In New York City there often recurs a phenomenal thing, that when a flag of creativity is stook in an unknown, castaway community, it is soon dispersed and made popular by the those less innovative but just as eager for stimulation, until the system shuts the scene down and the movement chokes dead. These are the last days.

Disco – born as an underground scene in gay black dance clubs in post-industrial Brooklyn outlands – got big. Barnacled by two-tone collared, classically articulate New England collegiates looking for the glamour and edge of nightlife, the scene is kept alive by guys like Bernie, the peppery pony-tailed club owner, who says, indemnifying himself, “I used to be in advertising,” like a shammo music promoter from Woodstock.

Alice and Charlotte find themselves unlikely friends.  Though disparate and awkward at tony rebellious Hampshire College, the girls live together with a third roommate in an Upper East Side railroad apartment. They are always walking through each other’s rooms at inappropriate times, and find asylum at the club, the umbrage of Xenonic strobes, where the girls bounce their own insecurities off one another, under “Doctor’s Orders.”

Charlotte’s idea of sly charm is to say things seriously as if “obviously a joke.” Alice is the character most grounded and humble and eventually the most successful, but she is also the most shamelessly confused. She hooks up with navy-blazer dicko Tom Platt. In the future one imagines Tom writing Op-Ed pieces in the Times which gain him a sociopathic following amongst liberals. Tom sidles up to the dance floor with his pennyloafer lack of rhythm and soul, his late entrance attractively picaresque for Alice, who still believes in novelistic romance. Tom thinks it is a profound thing to collect Scrooge McDuck memorabilia, and it seems as if the situation couldn’t be more lame until poor Alice (too many whiskey sours) tries something she never learned at Hampshire – to talk naughty: “Scrooge McDuck is sexy.”

Disco’s characters are all somewhat obsessed with the camaraderie and excuse for melodrama that a “scene” provides, though their emotions and intellect have been bred to expect the higher sanction of inimitable status without proof of action. Once they arrive in New York, expectations warp, and they pick up a modicum of survival skills – as when Jimmy Steinway has his elder WASP boss from the ad company take Jimmy’s raincoat, “Here, put this on,” so they won’t get rejected by Van, the Blade Runneresque head bouncer. Jimmy is on thin ice anyhow, Van doesn’t let them past the velvet ropes, and instead Jimmy sneaks his party in through the back.

At the end of the night, after the hermeneutics of a “gay mouth” and Lady and the Tramp exegesis, it is shack-up time, the “ferocious pairing off.” Alice falls into a lingering fling with Des, a lovably loquacious lech and Ivy League grad slumming the after-hours with an attuned coke habit. For Des, the new openness of gay-rights serves as a useful masquerade to extract himself from female relationships that become too real for his stunted ideology. When he is suitably disinterested in a woman, he confesses a new-fangled lust for the host of Wild Kingdom. Des is bewildered at the implications of being called a “yuppie” – a fresh catchy term – since he regards himself, though young, as neither upwardly-mobile nor professional. “Those are good things.” But it is because Des is decidedly not good that Alice starts hooking up with him. Des’ fidelity to Alice is brief, though he seems to believe that he has truly changed, unlike Tramp. Alice turns her sensibilities to Josh Neff, a spy for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Disco was always comprised of a motley assemblage – trannies and Bay Ridge gavones rubbing polyester shoulders; Broadway dancers and anti-hippie rejects; the Andy Warhol hodgepodge of Brooke Shields and Dali and Schwarzeneggar and Halston; Dolly Parton’s birthday when they decked out Studio like a barnyard. Such pop eclecticism hits the American imagination as it would have (among canonical others) at the last turn of the century, over Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who assaulted San Juan Hill in Cuba as aggressively as Jimmy Steinway marshals his entourage past the club door (at one point disguised in Wizard of Oz costumes). In the ranks of these heroes of the Spanish-American War were Yalies and Comanches and gold prospectors and bison-hunters. Indeed, the most deliriously enlightened scene in Disco occurs near the U.S.S. Maine monument at Columbus Circle. Josh and Alice step delicately along the Park and Josh confides to Alice his own history of madness. These 59th Street environs, from the Plaza Hotel west to Broadway, is favored territory of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this scene in Disco near Merchant’s Gate is pregnant of that author’s intimations of epic youth and deep loss. “You think I’m a wacko?” asks Josh. Alice first shakes her head no before she nods yes. Josh is the paranoiac lyrical artist-type with blueblooded learning and a quick pedigree in seersucker espionage – the vocalizer for both the ecstasy of Disco and the glorious trauma of skittish love. He is also the agent of the club’s closing, which puts Van on welfare and Bernie in jail.

“The very early eighties,” as Disco’s opening titles indicate, are a time when New York is backlashing from the zombie vigilante midnight-movie reputation caused by the 1970s. Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau’s office is mobilized to prosecute the disco business, with Josh acting as the Elliot Ness. One might fantasize that a co-worker of Josh in Morgenthau’s office is future Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor, chain-smoking and equally forward-thinking. Morgenthau went after disco clubs as he did underground cinema in the 60s, impounding prints of Jack Smith’s glitzy gender-bender Flaming Creatures; and in the early 2000s, taking down the toga-clad CEO embezzlers of global manufactures conglomerate Tyco, International. The rest of the country despises Disco as the ultimate curse of good taste – the tripped-out crowd at a Chicago White Sox game burns piles of LPs as if books at a Hitler rally and take to the fields with baseball bats like mobsters. New Yorkers are still too unhinged from the Death Wish decade and don’t deal with things by ratiocinating. Soon enough a new neon decadence sets in, and the preppy ties and shaggy-flared hairstyles will devolve into hairspray flips and 80s womens jumpers.

Charlotte ends up hospitalized with “back spasms” when Jimmy ends their relationship (“she got her period” he explicates), and her recovery is fraught with self-consumption, blaming everything on Alice. She seeks new life in TV, “where my interests truly lie.” By now, Alice is over Charlotte’s continual berating co-dependency, and gains success in the book publishing industry. She has already admitted to Departmental Dan that her “dream book” would be to publish “anything that might become a best-seller.” Only aside from that might she hope for a shot at Salinger’s unpublished short stories. So it is not a surprise, but a heartwarming familiarity, that with her breakout book she “shifts the category from nonfiction to self-actualization,” staking her own light flag in America’s new consciousness-fad. Alice now offers lunch invites at Lutesse while the rest of the old gang picks up checks at the unemployment office. It takes slick bouncer Van to fess up the final reality, before heading to Florida: “Disco’s over. It’s dead. People aren’t just going out like they used to. They’re tired. . .”

Josh and Alice, on the subway love train, can only dance, and all New York City straphangers dance with them – like an Ed Koch-era Lotto ad or ’86 Mets promo on WPIX. Whit Stillman hallmarks unto the living American memory what only 20 years later is revealed as so richly spotlit, so vivacious of meaning.

Watch here: The Last Days of Disco.

Martin Mull, the comedic persona, plays best the sardonic professional whose common sense is tyrannized by an unruly, nonsensical world. In Serial that world is the New-Age ethos turning everyone into Esalen zombies; in Rented Lips it is Hollywood, a stand-in for all forces that apparently stifle creative expression. Mull does not countenance idealism and his call for order is not puritan or status quo. His characters are ever quicker than the audience, and no matter how self-deprecating or schlubby, he always has a smart-ass line that, even if it isn’t his cleverest you want to laugh because it is Martin Mull saying it, from just below the tawny primmed mustache and professorially deadpan eyes, like a fed-up Roast-master. Much of Mull’s schtick is derived from his starring TV turn on Fernwood 2 Night, as campy and haughty wide-collared talk show host Barth Gimble. He has a rich pedigree as a supporting character in 80s comedies, like the smarmy prick boss in Mr. Mom – and in TV, having showed up on the likes of transgressive sitcoms Dream-On (1990) and Get A Life (1990). Mull’s way is the believable weirdo with a bit of dimension: Pat Coletti, the millionaire next-door neighbor in OC & Stiggs (1985, R. Altman) who, when asked “What do you do?” answers, “Basically, I drink;” or Gene Parmesan, the abject master of disguise on Arrested Development (2004). This author has yet to view Mull’s performance as Colonel Mustard in the Clue adaptation (1985), but it suits the man that he would enliven a boardgame character.

Serial unravels in Marin County, CA, at the aftermath of the Me Me Me Decade. Martin Mull, as Harvey Holroyd, is the straight guy whose life comes homeopathically crumbling down: daughter joins a psycho love cult; a silly affair with the sultry orgy-queen; the old-fashioned friend with whom Holroyd commutes by ferry to work that ends up on a debauched suicidal Quaaludes binge; Tuesday Weld, as Mrs. Holroyd, beholden to the coked-out pill-pushing Frederick Perlsesque shrink; and a gay biker club headed by closet CEO Christopher Lee a/k/a ‘Skull.’ The romp is well-tinged by the Lalo Schifrin cheeseball lite FM theme song, and the Catskills zinger-style comedy applies to an ultra-contemporary satire which, today, almost 30 years later, has removed the movie from the pop discourse in ways that no-brainers (though classics) like Caddyshack and Vacation have lingered in influence. Very rarely has Mull been given the star power with which he shines in Serial, with a most apt predicament of the loose and sunny sham 70s stiffening into the glitzy and shammier 80s.

In Rented Lips, Mull is Archie Powell, a loser who makes socially conscience documentaries and still lives with his mother. Shady investors agree to give Archie money to make his dream movie about Native American farming, on the condition that he also make a porno flick, and the hack actors involved will star in both productions. It is a problem for the movie that there is never any sex. A Mull fan would expect prodigiously smart and smutty gags upon such a premise, but a whole swath of pertinent trashy gags is lost. Instead, the movie does The Producers vein: silly musical numbers with Navajo and Nazi costumes set to a score by Van Dyke Parks. The script is credited solely to Martin Mull – perhaps the calamity in the movie apes its own making. The principled Artist stands for the purity of his Art within the shackles of an unfair and cruel system. It’s the actor’s territory surely but not one for the Mull canon.

It is easy to forget that Woody once was married to Louise Lasser, and accordingly she was featured in his early films. In Bananas, she is a young collegiate dabbling in lefty politics and Zen Buddhism and women’s lib. Woody, as Fielding Mellish, just wants to get her in the mood: his response to Louise expounding upon her study of philosophy: “Do you like Chinese?”

Shamelessly knockabout when ladies are mugged on the subway:

Mellish is shamefully knockabout transacting porno:

Bananas is a ripe example of Woody putting his nightclub act into movie form – scenes are tied together with punchlines and zingers. Mellish has a recurring dream, where he is bound to a cross and carried on the shoulders of cowled figures down a NYC sidestreet – but his fantasy of religious sacrifice is thwarted when a rival crucifixion comes along and tries to take his own death pageant’s parking space. It is as if a scene from a Woody Allen short story finding life in the script.

Woody’s directing style is vintage late 60s/early 70s, hip and slapdash, delightfully old-fashioned though the political schtick is timeless – especially in the wise use of Howard Cosell, color commentating the Mellish honeymoon:

Mellish is put on trial for his treasonous activities and goes pro se:

Louise Lasser’s Nancy is whiny, humorless, shallow and is only interested in Fielding when she mistakes him for a courageous revolutionary leader – she is one of Woody’s least cerebral female relationships and the most marginal of his infamous companions; and it only emboldens Fielding Mellish as a classic total hysterical loser.

Larry Cohen, the screenwriter of Maniac Cop and a frequent director of his own glib lurid scripts, has the ideal career – cranking out semi-artful, narratively whipcracked, socially conscious, B-movie genre pictures and TV shows, with a positivity of creative control, attracting a random stock of solid C-list actors (but A-list in the grindhouse), with minimal sacrifice to artistic code. Maniac Cop is a hulking uniformed police officer in the old-timey tunic and belt who stalks the empty, sinister late-80s Manhattan streets, killing innocent civilians with a saber drawn from his nightstick. The Larry Cohen punchline antics begin when a young girl flees muggers (down Prince Street, right outside the old Rocks In Yer Head record shop), and the girl encounters a cop but the cop senselessly murders her in Washington Square Park as the muggers hide and watch. After a spree of similar attacks on everyday citizens, the public no longer trusts the men in blue, and old ladies are soon blowing away traffic officers. Maniac Cop causes social distortion in his vengeance against the City. Instead of directly attacking the mayor & police commissioner (who eventually get thrashed by the saber) he starts at the pedestrian level, the most trustworthy of urban caste. A welcome new twist in the vigilante movie, a genre that works well in reference to its own immediate time and place. That is why The Brave One sucks, and Observe & Report is inspired.

There was a period in the 1980s when the idea of the profane macho-man devolved, from movies made by grown men with adult minds to movies made by grown men with adolescent minds, and most likely because the audience got younger and hopefully not the minds of men – and men who grew up on 60s & 70s tough guy movies took their young sons to the new ones coming out in the 80s – whatever the movie, as long as there was a male lead, big guns, bad guys, bad words and fucked-up action. And usually an objectification of females. In 1987 these men never took their sired to see Ishtar.

Harley & Marlboro makes several nods to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (a movie which is, equitably, rather chaste among many others in this canon), just as Ishtar nods off like a junkie to old Hope/Crosby capers. Beatty & Hoffman exude a certain shameless honesty, the male bonding that is both pathetic and exalting. Their songster schtick is out of whack and flat when merged with the silly 80s stagecraft, but these fashions become picturesque when Hoffman runs around Ishtar wearing a faux-futuristic Grace Jones-style headband.

Harley & Marlboro is just as shameless in its male-bonding scenario, and Crockett and Rourke’s pan-fried personas inspire a bit of trust in the subtext. These renegade pre-apocalyptic ramblers are out to save their favorite hangout, The Rock N Roll Bar & Grill, from the Great Trust bank, a financial conglomerate run by slick-haired, black shiny overcoat-clad android yuppies (a staple villainry of 1990s movies). One of the yuppies continually refers to Harley and Marlboro as “dilettantes.” Our guys just try keeping it real: classic Americans standing off in defense of hard-earned property. If the movie had been a hit, would it have spawned a series of blue-collar product-hero movies set in the not-at-all-distant future? Marlboro’s love interest is Virgina Slim (she’s a cop), and ex-WWF wrestler Big John Stud plays Jack Daniels (he gets blown away).

The audience for Harley & Marlboro, at the time, surely expected nothing more from Don Johnson and Mickey. But the audience of Ishtar expected more from Hoffman and Beatty (neither Don nor Rourke had ever made award-winning Communist epics or been part of the Tootsie consciousness). Ishtar falls in the canon of screwball but the actors and director veer back and forth between the self-awareness of it and of not – and the flick only works engagingly when not: Beatty reaching out to Hoffman on the Upper West Side ledge where Hoffman threatens to cast himself off, the inverted ironical moment of intimacy, “You have the guts to admit you have nothing. . .” Hoffman auctioneering in nonsense Bedouin language and Beatty disguised as a sandman pretending to understand the dialect. A fine metaphor for the characters’ relationship. And their fantasy hit song, “Dangerous Business,” passes the Old Grey Whistle Test with depressing catchiness, a real kneeslapper in the sequences of the two actors as failures composing it, mistaking the random for the inspired, until they are crawling deliriously around the desert, spouting inane Tin Pan Alley rhymes. Producer Warren has withdrawn the film from the data stream for fear of subsequent exposure[?], but Don Johnson basically mimicked his portrayal of The Marlboro Man weekly as Nash Bridges.

ps: Ishtar was viewed on VHS, Harley & Marlboro post-analog.

Dominick “Fatso” DiNapoli is not so fat – played with more pathos than bathos by a pre-Cannonball Run Dom DeLuise, he is not obese like his cousin Sal. When Sal and Fatso were alter boys together during Mass, Sal would secretly pass Fatso chocolates. Sal dies at 39, slain by gluttony. Anne Bancroft, who meagerly wrote and directed the movie, plays Fatso’s shrill cousin, wailing over the coffin and warning Fatso that he is next for the grave. Fatso mourns Sal in the only terms he knows. Fatso’s meditation on death is delightfully meaningful but the movie is wounded by its blaring overhead lighting like an office bathroom, and lack of any charm or hint of dynamism in its attempt at a Cassavettes-like cavalier vibe, only cringingly ineffective.

Fatso has a knack for the art of topping a slice of Italian bread with marinara. He cries over Sal while stirring and salting the tomato sauce. He is not a vile eater but a constant eater. He is proud of the delicacy with which he prepares his pathological food. Whereas Fatso is patient and genial, walking to work in the old Italian West Village and greeting neighbors on the street on the way to DiNapoli’s Card Store, his family and friends are stressed and overworked and unhappy Italiano stereotypes, and pick on Fatso more than look after his welfare. After dabbling with Dr. Schwartzman, a diet quack on East 65th Street, Fatso finds the girl of his dreams, a shy little blonde pumpkin. In the end he’s still fat.

Watching it for the gazillionth time, still a pure gut-bust. High-art British masterwork screwball plotting the cross-eyed Reagan/Thatcher 1980s. Otto is a man whose mind has mixed up the whole of Western civilization, and acts it every scene (as in the ravaging inability to say “I’m sorry,” and his knockabout act mimicry of foreign languages), and Jamie Lee the bravura sweetheart vamp, finding cues as would thespianess Miriam Hopkins.

Lovelorn lesbo con-lady romp, giddy with parlor room mob noir mechanics, zazzy dialogue, hammy acting and slick late-90s special effects.  Equal parts Brian DePalma & butch scrivener Pat Califia.  When Joey Pants is about to chop Gina Gershon’s fingers off, it has already been proven what special techniques those fingers have performed. . . down Jennifer Tilly’s starved honeypot. . .  and Joey Pants artfully whacked in a symbolic pool of whitewash jizz. . .

In the summer of 2008, a video store in Hell’s Kitchen was having a VHS sale, 3 tapes for $10.  Not the best deal for a near-fossilized modal of entertainment, but still your author participated during lunch break in between lecturing atop bus tours of Manhattan Island.

Frequent visitations were made to Video Cafe, where the premises hark way back to the hoary likes of Palmer Video & Joe’s Video on Bloomfield Avenue in Verona, New Jersey, where as a lad your author first engaged the aesthetics of the VCR – the goofy staff, the chintzy wire racks, the bizarro consciousness-insinuating early box art, the chemic fragrance of outdated plastic packaging, the random sounds of whatever movie screened that hour from the monitors perched off the ceiling: maybe Stallone, maybe a stray disciple of the Brat Pack, maybe French, maybe the Resident Evil film.

The sale at Video Cafe was limited to drama, comedy and horror, which your author was not apprised of until after making picks from the classics and foreign section.  Stalker and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? had to be put back on the shelf.

And so a memoir of watching that stack of movies bought. . . .

Mickey Rourke portrays a small-time New Orleans bank robber blessed with a saint’s soul but disavowed by the congenital facial deformity of a warlock – even surpassing as an iconograph that which the actor in “real life” would later wreak both surgically and pugilistically upon his own countenance. The ironic “Johnny Handsome” is double-crossed on a bank job and ends up in prison, where an ambitious pointdexter surgeon (Forest Whitaker) attempts to perform radical Face-Off-esque treatment to restore Johnny with a humanable face – which turns out to be that of Mickey Rourke post-9½ Weeks. Johnny then returns to society, and though his face reforms his soul does not: he fails at innocent romance and takes revenge on those who betrayed him – scuzzbag maestro Lance Henrickson and marvelous pulp-bitch Ellen Barkin. Morgan Freeman plays a dapper folksy Bayou-cosmopolite detective, the one character who knows that Johnny ain’t really so Handsome. Walter Hill draws his metaphysics from the French but his colors from brute American precedents. And where to begin placing Johnny Handsome in the current hagiography of Mickey in The Wrestler? Johnny shows a man bounding back his new face into the old universe; Randy The Ram seizes an old face in an old place and causes it to transmogrify.