Boogie Nights (1997)

IMDb plot summary: The story of a young man's adventures in the Californian pornography industry of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, and John C. Reilly.

Boogie Nights has been on my watch list for ages. And now that I've finally seen it, my response is similar to that of a lot of Paul Thomas Anderson movies -- there are individual pieces of total brilliance, but I am uninvested in the narrative as a whole. There are a few scenes in here that almost stun me with how perfectly scripted and shot they are (Wahlberg's confrontation with his abusive mom is one, as well as the scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman's attempted kiss). But the sum of all these individual parts leaves me a little cold, especially in the last 15 minutes or so when what has been an increasingly Requiem-for-a-Dream-esque nightmare suddenly flips upside down and everything is abruptly lovely and awesome again, with no hints at any of the darkness that happened before. I'm glad I finally saw it, but I'm not totally sold on it.

3 stars.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Boogie Nights > Ghostbusters II
Boogie Nights < Fruitvale Station
Boogie Nights < Being John Malkovich
Boogie Nights < Peggy Sue Got Married
Boogie Nights > In and Out
Boogie Nights > Star Trek Into Darkness
Boogie Nights < Ramona and Beezus
Boogie Nights > The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Boogie Nights > Mad Max
Boogie Nights > Ran
Boogie Nights < It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown

Final spot: #1257 out of 2815.