Okay, sorry to do my rant at the beginning of the review instead of the end. On to the movie. I really liked it, although I wouldn't rank it as one of the best movies of the year like every other critic in the country. It's vibrant and original, with a good eye for the details of the 1970s and 80s. You wouldn't tend to think of adult films as a family industry, but that's what Boogie Nights makes them out to be: movies made by a tightly knit group of dysfunctional people who manage to function with each other.
The acting is universally excellent, the film is well-written, and director Paul Thomas Anderson is very good at crafting individually engrossing scenes, although he has a problem stringing them together. The best scene is the climactic shoot-out, in which he manages to create a tense atmosphere, signaling underlying evil with a subtlety unknown to most Hollywood directors. Although the underlying evil might just have been Night Ranger's "Sister Christian."
The movie is overlong, though, and a lot of the characters are underdeveloped. I would have liked to know more about Buck (Don Cheadle) who seemed like an appealing character and had plenty of salient plot points, but zero background. Also, Eddie/Dirk's (Marky Mark) transition from naive New Kid on the Block to prima donna was too abrupt. If you really want to see Marky Mark Wahlberg act, I recommend renting Traveller, just out on video -- he's good in Boogie, but he's much better in Traveller. By the way, I have to relate his comment about the 13-inch prosthetic penis he wears in the film: "I don't want to go out with someone who has seen this movie and is looking for something they're not going to find." And I can't help wondering how much that must have hurt to take off... and the poor (or lucky, depending on your point of view) make-up person who had to apply it....
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