Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you will no longer receive blurbs from me regularly.
The good news is that that's because I AM DONE WRITING AND RESEARCHING THE BOOK.
Now it's time to edit, edit, edit. I write about 435 movies over the course of 110 years. That's a massive undertaking. I'm glad I got the ball past the finish line.
There's a way to go still, and I'm hoping to have it out by October, but I FINISHED! I FINISHED! I made a book whose parameters seemed impossible but I finished it all the same.
Boogie Nights (1997) FM
Burt Reynolds picked up his only Academy Award nomination for playing ambitious porn auteur Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 breakthrough film Boogie Nights. Though Reynolds was famously ambivalent about the role, he nevertheless delivered a career-best, career-defining performance as a twinkly-eyed alpha male in the autumn of his life who is a loving father figure to the oversexed, drugged-up lost souls and outsiders in his peculiar social and professional circle. Reynolds brings battered dignity and fundamental tenderness to the role. Boogie Nights is about profoundly flawed people who love each other despite their glaring weaknesses.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s career-making film chronicles the dizzying highs and agonizing lows of the late 1970s porn world through the story of Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg). He’s a naive kid with big dreams and an even bigger penis. The young man’s freakishly large genitalia, good looks, and fresh-faced likability make him a huge star in fuck films, but changes in the industry and inevitable descent into drug addiction, desperation, and prostitution lead to a precipitous fall.
Cocaine first makes our hero and his sidekick’s life a California dream of decadence and debauchery and then, inevitably, a waking nightmare he’s desperate to wake up from.
Anderson fuses the coked-up rhythms and manic editing of Goodfellas with the groovy West Coast vibes of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby. Anderson’s Oscar-nominated screenplay gives some of our greatest character actors their finest roles. Julianne Moore picked up the film’s third Oscar nomination for playing a tragic porn star with a vibe at once maternal and overtly sexual, but Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Riley, Alfred Molina, William H. Macy, and Heather Graham deliver award-worthy performances as well.
To borrow Jack’s own words, Anderson made an instant classic that’s true and right and dramatic. He made it fly. Anderson is one of our great auteurs, and he has made many transcendent films, but there is a good chance that this is the one that he will be remembered for.
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