Nostalgia in pop culture seems to operate on a twenty-year delay These days, there are a lot of callbacks to '90s movies, TV shows, video games, and more. Conversely, the 90s were all about the '70s, and during the latter part of the decade, there was a resurgence of movies that took place in the late '70s, complete with earworm disco tunes and bell-bottoms. The king of these films is of course Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights." Whit Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” was an even-tempered approach to relationships during, well, the disco days. Spike Lee combined a gritty thriller with an ensemble drama in the 1977-set “Summer of Sam.” Adam Rifkin pitted hard rockers and disco kids against each other in the underrated “Detroit Rock City”.
Among these was 1998 oddity “54," about a young and naïve stud’s fish out of water experiences as an employee of the infamous Studio 54 nightclub during, you guessed it, the late '70s. I saw the original cut of...