American Swing

It was about, surprise surprise, swinging. Particularly an old swingers club in New York, Platos Retreat. I don't know what I was expecting but boy that was a bunch of sex in that one. I really wasn't expecting that much, I guess and I was surprised. From the beginning, I couldn't at all see how this movie was going to last an hour, let alone an hour and a half. But whatever. It was what it was.

At times, it wasn't so much about Platos, but more of a profile on its creator, Larry Levenson, except not a very good one. I was going to stop it half way through, but Marggy said I should just finish. They'd get into these long strings of discussing him as if he was the focus of the doc.

There was lots of old archival footage and a lot of it was quite hard to see. I know from my internship that it's quite difficult to get this old footage, so that part is commendable, but I feel like the filmmakers were just satisfied getting some of the old footage and didn't mind if you could make out what was going on.

I didn't like the flipping the video back and forth. That was weird and distracting. we were always taught not to do that. There are rules that you're not supposed to do in movies that people break for creative effect, but this should not be one of those things.

Overall, I feel like this should have been an hour long tv documentary or something. There was just something about it that dragged out too long. There was a sequence that was just terribly cut and I started to get bored. It was going back and forth between a Plato's tv ad people's first hand accounts of Platos. That was horribly cut.

The music was fun.