Swingers (the movie) - Classic or Dud?

watched this last night for the first time in 15 or so years.

everyone otm above about how bad it looks. when they do the reservoir dogs slow-mo strut and later the homage to the copacabana steadicam from goodfellas you can't help but think: this looks god-awful, especially compared to the reference points.

it is also so of its time. the aforementioned goodfellas and reservoir dogs rips, and obviously most notably the whole swing revival, saddle shoes, wallet chains and big bad voodoo daddy element - but also the real 90s battle-of-the-sexes gender politics of it - the "likable" lovelorn protagonist who is a foil to the womanizing vince vaughn constantly calls women skanks.

a pretty decent enough watch from a nostalgia point of view and some of it holds up reasonably well - still found michael's awkward attempts at banter with women in the vegas section pretty amusing, i like ron livingston in anything he's in despite him being the least notable or exciting actor around. but basically the only remarkable aspect of it is the career making performance of vince vaughn - who was never this good, or handsome, again

the choice of the swing revival as the scene to use is probably the single lamest thing and yeah vince vaughn is really good and was never this good again, but the seeds of his whole lazy dead-eyed douche schtick that he made his subsequent career on are all here, it's just masked with an energy he never captured again. in retrospect he's kind of an embarrassing star. the gender stuff is pretty lame, this is definitely a dudebro POV film in the least interesting sense.

it is kind of funny to see this as a time capsule of that swing scene. The Derby is now a Chase bank, after the swing thing faded it turned into a pay-to-play venue for local musicians and then quietly shut its doors.