I found it a wholly interesting commentary track, though, and was actually rather surprised by it.
Stillman is clearly in charge here with Eigeman and Sevigny disappointingly only acting as a sort of back up to him and only speaking up when addressed by Stillman. The first and probably best feature on here is the audio commentary featuring director Whit Stillman, and actors Chris Eigeman and Chloë Sevigny. But what it looks like is we’re getting an older high-def transfer that cut it for DVD but not exactly for Blu-ray.Ĭriterion ports everything over from their DVD edition, which I found underwhelming initially and still find to be so going through them again: they’re not all that different from the typical material you’d find on any other DVD or Blu-ray release. I was impressed with the DVD, which was released three years ago, so I did have some high expectations for this Blu-ray and that could have played into my disappointment. Despite the variance in the degree of details the picture overall is sharper than the DVD’s, yet it could certainly be far better. Film grain is noticeable but it can come off like a blobby mess and look a bit like noise.Ĭolours do offer an improvement on the other hand, with reds, blues, and purples coming off significantly better, and blacks also look a bit deeper. Details vary severely from scene to scene, with some decent amount of definition in the finer details during some sequences and what looks like a waxy glaze over some objects, particularly faces, in other scenes. Edge-enhancement rears its ugly head in many instances, causing slight halos around objects and can be hard to ignore on the dance floor. It worked for the DVD but I'm almost sad to say the Blu-ray’s presentation is incredibly underwhelming to say the least.Ĭompression is less of an issue here but other artifacts are noticeable, and it has a surprisingly flat and muddy look to it. It looks as though the same high-def transfer used for the DVD is the same one here (not surprising.) Even though it was downscaled for DVD it still looked great despite a few short comings that I blamed more on compression. Stillman highlights the political stakes of personal pleasures with archival clips showing the infamous 1979 Disco Demolition Night, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, which devolved into a riot led mainly by young white men.Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco receives its Blu-ray debut from Criterion, presented in the aspect ratio of 1.78:1 on this dual-layer disc. Their circle of men includes an environmental lawyer (Robert Sean Leonard), an adman (Mackenzie Astin), a colleague (Matt Ross), a club employee (Chris Eigeman), and the group’s unofficial philosopher, a fledgling prosecutor named Josh (Matt Keeslar) who naïvely hails the disco scene for its “cocktails, dancing, conversation, exchange of ideas and points of view.” In the disco, talking is a meeting of the minds, and dancing is a meeting of the bodies-sex without contact, an egalitarian indicator of erotic compatibility-yet these young socialites’ emotional relationships involve cruelly deceitful games that are inextricably based on the bedrock standard of the bottom line. Set in Manhattan in the early eighties, the film stars Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale as recent college graduates and editorial assistants whose social life is centered on a flashy and exclusive night club. In this deftly dialectical and bitterly intimate comedy, from 1998, Whit Stillman unfolds disco’s vectors of power with a historian’s insight and a novelist’s eye for satirical nuance.
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