Thoughts from the committee
Like a Robert Altman film made by Martin Scorsese, Boogie Nights announced its 27-year old director Paul Thomas Anderson as a major figure in cinema, a status he has handily maintained ever since, including with his recent triumph of One Battle After Another. The 90s are a stacked decade for amazing films, but when we imagined a Friday night at the Embassy as part of our festival, we couldn’t move past Boogie Nights.
Like his next feature, Magnolia, Boogie Nights is a sprawling multi-character epic. Its setting is the porn scene in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in its heyday, when Times Square was full of late-night theatres and John Holmes was a household name. Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) is a bus boy in a disco club where he meets Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and his wife Amber Waves. Eddie joins the industry under the stage name Dirk Diggler, and we see his rise and fall as the excesses of the scene get the better of him. Anderson’s cast of actors are a delight, from John C Reilly’s hilarious Reed Rothchild, to Phillip Seymour-Hoffman’s tragic Scotty J.
A story of found family, finding yourself, and, of course, playing the part, is told through Anderson’s bravura filmmaking. Long choreographed steadicam shots, incredible needledrops, and a funny and heartbreaking script that’s equal parts cynical and sentimental demonstrate an incredible maturity for a director’s early work.
“There was little in Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut feature, Hard Eight, to prepare us for the confidence, exuberance, and sheer panache of his surprise – and surprising – Boogie Nights… It’s a hunka hunka burnin’ celluloid.” – Jay Carr, The Boston Globe