Funkytown

Boogie through the darker aspects of the 70's disco scene ...
Ah, the seventies. Bad hairdos, ridiculous clothes, danceable but quickly forgettable music ... and lots of attitude, greed and drugs.

This is the era captured pretty well in the 2011 Canadian film "Funkytown," which follows the disco scene in Montreal during the period 1972-1980, based loosely on actual events. The story is told through the stories of various deeply-flawed characters, including the city's #1 popular disco DJ and TV host (who has a serious cocaine problem), a young man thrilled to be dancing on TV with his girlfriend (but secretly harbors a secret: he's gay and deeply in denial about it), a record producer desperately searching for one last star to promote, and a son who is deeply afraid of his father who controls his livelihood. The story is realistic for the period, though quite dark overall. It even briefly covers the growing discontent with disco, and popularity of punk rock as its replacement trend.

US television audiences may recognize...

Low-dosage disco
Justin Chatwin has an adorable face and deserves to be in a great sitcom or dramatic ensemble. But the frankly unlikeable characters populating "Funkytown" make it hard for the film to resonate of anything but weariness. Also, the several glaring anachronisms -- a club full of people dancing to records not yet made in the year announced by clunky between-scene cards -- tested one's patience as much as the episodes of meat-headed self-destructiveness collated in the screenplay. Even the film's title is out of time, unless they all survived to 1980 as hangers-on and heard Lipps, Inc in a disco. Bad re-cut of "Disco Inferno," charming French translation of Tina Charles' global smash "I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance)" by Montrealer Marilou. Llloved hearing Boney M.'s "Daddy Cool" start playing, filling the Eurodisco void in "Saturday Night Fever"'s song score, wondered where the many notable Canadian disco records of the '70s had gotten to, like Montreal Sound's hammering...

So-so!
I rented this movie with the hopes of watching a good film. To me, it leaned more to the boring side. I tried to like it, tried to keep an open mind, tried to sit back and just watch it as a film, but got bored around 1/4 of the way. Ooh, I watched to full movie, hoping to find something intertaining about it. Nope, found nothing.

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