John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever

From an interview with John Badham, director of "Saturday Night Fever": This is a movie very much of its time and its period but at the same time it’s become timeless. To what can you attribute that to? I give as much credit as is humanly possible to give to Norman Wexler, the screenwriter, who had such a brilliant talent for getting into the troubled souls of people and that’s what comes out and resonates. You know we like the dancing and we like the music and that’s all really good stuff, but we identify with these characters even though they are of a specific time. But their behavior and attitudes and even their loneliness and despair really continue to resonate with us across decades. And people all the time say to me, “I just saw the movie again. I forgot how powerful the characters are…there’s really a lot there that kind of sits with you.” So all the credit in the world goes to Norman.
— September 23, 2021 6:29 a.m.

John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever

So after all this time and all these lengthy posts, even one on how an unconstitutional abortion law makes your "single most hated scene in Saturday Night Fever" immediately relevant virtually overnight after almost 45 years... and still NO response, Scott? "Now that's what I call classy" said no one ever. Seriously! Oh, well. At least I can spell one very simple and concise Yiddish word very easily. It's meaning rolls off the tongue with the most colorful and intentional finality: "Putz."
— September 3, 2021 12:51 a.m.

John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever

https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-law-begins-the… (Abortion is illegal in Texas as of September 2021, with $10,000 rewards to citizens to rout out and report for arrest any citizen or clinic who desires it or performs it.) Gee, Mr. Marks....does the "meaningless and ruinous" scene between Frank and Bobby suddenly deserve a reassessment of your refined aesthetic sensibilities?
— September 1, 2021 8:16 a.m.

John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever

Where "Sex Marks the Scott": I have come to a certain revelation about why you perceive the Bobby C. character as so needless and so personally offensive. Travolta never regained deep respect as a truly great actor except for his performance in SNF, because the role of Tony was essentially the role of a weak and insecure young man playing the role of a hero who convinces others he is to be looked upon as an exemplar of infallible strength, a "star", a "god," a "sex symbol". In actuality, Travolta became a superstar/sex symbol "object" because through the complexity of his performance, he revealed an individual collapsing inwardly from a false persona, a boy unable to free himself from the illusions and values that keeps this "star" persona intact, and withers away in the light of a powerful dynamic that reveals a distorted mirror image of himself in the weakness and conformity of Bobby, his idolater, who equally cannot free himself from playing the role of a willing supplicant to Tony's false persona of "hero/god" which lead to his self-destruction. The key here being the line "there are ways of killing yourself without killing yourself" that Tony utters privately to himself after Bobby falls to his death re-enacting the false ritual of "courage" that is held as the manly "crown of achievement" and height of Tony's value system which maintains everything that is a lie within himself as well as the outer hierarchy of his society as unquestionable, unchangeable, and authoritative. In essence, Bobby is the central overriding and compelling force and catalyst of change that destroys the entire mirage of not only the main character's heroic "role" but the entire spectacle of a community's consensus "reality" (church/state/nation) and therefore destroys the fantasy of the actual "movie star" that you find so attractive in real life. Tony becomes whole in the film by admitting he's no different than Bobby, and this is why you hate the Bobby character so much. It is no coincidence that once "SNF" turned Travolta into the real-life personification of a "sex symbol", most critics have maintained for decades that he never equaled his performance in this single film as an actor (watch his performance in "Moment By Moment" which he shot mere months after completing "Fever" and in which again he plays sex object and stud to career-destroying effect) to know that SNF was a singular phenomena, of which Norman Wexler's screenplay and Miller's emotionally raw performance as Bobby were instrumental if not crucial (and fueled the Bees Gees hit soundtrack, NOT the other way around) and this combination was never to be duplicated. This is something I believe you refuse to admit you have failed to see (unlike Tony Manero) which is why you condemn the Bobby C. character as the film's major flaw. It's egotistical displacement, which mars the vast and impressive scholarship of your criticism and your work.
— August 30, 2021 2:37 p.m.

Hitler, baby, one more time

Oh, I forgot. "The Tenth Level" with William Shatner, about the Stanley Milgram Experiment.
— August 29, 2021 1:07 a.m.

John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever

Or: There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of art or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving Ignorance and Envy their first notice to find their prey. Or: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Or: Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules. Or: The one whose judgment counts most in your life is the one staring back in the glass. Or: The man who becomes a critic by trade ceases, in reality, to be one at all. Or: Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves. Or: A critic is a legless man who teaches running. Or: Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist, but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all art should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips. Or: The lot of critics is to be remembered for what they failed to understand. Or: There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence. Or: Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, artist themselves if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic. Or: Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. Or: Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. Or: Anyone can be a critic who has bravado and a following of less-experienced admirers willing to accept their authority. Anyone. Or: The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been accomplished, would find nothing to write about. Or: No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the opposite.
— August 28, 2021 11:13 p.m.

In the Heights takes a hint from La La Land

"In The Heights" was awful: as plastic as a Puerto Rican flag-emblazoned Dixie cup stocked in McDonalds, barren of any real pain or struggle or truly compelling sociopolitical conflict, "Disney Ghetto" and ultimately arch-conservative with it's obnoxiously familial and sentimental reification of "The American Dream". The Latinos I know who saw it said they hated it....and so did several other ethnicities. For someone who seems to want to display their snarky intellectual sophistication like so many oh-so-clever peacock feathers, you sure come off like a picture-perfect dilettante, and a particularly transparent one at that.
— August 28, 2021 7:18 p.m.

Goodbye, Columbus: this critic's first R rated film

How inane is it to admire a movie and then condemn it's director? "Zoom in on an engine overheating: cut to Neil’s Aunt Gladys lifting the lid off a steaming pot of peas. He later interrupts lovemaking in the attic by juxtaposing it with a slab of red meat." Maybe the cut from engine-to-peas represents the arc of sexual passion mutating into the mundane? Maybe the cut from lovemaking-to-meat represents Neil's inner struggle with his true feelings for Brenda as either worthwhile or merely nothing more than an object of physical lust? You've got a bad case of too much hipster scholasticism and too little talent for actual perception.
— August 28, 2021 6:40 p.m.

Hitler, baby, one more time

You make no mention of "The White Rose" in terms of German civilian teenagers who defied the Nazi State and paid with their lives.. As far as Hollywood is concerned, the only film that ever managed to get near any verisimilitude of Holocaust experience, in my opinion, was Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker" (1965) with a towering performance by Rod Stieger. For German filmmakers, Syberberg's "Our Hitler", For fiction, Jonathan Litell's "The Kindly Ones". For theater, Robert Shaw's "The Man In The Glass Booth". In addition: Pasolini's "Salo", Klimov's "Come And See", Haneke's "The White Ribbon", Schlondoff's "The Tin Drum", Geissendorfer's "The Magic Mountain" from the Thomas Mann novel.
— August 28, 2021 5:38 p.m.

John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever

You know, Scott, I must admit against my better nature that somehow you've gotten the upper hand in our little cinematic joust with SNF. I feel rather unfulfilled and even a bit sad that our contretemps had to come to such an abrupt end, by way of your (should I say rude?) snit-fit, and reluctance to continue flashing your critical mettle, if not eloquent wit (disco dancing with Pope Francis, brain snot, Yiddish spelling bees, etc.) So, if you have any shred of forgiveness left in your self-proclaimed soulless Jewish heart, could I humbly request your return into the forbidden Arena Of Illogical Opinions, if we were to follow your impassioned argument that SNF, irreparably stained and compromised by the singular aspect of the Bobby C. character's psychological and emotional pain, could never even live up to the pure unadulterated joy of what appears to be the absolute essence of your ideal, namely Allan Carr's 1980 "Can't Stop The Music"?
— August 27, 2021 6:17 p.m.