At the Late Night Picture Show...

I want to go there ... -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Caveat: I’m doped up on allergy meds and cannot be held totally accountable for how the nouns and verbs play out below. I’m having the worst allergy attack in recent memory and have had to quell it with a combination of Allegra D and Wal-Phed.

This week, I watched several great old movies via my new service, Netflix. I’ve resisted Netflix for years, because I didn’t like the DVD mail order business model. I want my movies now, not next week. In the last year or so, they’ve added Netflix streaming service (which works with Roku, Xbox, Samsung blu-ray and several other devices). I can pick out my pix online, and for $8.99/month I can watch unlimited movies and TV shows. The one snag is that streaming video gives you older fare and a lot of “B” movies. Nonetheless, I like a lot of what they have and can probably get my nine bucks worth for a least a couple of years to come. Netflix rules -- for now anyway.

LAST PICTURE SHOW

One of my Netflix pics was The Last Picture Show, a gritty, beautifully rendered coming-of-age movie made in 1971. That year, I was 14 and having the same feelings and insecurities as the movie’s adolescent characters. This movie, set in Anarene, Texas 1952 was a perfect reflection of my 1971 angst, despite the distance of 19 years between me and its fictional characters. Last Picture Show was filmed in black and white and it captures the simple, small-town atmosphere of the West Texas town (now a ghost town near Wichita Falls). This movie was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, a 31 year old new-wave wunderkind at the time and based on a 1966 novel by Larry McMurtry (best known for 1985‘s best-seller Lonesome Dove).

Last Picture Show is a perfect storm of writer, director and actors of enormous talent converging on to one project. Several seasoned character actors (Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson) rounded out a cast of stellar new faces (Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd) and gave us some of the finest performances ever in cinema history. The movie might be described as darkly comic, although it has tragic human implications and consequences as the characters grope their ways through a veritable Texas dust storm of restlessness, loneliness and yes -- horniness. There is some graphic activity, enough that the Church Lady might label the film as soft-core pornography. Fortunately, the Motion Picture Academy saw things differently and gave the movie 8 Academy nominations -- which it won, for best supporting actor (Johnson) and best supporting actress (Leachman).

I love attentiveness to detail. It always bothered me that on TV shows like Happy Days, set in the 50’s, the characters have 70’s hairstyles and for the most part 70’s fashions. Last Picture Show painstakingly gives us the early 1950’s with appropriate fashions, Zenith TV sets, 1951 Mercuries, and Hank Williams tunes coming out of the juke box. I had to purchase Hank Williams’ Honky Tonkin’ from iTunes after watching the movie -- the moment must live on! The windswept little town of Anarene seems sad and dusty yet all at the same time weirdly inviting, like a cold Dr. Pepper in a vintage bottle.

This movie is actually two trips in the Wayback Machine. It gives us 1952 Texas, but it also shows us what Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges looked like at the start of their careers in the early 70’s. If you love nostalgia as I do, you’ll love this whole package. The National Film Institute rates Last Picture Show as #95 on the top 100 American films ever made. I would rank it higher myself; if you haven’t seen it yet, sign up for Netflix and grab yourself a copy.

© 2010 blogSpotter