Movie of the Week 04-14-09

American Swing (Jon Hart, Matthew Kaufman, 2008)

The legendary NYC sex club Plato's Retreat took 60s Flower Power Free Love, spiked it with cocaine, revved it up with disco & treated precious bodily fluids like eggshell latex primer & this entertaining, spendidly icky, documentary is about as close to the club's fabled, louse & celebrity-infested mattress room as you'd want to get without a hazmat suit...

American Swing (Jon Hart, Matthew Kaufman, 2008)
This documentary about the infamous Upper Manhattan swinger club Plato's Retreat, which flourished as the breathless finish line for free love from 1977 until 1984, features opalescent fountains of jizz, casual anal sex between trips to the odious buffet, Buck Henry describing the heave & ho of the scabies-ridden mattress room, glittery disco & glam music, old overweight Long Island Jewish couples it's hard to imagine copulating wildly with Garrett Morris, cocaine tales in excelsis, Phil Donahue acting just like the pompous, disingenuous liberal grotesque he is, copious nudity (some even worth seeing), Ed Koch in a permanent state of denial & Retreat guru Larry Levenson, a big-hearted schlub canonized & pilloried by sex, sex, sex. Seriously, what's not to love about this? Oh right, the AIDS.