🎬 #197 Porn On Film.
Just a short, single recommendation this week - ironic given the subject.
Please enjoy
Bry
FILM: BOOGIE NIGHTS 🍆
1997 Dir Paul Thomas Anderson
2 hrs 32 mins
One of the amazing things about this film is that it features a song that I know from Transformers: The Movie - You Got The Touch by Stan Bush. A song that Mark Walhberg’s Dirk Diggler covers in an attempt to cross over into a music career. It’s a great track and one that thematically tells us a lot about the film. It charts the rise of Dirk, as he becomes an icon in the industry with his special ‘talent,’ but it also maps the changes in his character just as well as the industry as a whole, during the transition from film to video. A change that takes the ‘art’ out of the whole endeavour - one that is feared and resisted as long as possible by producer Jack Horner [played by Burt Reynolds].
To him, it cheapens what he and his cast and crew are trying to do. The evolving tastes of more amateur, more gonzo style, as it would come to be known, threaten his domain. There are a lot of parallels being made here between porn filmmaking and mainstream filmmaking. Even more relevant now, with the evolution in technology and ai, meaning that almost everyone has a high-quality film camera in their pocket and could, in theory, make a film. This is great to me. But also, that technological leap plus streaming means there is much, much more being produced and does the lower barrier to entry lower the overall quality? Who knows, but that’s the idea that Jack and his team are trying to fight back against. If amateurs can film themselves having sex, is it as ‘artful’ as the porn the team is attempting to making? Boogie nights is a PTA classic, as dynamic and energetic as its protagonist - with one of my all time favourite PTA endings.