Boogie Nights

Saw Boogie Nights. It was great. It charted the rise of a male porn star through the cheap drugs and easy love of the 60s and 70s. All is right with the world, everyone's getting high and getting laid. Then, during a new-years party, William H Macy finds his wife fucking some other guy for the last time and starts shooting. Welcome to the 80s. Suddenly cute-n-cuddly love-making turns into angry screwing, pot gives way to crack, unshaven pits turn into silicone tits, and porn theaters give way to cheap videotape. Some of the impact of the above is kind of force-fed via voice-overs (I'm thinking specifically of Jack's direction on set. "No girls, that's nice, but there's no passion in it.") but it is effective, and I'm perhaps only seeing the machinery.

Music is used to great evocative effect to place the scenes. The soundtrack is great. The character of Roller-girl had an interesting arc: at first she flees from normal society into porn because porn (adorably) still respected women. Later on porn catches up and she beats the shit out some asshole who chastises her for "leaving him with a hard-on" during some porn-van shoot. That scene is awesome with its hateful, cheap, smeary videotape lights. It's also inter-cut with the rock-bottoms of the other characters, so the whole mood is pretty shitty. The worst scene by far is one of a drug deal gone wrong. Some cracked-out gay guy is playing Russian roulette while the latest pop hits blare out of his stereo. Meanwhile his goon carefully weighs the fake dope while a Chinese twink blasts off fire-crackers. The music plays at deafening levels, punctuated with the gun-blast explosions of the crackers, and our heroes just sweat and sweat. Just awful.

I'm kind of rambling, but the movie has a lot in it that's great. Homosexuality is used interestingly as well: the fat, ugly Seymour Hoffman is the only gay character and is kind of side-lined in the 60s. The whole world is an orgy but he's not invited. Later on, his attempt to kiss the protagonist at the new-years party is the little pre-death of the free-love era. When our hero is at his lowest, being beaten by homophobes for resorting for prostitution, their shouts are almost kind: "You shouldn't be doing this." They're right, he shouldn't. Homosexuality is unfortunately mostly used in a negative context in this film (see also the cracked-out gay guy above,) which is a pity because things were going great for gays for a little bit in the 70s, before AIDS. In fact, this film could have focused on gays without losing too much.

Anyway, the film is great. I would expect nothing less from P T Anderson.

PS - I didn't see this mentioned on the imdb page, but listen to the end of the credits. It gets weird.