[ Golden Gater Online - October 23, 1997 ]
Justin Grams
Staff writer
"Boogie Nights" is the first film of the 1990s to give twenty-somethings an idea of life, in an era when all of them were oblivious to anything but Saturday morning cartoons, Barbie dolls and breakfast cereals.
The film crams exhausting details of the late 1970s and early 1980s into its powerful, documentary-like photography, and then rams its images into the viewer's subconscious like a nostalgic Viewfinder from a childhood toy chest.
From a young person's perspective, it's a mechanism packed with endless, tauntingly familiar snapshots of their baby-sitters' roller skates, the spandex and polyester clothes the big kids wore to school, and the awesome posters that covered their older siblings' walls and bedroom doors. "Boogie Nights" is 152 minutes of emotionally delicious drama from 26-year-old writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson.
The film, which opened in a successful, limited release on Friday, (it goes nationwide on Oct. 31), stars Mark Wahlberg as Eddie Adams, a San Fernando Valley busboy who becomes an adult film star in the tail end of the 1970s. He's just in time for the overwhelming amount of residual excess that left the 1980s in a state of political and social confusion.
Eye contact is all it takes for Eddie to get on the road to stardom with adult filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), his actress/girlfriend Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and future co-star "Rollergirl" (Heather Graham). And it's obvious from the beginning of the picture what a star he wanted to be! Eddie is the epitome of a naive, California dreamer. Still living at home with the folks, his bedroom walls are covered with stardom myths -- posters of movies, sports cars, Bruce Lee and scantily-clad babes.
It's when Eddie changes his name to Dirk Diggler and makes his first successful porn film that he's picked up in a gust of wind and flown like a colorful kite through the glamour and addictedness of late-night disco parties, endless lines of cocaine, spending sprees and a painfully naive insensitivity to it, inevitably all coming to an end.
But "Boogie Nights" isn't just a story of one boy's rise to the top of the American porn industry. It's a depressing, yet emotionally stimulating account of the pornography business and the family that formed a bond around it.
It's when Anderson explores the voids this makeshift family holds as individuals when the film sucks its audience down, slipping its characters into emotionally and physically traumatizing circumstances that build every character into a three-dimensional human being.
Anderson tells the story of "Boogie Nights," not just with his vibrant script, but with his hypnotic camera movements and flawless use of timing. Critics and aspiring filmmakers will undoubtedly be jealous of the young director's undeniable influence of Martin Scorsese in his directing technique. Sure, "Boogie Nights" is told in a similar narrative utilized by Scorsese in his pictures (most notably "Goodfellas" and "Casino"), but Anderson clearly holds his own style as well. In some scenes, Anderson puts complete faith in his actors' performances and gives them long, tight close-ups and monologues in scenes, which would usually be shot from many different points of view.
"Boogie Nights" is a film that defends its shortcomings with alluring originality. Anderson's film plays as a nearly perfect, historical piece of the 1970s, otherwise ignored by filmmakers and the public since the 1970s. It's a great piece of filmmaking that will leave any open-minded individual yearning to retrace pieces of their own past, using mediums that can still be evaluated and scrutinized; music, dance, fashion, pornography and any other influences that shaped how our society evolved to what it's become today. It's more of a truthful, uncensored history lesson for today's youth than any hardback textbook ever published could convey, and a phenomenal scrapbook for the parents that had them.
[ Golden Gater - October 23, 1997 ]