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John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever
Seriously! You've left the building like Elvis? I guess your defense of "Saturday Night Fever" as an unmitigated classic of purely weightless and fluffy disco kitsch has somehow run it's course. How surprising. Has the seductive ooze of inspiration suddenly dried up from the dripping tip of your wilted pen? No more religious grammar lessons or incisive observations about how lame it is was to have a long-acclaimed dramatic performance get in the way of your enjoyment of "The Hustle"? Or how much Gene Siskel needed to clear out the intellectual phlegm from his head? Really, Mr. Marks, how deep IS your love? Seems to me your sudden silence is an admittance of intellectual defeat and childish egotism that appears to be as petty and as small-time as your future.— August 26, 2021 2:13 p.m.
John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever
"No one ever"? HA. Try two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, Chilean director Pablo Larrain, Vanity Fair Magazine, Martin Scorsese, and Frank Rich, the former theatre critic of The New York Times. I hope you like writing your reviews for The San Diego Reader. Because with that kind of insight, that's about as far as you'll ever get.— August 22, 2021 9:55 p.m.
John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever
Mazeltov! I'm a member of the tribe myself. And it doesn't mean you have no soul. It's just means you don't have a very sensitive one.— August 18, 2021 3:19 p.m.
John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever
Not only do I have the nerve to call you stupid, I have the nerve to call you shallow, defensive, and an obviously offended Christian. Anticlericalism is at the the very heart of the film, and Wexler makes that completely clear through an explicit line with Frank (which of course you blatantly ignore) when he says "one day you look at a cross and all you see is a man dying on it" and about his parents, he despises "their fantasies of pious glory"..... The Church's pieties, not Mommy And Daddy themselves. The exchange between Frank and Bobby is about The Church, too (and abortion, in case you didn't notice.) and presents that issue in the most ruthless way, insofar that it clearly shows an innocent trapped by absurd cosmological fascism, like a child crushed under a Nazi boot. More proof? Travolta takes his brother's clerical collar and turns it into a noose....but you didn't see that, right? Of course not. The film makes no attempt to add pathos that isn't already implicit in the screenplay's unapologetic and brutal social critique of Catholicism, of which Bobby C. is the more than powerful messenger and it's true sacrificial lamb. What you're praising as the film's "strength" is called "Thank God It's Friday", a true masterpiece and far superior film than "Fever" with all of it's sexed up disco superficialities, unpolluted by a "simpering suicide" and unnecessary macho cruelty towards a vulnerable lost soul. It's always a misstep when a film has the audacity to ruin someone's good time, isn't it? "Saturday Night Fever" shunned nothing. You have.— August 17, 2021 10:30 a.m.
John Travolta oozes seductiveness in Saturday Night Fever
Truly one of the most insipid and idiotic pieces of writing ever. How can you profess to either understand or admire the film's "enormous staying power" while at the same time condemning the Bobby C. character as the film's biggest "misstep", or the scene that is Wexler's most naked condemnation of organized religion's toxic effect on the bleak and ignorant world into which his writing has thrust us? If anything is "maudlin" it's your latent threat about the enormous power that single scene, and Miller's performance, wields over the entire film, and your utter stupidity to perceive it.— August 14, 2021 9:14 a.m.