matt keeslar

College movies are usually wild comedies with lots of booze or heavy duty stuff with stressed out students in constant turmoil. "Art School Confidential" (2006) is the rare exception to the rule. Funny and serious, as well as realistic and well acted, this dark satire of a freshman's traumatic adjustment to higher education earns an A-.  

French director Pierre Morel has signed on to direct a new adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel "Dune," according to Paramount Pictures, the studio behind the project. Morel has signed "a holding deal," according to a Paramount spokeswoman. Kevin Misher and Richard Rubenstein are producing the film.  

"Disco will never be over," Matt Keeslar's manic pop-culture philosopher Josh declares in Whit Stillman's 1998 film The Last Days of Disco . "It will be misrepresented and caricatured and sneered at, or -- worse -- completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes... but disco was much more, and much better, than all that. Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever! It's got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in  

The operating systems of Star Trek , The Prisoner , Astro Boy and V have all been rebooted for Generation Xbox this year, with varying degrees of success. What science fiction series is next for a 21st-century upgrade? Try stuffing these 10 television shows in your replicators.  

Whit Stillman hasn't made a lot of films. In fact, there are only three: Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco . All filmed in the '90s, his trio of movies morphed from upper-class teen Manhattanites, to heading out into the international working world, and finally to a look into the end of disco.  

"Adventureland" & "The Last Days of Disco" It's an early-'80s pop-apalooza double bill! Although made a decade apart in vastly different settings, Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco" (a surprising but welcome new release from the Criterion Collection) and Greg Mottola's "Adventureland" are hilarious and often pungent chronicles of an era that can seem at once incredibly distant and also eerily resonant, an era when disco, punk, AIDS, gay and straight collided to create the first Frankensteinian stirri  

With the second season of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse about to premiere, we thought new or lapsed viewers could use some catching up. IN THE BEGINNING... Joss Whedon wrote a show for Eliza Dushku.  

Somehow I don't think this new gig will be as much fun as her old one. But out of love for The Middleman , I will be happy that Natalie Morales has been upgraded to series regular on White Collar . The job started as a two-episode guest spot, so I guess somebody was impressed with our Dub-Dub. If I can't have one of the best shows of the past several years, I should at least be satisfied when the people that brought it to life find new gigs.  

We're both mixed on T he Last Days of Disco (1998). It was his most expensive film, with a longer shooting schedule but correspondingly greater angst as the budget tightened. He based it on his own clubbing in the early '80s, and came to regret recreating those experiences in Jersey City, NJ's palatial, then-disused Loew's movie theater, a big space that swallowed extras and production design and distracted him from his usual minimalist aesthetic.  

In one form or another, everyone belongs to a subculture—a sort of meta-society comprised of those sharing a common interest or passion. Because these groups are comprised of those closest to a subject, they oftentimes become the target of criticism, as the perspective of others is generally limited to their own interests. Understanding others merely for the sake of understanding seems like a wasteful practice—such information is hardly relevant to our own, closeted lives.