Starring Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy. Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Boogie Nights begins in 1977 in a swinging disco club, with flashing lights, and loud and offensive fashions and hairstyles. A young dishwasher Eddie (Wahlberg) has taken a job in L.A. just so he can get a job in adult movies, because of a very large "gift" he possess just south of his belly button. A successful porn director (Reynolds) spots him in the nightclub, and invites him to discuss his participation in an ambitious movie with the director's wife Amber Waves (Moore). Eddie changes his name to Dirk Diggler, and overnight becomes a star, winning adult film awards for his "quality" work.
Amber acts as a mother figure to the other porn stars, and they become a close knit group, with the same group of actors appearing in all the films. Rollergirl (Heather Adams) is a pretty, vacant high school dropout who will take off anything except her rollerskates. Another (Cheadle) works part-time as a stereo salesman, and longs to open his own stereo store. To them, their sex work is just a job. They are shown as people who are a family, and truly do care for one another. But as they enter the 1980's, things start to deteriorate. Drugs and booze are plentiful and overused by everyone, and they start to take a toll on all the actors. Plus, porn movies are now being made on cheaper videotape, so any pretense of quality production values or plot are being quickly abandoned. And their drug-hazed world soon collapses as some of the family is cast adrift.
This movie comes with a high level of pre-release praise and hype. I'm not exactly sure why. For sure, there are positive elements in the film - this is not Showgirls. For one, the cast is quite good. Wahlberg is quite convincing as the innocent with one huge gift rising to the top, and taking the inevitable crash near the end. Moore, Cheadle, Graham and Reilly all are fine. But the best is surprisingly Burt Reynolds, who presents a sympathetic and varied portrayal of a pornographer with a heart and with aspirations in making good films (don't laugh). For the first half of the film, there is lots of energy and excellent use of humour. The song selection for the soundtrack is quite good, including one of the best disco songs ever, Best of My Love by the Emotions, and even the cheesy ones fit the mood of the film well. But the film begins to drag during the 1980's portion. The film is 2 1/2 hours long - I was ready for it to end after about 2 hours, but it just chugs along.
The director attempts to tell a multi-layered story where several stories are woven together, like that used by Robert Altman in Rough Cuts and John Sayles in Lone Star, but is much less successful. Here, there are just too many superfluous stories, and too many of them are not fully explored. For example, the cinematographer (Macy) at Reynold's house party shoots his wife while cheating on him, and then shoots himself. But how this affects the other characters, or how the cops reacted to these events in a pornographer's home are never explored. A film technician, Scotty, makes a pass at Dirk at a party, but it is never raised in any way ever again. The story involving Cheadle's foray into stereo takes away from the rest of the movie and just adds more time to the movie. Fewer plot developments, and exploring the ones started would have been a big improvement. There is considerable attempt to film the movie with style, but I could have done without the blurry shots and most of the jiggling camera frames. For a film about pornography, there is not that much sex and nudity, but for me the film too often came across as trashy instead of revealing or enlightening. Some reviewer said this movie "may well leave Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese drop-jawed with envy". No it won't.
