What a breathtaker. God bless P.T. Anderson's for creating a film that rockets the sockets. With a brilliant screenplay, set design, wardrobe, cinematography, editing, soundtrack, and most of all casting; Anderson plunges head-first into the world of pornography in California's San Fernando Valley, circa 1977, chronicling its rise and fall over 6 years. Burt Reynolds, delivering one of the finest and most unexpected performances ever in film, plays Jack Horner - a middle-aged, world-weary porn director who sees his work as true art and not simply as a masturbation device. He plucks busboy Eddie Adams - already suffering from a horribly comfortable middle-class existence - from inside a discoteque, due to his particularly large endowment. Eddie christens himself Dirk Diggler, begins a career as a porn actor while we ride with Dirk to the top of the porn mountain and down to the cocaine-addled mess that becomes his life. As Dirk, Mark Wahlberg delivers a captivating performance that probably no one was expecting at the time. Wahlberg more or less carries the film both as a suave, schoolyard bully and a fragile, wounded child.
This rollercoaster has an extremely colorful cast of characters that become Dirk's surrogate family. Jack is Dirk's new father, ripe porn queen Amber Waves serves as Dirk's mother. Other porno actors, including the impressionable Reed Rothchild, clueless Buck Swope, roller-skating Rollergirl, and chocolate-breasted Becky Barnett become Dirk's brothers & sisters. All the while Anderson pumps out a nicely varied collection of 70's musical gems; equally mixing rock, soul, funk, disco, R&B and even folk. The entire cast of this film is flawless - EVERYBODY performs superbly. Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Heather Graham, Phillip Baker Hall, Luis Guzman, William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, Nicole Ari Parker, Robert Ridgely, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters, Alfred Molina - these actors are all wonderfully fantastic in this film.
I won't waste time saying who plays who, enjoy the discovery (or rediscovery) yourself; they all shine marvelously. You cannot blame Anderson for reuniting most of these actors for "Magnolia" - they work uniformly under his eye. Anderson is a triple threat because he's an actor's director, a writer's director and a director's director - all in one. If "Boogie Nights" is only his second film, we are bound to witness greatness from this guy for years and years to come.
Certainly the best film of 1997, Anderson's frenetic storytelling skills works wonders as he doses all his characters with a healthy fraction of empathy; we even understand the bad guys (and their motives), yet we're still not made to feel sorry for them. What particularly impresses me about this film is Anderson's ability as a writer to express the thoughts & feelings of characters who would be considered less than intelligent by many people. You may be quick to call them "dumb", but Anderson isn't so harsh; he feels they are simply people who cannot articulate themselves very well. I love the ever-present sympathy he has. Many detractors of this film claim the cinematography borrows too heavily from Scorsese while the editing technique employs the work of Altman a little too often. Indeed, like many Scorsese "disciples", Anderson wears his "Scorsese Camera Badge" a lot more heavily than Spike Lee or Oliver Stone. Still, it's used to such dizzying effect in accordance with a fantastic screenplay & cast that after a while you forget he's doing so (unless you spend the entire film judging it as it goes along). I really felt like I was in the 70's throughout this movie, immersed in everything beautiful & wonderful it had to offer, as well as its consequences, even though I was born in the middle of that decade. What a glorious spin from P.T. Anderson and his ENTIRE cast & crew - they created the perfect time warp. This film is a sign that all of us can be rescued from the Jerry Bruckheimer hell that is Hollywood.
This rollercoaster has an extremely colorful cast of characters that become Dirk's surrogate family. Jack is Dirk's new father, ripe porn queen Amber Waves serves as Dirk's mother. Other porno actors, including the impressionable Reed Rothchild, clueless Buck Swope, roller-skating Rollergirl, and chocolate-breasted Becky Barnett become Dirk's brothers & sisters. All the while Anderson pumps out a nicely varied collection of 70's musical gems; equally mixing rock, soul, funk, disco, R&B and even folk. The entire cast of this film is flawless - EVERYBODY performs superbly. Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Heather Graham, Phillip Baker Hall, Luis Guzman, William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, Nicole Ari Parker, Robert Ridgely, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters, Alfred Molina - these actors are all wonderfully fantastic in this film.
I won't waste time saying who plays who, enjoy the discovery (or rediscovery) yourself; they all shine marvelously. You cannot blame Anderson for reuniting most of these actors for "Magnolia" - they work uniformly under his eye. Anderson is a triple threat because he's an actor's director, a writer's director and a director's director - all in one. If "Boogie Nights" is only his second film, we are bound to witness greatness from this guy for years and years to come.
Certainly the best film of 1997, Anderson's frenetic storytelling skills works wonders as he doses all his characters with a healthy fraction of empathy; we even understand the bad guys (and their motives), yet we're still not made to feel sorry for them. What particularly impresses me about this film is Anderson's ability as a writer to express the thoughts & feelings of characters who would be considered less than intelligent by many people. You may be quick to call them "dumb", but Anderson isn't so harsh; he feels they are simply people who cannot articulate themselves very well. I love the ever-present sympathy he has. Many detractors of this film claim the cinematography borrows too heavily from Scorsese while the editing technique employs the work of Altman a little too often. Indeed, like many Scorsese "disciples", Anderson wears his "Scorsese Camera Badge" a lot more heavily than Spike Lee or Oliver Stone. Still, it's used to such dizzying effect in accordance with a fantastic screenplay & cast that after a while you forget he's doing so (unless you spend the entire film judging it as it goes along). I really felt like I was in the 70's throughout this movie, immersed in everything beautiful & wonderful it had to offer, as well as its consequences, even though I was born in the middle of that decade. What a glorious spin from P.T. Anderson and his ENTIRE cast & crew - they created the perfect time warp. This film is a sign that all of us can be rescued from the Jerry Bruckheimer hell that is Hollywood.