Thoughts on Boogie Nights

I woke up really early in the morning, so I decided to watch Boogie Nights on Hulu, I hadn’t seen it in years. It’s still a fantastic film, and I’m amazed that Paul Thomas Anderson was just 26 when he made it. It has incredible cinematography, a lot of one-shot pans and long tracking shots, and a really stellar cast that I’m surprised he was able to get for his second feature.

There were minor parts that I had forgotten about and thought was hilarious, like Dirk’s terrible singing on the song that in the real world was in the 1980s Transformers film, and the guy freaking out over the girl who O.D’d: “This is twice in two days that a chick has O.D’d on me!.” There are so many needle drop moments with the music, like shifting between four pop song classics in the Alfred Molina scene alone.

I liked how a lot of the main characters were generally the same in the end as they were in the beginning. Dirk definitely went through a major transformation from naive innocent to hardened and empty, but still seemed like a dumb person without much skills outside of his work. Some age and wisdom, like with Rollergirl and Buck, but generally the same. I noticed that Jack never indulged in cocaine himself, largely keeping it around for others’ enjoyment.

I was mixed between feeling bad for Little Bill and his troubled marriage, while also thinking he should have just gotten a divorce instead of how he chose to resolve the situation. It makes for an incredible sequence in the film, I just thought about it later and realized my sympathies with him were misplaced.

I looked up the IMDB trivia, and the alternate choices for casting would have worked just as well for this film: Leonardo DiCaprio for Dirk, Marisa Tomei for Amber, Jack Black for Scotty, and Warren Beatty for Jack. I can see all of that working for an alternate version of the film.

I don’t know how known Thomas Jane was in 1997, but he is a total scene stealer. His character is a coked-up idiot who devises a plan to trick a psychotic drug dealer into buying a kilo of baking soda under the guise of it being cocaine, and gets way too greedy and dumb in the moment. There was no question as to how his story was going to end, but I thought he was really great in his handful of scenes.

I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I liked that Anderson chose to give Nicole Ari Parker’s character a happy ending of a marriage to a regular guy, rather than his original idea of having the husband become jealous and abusive over her pornography past, I would have hated more of that ugliness in addition to everyone else’s lives being destroyed by drugs.

I really should know more of Melora Walters’ work, she’s a fantastic character actress who played Jessie, Buck’s wife, and was so sweet and cute. I had previously raved about her in my review of Twenty Bucks.

It was fun revisiting this and noticing a lot of small moments I had overlooked before.