Word: disco
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There is a light-year's gap between the living standards of the masses and those of a growing middle class. A low-ranking civil servant in Egypt's swollen, slow-moving bureaucracy may earn no more than $45 a month; an evening at currently fashionable Jackie's Disco in Cairo costs $60 per person. Some of the affluent Egyptians who can afford a summer home in Alexandria are uncomfortable about the disparity between their country's two nations. Says one wealthy, Harvard-educated Cairene: "I feel like a foreigner when I'm with the Egyptian lower class. When...
From a cynical perspective Saturday Night Fever looks not so much like a movie as a merchandising assault on the youth market. The first film to exploit the latest disco craze, it stars a hot TV personality, John Travolta, and features a sound track overcrowded with highly pluggable Bee Gees songs. The sets are plastered with posters of Al Pacino and Farrah Fawcett-Majors; the script shamelessly ransacks American Graffiti and Rocky. The people behind Saturday Night Fever -or perhaps one should say the accountants-have not left much to chance...
...movie is hard to dismiss, for its prefab ingredients are often stirred to a boil. Energetically directed and well acted (largely by unknowns), Saturday Night Fever succeeds in capturing the animal drive of disco music and the social rituals of the people who dance to its beat. Were it not for some failures of dramatic nerve in the second half, this film might actually have been the rock-'n'-roll Rocky it so desperately aspires...
...long as Saturday Night Fever stays at the hero's local disco, it is on solid footing. When Tony and his inarticulate chums burn off the tensions of their workaday jobs and Roman Catholic guilts, we see a mindless explosion of pent-up energy that is almost frighteningly hedonistic. The characters become cruel and volatile beneath the strobe lights, and it seems that Saturday Night Fever has an authentic statement to make about America's newest crop of alienated youth...
...precious or musically cute. In that it's a return to basics, it's a divergence from the style Scaggs has come to be known for, and it works. Jeff Porcaro's drumming is unspectacular, but so steady that one wishes he'd be cut free of the quasi-disco beat earlier...