BOOGIE NIGHTS

Starring: Burt Reynolds, Nina Hartley

If your adolescence was as depraved as mine, you will find much 
to shed a tear over in this sprawling, decadent saga of the porn
industry in late seventies/early eighties Los Angeles. Young
whipper-snapper director Paul Thomas (!!) Andersen shoots a 
condom-load of talent and the result is an affectionate homage 
to the days when breasts were un-augmented and sex was innocent,
risk-free fun. Who could forget those golden opuses of seventies 
lust that we as children caught on video in the earliest of the 
eighties? Back then, porn was sunshine and lollipops, and Paul 
Thomas (Andersen) knows it.

In the midst of an Altmanish assemblage of intertwining characters,
wanders Marky Mark as the hung-like-a-horse-thief Dirk Diggler. His
saga becomes the journey of Everyman as he finds love and a sense of
family with Amber (Julianne Moore nailing a uniquely seventies 
screwball sense of maternal sexuality square on the uncircumsized
head), "daughter" Rollergirl (Heather Graham) and "daddy" director 
Burt Reynolds at his sublimely laconic best.

We follow this ragtime band out of the clean, lovely seventies into 
the miserable eighties, with it's direct-to-video porn (less a 
celebration of hedonistic love than a bone-headed objectification.)
Disaster ensues for the now coke-addled bunch, and Marky winds up, 
as does the film, in ultra-violent Tarantino country.  The trouble 
is, the first half of the film is so fun and we come to love all 
the characters so much, that it's no picnic to watch their sad, 
endlessly plummeting descent. 

And what of our our "wunderkind" Paul Thomas A.? One can't help but
wish he didn't have to emulate ALL his heroes in one movie. With 
every other Paul, Dick and Thomas in filmland cranking out yet 
another Trantinoesque bloodbath what we really need is someone 
who can make us care about, even love, characters. This rare gift, 
more than all the fancy tracking shots he has up his substantial 
sleeve, is Mr. Andersen's real genius.