Boogie Nights

Great filmmaking, a true masterpiece by a then young and hungry director with a boatload of influences. It's a wonderful story with colorful characters and excellent performances. It could've been a mundane and uninteresting affair but the movie has a secret weapon, comedy. A lot of the characters have this "dumb innocence" that makes the story so side-splitting funny and real. Mark Wahlberg and John Reilly have that "stupid guy" charm that results in so many laughs. The actors are aware of these funny personality gags and are self conscious of it, and that is what makes the drama work.

It's kind of weird. I just watched There Will Be Blood and that was one of the more intense movie I have watched and I'm watching this and like holy s*** this director has range. A good fun entertainment movie.

It has the perfect casting when they have Mark Wahlberg playing at dumb young kid that is playing in a pornos movies. It's just perfect casting on that front and he delivers the dumb idiotic performance so goodly.

And how bad all of the actors are in the actual pornholes it just adds to it. It's just so fun everything about this movie is fun and then when it get tragic it's even more sad because you've seen the highs and the lows.

And showing this interesting time in the world of pornography is so interesting to see and they do it with such flares . It's just overwhelming. It's hard not to just want to be part of the parties even if they're gonna get Coke down of their mind.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has created a fascinating account of a family of pornographers in the late 1970s. It is a frank, compelling, and disturbing vignette of unforgettable characters. Mark Whalberg (in his best performance to date) plays a well-endowed 17 year old who begins working in the porn industry under porn director Burt Reynolds (in an Oscar nominated performance). John C. Reilly plays a fellow porn star, Julianne Moore (never better) as a famous porn queen, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a timid homosexual porn crew member, William H. Macy as a fatalistic loser who's wife is always cheating on him, and Heather Graham (Reynolds daughter) as a rising porn star. Everybody does a fine job. The best scenes belong to former porn star couple Don Cheadle and Nicole Parker who add some of the comic relief to the film. What's intriguing is the way the actors interact with each other and the way they struggle to find their self-identity, plus a bravura script, colorful and startling cinematography, and a rousing rocking 70s soundtrack that make Boogie Nights one of the best films of 1997. It is a touching, humorous, and shocking film bursting with originality with an overall message of: redemption and forgiveness.

Boogie Nights is full of surprises, nothing quite prepares one for it its soul. Yes, it does have soul, whilst tackling the tackiest of subject matter, with both a wry smile and respect. Brillantly cast and wonderful character development, the performances somehow combine the best of stage acting with improvisation within a cinema verite style.

The plot proved richer than I expected and the underlying themes are teased out quite profoundly as each "B grade" human being is brought, through crisis, into perspective.

A sociologist's dream case study, the film resonates the raw truth of what we all know about self-esteem, parental love and lack of it, attention/love deficit and its manifestation in adulthood, the desperate need to belong. Something for everyone here.. almost camouflaged as issues of untouchables and their separate milieu but of course they are universal.

The film works on a number of levels. The ironic loop is that the milieu portrayed exists only because of the voyeur, who happens to be watching the film...

Boogie Nights is non judgmental of its subject matter and characters, a rarity. It deserves every accolade it has achieved and more.

This is an excellent movie that is vibrant, colourful and powerful. The performances are all very good, but the big surprise is the return of Burt Reynolds. His performance is the most notable, and he duly rewarded with a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. Boogie Nights is about the pornography industry in the 70's, and how it all fell apart in the 80's. The first half, revolving around the 70's, is plausible and believable; entertaining and informative. Although the film falls apart in the second half, and descends into a lot of unnecessary, graphic violence.

Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) is the protagonist of the movie. He is spotted one night at a club by porn king Jack Warner (Reynolds), and is offered a deal to star in a movie. Warner remarks that, "I just know there's somethin' wonderful under those jeans just waitin' to get out." And that marks the entrance for Eddie into the sleazy, slutty, though human world of porn and sex. Boogie Nights follows his first appearance as a naive young actor to a drug hampered, egomaniacal lunatic who spirals down into the world of crime and Cocaine. Along the way, it deals with sub plots dealing with pornography and the surrogate families that establish themselves amidst the echelons; the prejudice that society carries to porn stars and the dirty, utterly disgraceful life they lead.

Although the film deals with sex and porn, there is not an obscene amount of it, and the director censors these scenes so it is not explicit. The viewers gather that Eddie Adams (or Dirk Diggler, the pseudonym he assumes for acting) has a prodigious member lurking under his jeans. But, until the final scene, all we see to indicate that is the stunned reactions by peers and onlookers.

The script is very good, but the film is overly long. It could be called an epic at a length of 155 minutes, but the time passes quickly. Despite Boogie Nights' flaws and shortfalls, it is a very good movie worthy of the acclaim it received.

Nine out of ten.