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How do I say this? Boogie Nights is a really great movie and you should see it and pay full price.
It's a paean to the rise of one porn star, Dirk Diggler, played remarkably deeply (ooh - no pun intended!) by Mark Wahlberg, aka Marky Mark, through the porn heyday of the 70's and into the crash of the 80's and the video market. |
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| He is tutelaged by Burt Reynolds as Jack Horner, and with Horner's stock actors, they try to make serious films with lots of sex in them. |
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The family of Horner's little porn clan is genuine and warm, despite or because of the exhibitionistic intimacy they live every day. It's decadent and fun but it's also cold and lonely and depressing. Later in the nicely soundtracked chronology, as the former actors try to rebuild their lives as normal people, you are completely on their side, even if you would disapprove of them as a rule. It's really interesting as well. |
| If you divide Boogie Nights up into four elements of film (I would never be so vain as to say THE four elements), maybe you can get a better picture of what I mean. So, there is the technical aspect of the filmmaking, the acting performances, the subject matter, and the storyline. |
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The technical aspect is really amazing - lots of different looking camera work and tracking shots out the yaz and beautiful sets (you know, for the period). At times the camera is making it all so real for us, it feels like a documentary - and the resulting feeling of immediacy renders it viscerally real. Other times the film crew within the film are talking about all the unsightly shadows in terrible lighting, stuff like that. It's very exciting and enervating, the shots and the sounds and the places.
What would eventually be shown in a seedy theatre in grainy 16mm we see the in-person performance as really very intimate and even loving. (Note how smoothly I segue into the performance aspect - unlike Boogie Nights, I felt I had to point that smoooooth transition out.) |
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It's hard to explain but you cannot hate these people for what they do for a living. In a way, it's all they could have done. Julianne Moore, Marky Mark, er, Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, and the other folks who suffer the anonymity caused by my forgetting my notebook again give us GREAT friggin performances. |
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They are in the nakedest of naked professions, and the actors on screen (save an amusing cameo by the real Johnny Doe - and yes, I had to be told that!) are not porn actors but they are believeable. Oh I am rambling! I want to write a long essay on this because it's a complicated film experience but it's really great! The acting is great, the review (this one) is poorly written. It's totally believeable - and the f*#king AWESOME camera stuff just makes it more real.
Subject matter. This is not a movie I would take grandma to. I could not watch it with my dad. It's not a date movie.It's about the
pornographic industry and Dirk in particular, but it is not in and of itself a porno movie. Considering the subject matter, I saw less nudity than I expected. |
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Take the skin factor of say, Showgirls, and make it a really really
good, interesting movie. And an hour longer. William H. Macy does not show his fuzzy little behind in this movie and I saw it on ER! But there is full frontal everything and a (no adjective available) cameo by an impressive prosthetic. Ladies, bring your smelling salts.
The porn industry has always been on the cutting edge of technology - moving pictures, color film (I think), video, and now DVD, and they are always at the vanguard of it. Next time you rent Little Mermaid for the umpteenth time you just thank John Holmes for his contribution. Storyline - ah yes. |
| The movie is a whopping 2 hrs and 50 minutes - do NOT succumb to the large Dr Pepper temptation! It whisks by, hypnotically presenting the amazing other life we never hear about, and propelling Marky Mark (sorry!) through his journey. Horrible irony, scary moments, amazing turns of fate, insane insane parties (which I was assured really happened like that), and dead-on spoofs on the cheesy wanna-be action movies that slowly became Skinemax after midnight. |
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So I can't get to the point. The point is, it's unique and interesting and totally well-crafted and shocking (but not in the way you would think!) and full of all the emotional travels you would want to take. Sure, there's nudity! It truly does serve the story! Wanton drug use, off camera sexcapades, it's got it all. And it's really great, did I mention that?
Full Price for sure. |
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