Out of the Mothballs and Into the Light: ‘Disco Godfather’ (1979)
As the pioneering installment of a new article series here on LNGFRM where we will feature very old movies that deserve a watch, we present ‘Disco Godfather,’ a late-70s blaxploitation flick starring Rudy Ray Moore and more disco dancing than you’ve seen in your entire lifetime.
We could call this movie a ripoff of ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ which came out two years prior. And it is a ripoff, in essence. You have a guy who’s good at dancing and that’s his main character trait, apart from how everybody in town seems to know and like him.
Then some hairbrained plot gets in the way of all the dancing and it turns into an ill-fated action movie. But where ‘Disco Godfather’ wins out is in the signature sub-par acting of its lead, Tucker Williams/The Disco Godfather and owner of the Blueberry Hill dance club, played by Moore.
What starts as a fun dance movie turns into a town-wide battle against the spread of PCP, which very literally sends users to the psych ward.
The movie has camp to spare, and its only real weakness is its trace amounts of fake Kung Fu, which only appear twice in the film.
The characters are largely cliches, but that’s what earns its blaxploitation label, a genre that was far from being progressive in its content, but which gave us some of the very first movies of any kind that featured Black characters as leads, villains, and everyone else, characters with multiple lines and character traits and something to say.
It’s something that mainstream Hollywood couldn’t pull off until this year’s ‘Black Panther.’
‘Fallout 76’ and the Weight of Public Opinion
Maybe we should we strangely glad that ‘Fallout 76’ has been so thoroughly panned by a fanbase that was expecting so much more. If nothing else, it proves that in video games, no one is too big to fail, Bethesda especially.
Many of their past mistakes were forgiven on the basis that the games still found a way to be fun, despite bugs and framerate drops. And maybe the current crisis has less to do with the game itself and more to do with fans getting fed up.
And maybe the worst part of all is that this could be the end of the Fallout series as a whole, a series that deserves a place among some of the best AAA games of the past 10 years.
Sure, there could be an installment a few years from now that makes up for past mistakes and reminds us of the magic of the world and fun of Fallout, but in the meantime guess it’s ‘Red Dead’ or die.
