory with a dark and robust story about so much more than dancing.

“My girlfriend, she loves the taste of communion wafers.”

Pulp Fiction

A word of caution to you squirmers: Pulp Fiction has a good amount of profane language, lewd subjects, drug use, violence and gore.   If all that makes you a little uncomfortable, I understand, but Pulp Fiction is still one of the best films of the nineties, hands down.

How do you describe a Quentin Tarantino film?  Bloody.  Lots of memorable dialogue.  Great soundtrack.  Even better scene transitions.  Quirky and foulmouthed characters.  With Tarantino’s warped mind and huge chin he can’t be tethered down to make your grandma’s movies.  Many grandma’s would be horrified by his films.

Which brings us to Pulp Fiction, one of the most influential films of the nineties that sadly, many people my age didn’t discover until late high school or early college.  I wonder today if our parents worried about us getting our hands on this film too early, or worse, too late.  I doubt my folks got a babysitter and saw this, they seemed to place an odd taboo on the night they went out to see The Birdcage.  In college, when I first started to get into Tarantino films, this and Reservoir Dogs, I was afraid I had missed the boat.  Thankfully, Grindhouse and Inglorious Bastards have made up for what I was too young to see in theaters.

Anyway, enough of this idle babble.  Pulp Fiction is the stories of interconnected people.  There’s two stories about Jules and Vincent (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta), two mob men working for Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), going around town with guns doing his dirty work.  There’s a tale about Vincent taking Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), Marsell’s wife out to dinner.  A couple at a coffee shop planning to rob the place.  And Butch Coolige (Bruce Willis) is a boxer paid by Wallace to throw a fight, back in his motel room is a sweet little lady named Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) who brings out the sweet side of the boxer.

Now, before you get confused, the story is not told in chronological order.  Instead, the film seems to build up to most amount of blood and greatest story of redemption.  If you keep that in mind, it may not seem like so much pulp.

One of the best scenes is at the fifties themed restaurant Jack Rabbit Slim’s.  Mia has Vincent take her there on their night out.  The waiters are dead rock and roll legends, they sit in classic convertibles and drink a five dollar milkshake.  As Vincent describes, “it’s like a wax museum with a pulse.”  The setting is only icing on the cake.  Mia is an odd person, she and Vincent talk but refuse to go on with the typical idle bull.  Their conversation is intriguing, engaging and it’s all topped off by Mia entering them in the twist contest.  Tarantino knows where to dig for gold, putting Travolta on the dance floor again reminds us of and nearly rivals his moves in Saturday Night Fever.

So who would love this movie?  In the beginning paragraph, you can tell who would not love this movie.  I don’t think you have to be a diehard Tarantino fanboy to love this, you don’t even have to like any of the actors.  The film itself is a little odd, quirky, and unconventional in a very cool way.  If you’re not sure, just try it.  And don’t watch Pulp Fiction on AMC, seems to be playing twice a day there lately.  I understand they need to edit it, but why not just play it late at night when the kiddies should be in bed and us cheap adults who don’t want to pay for Netflix can enjoy the movie as it’s supposed to be: bloody, violent and full of profanity.  That’s where you get the best lines.

“Does he look like a bitch?  No!  Then why you tryin’ to fuck him like a bitch?”