January 29, 2006

Bright Lights, Big City

bright1.jpgOpen your Nostalgia Calculator (it's in the Applications folder - OS 10.4 only), and adjusting for the acceleration of time perception over the years, we should have just entered 1988. So get out your "Red Red Wine" cassettes and put on your "Ollie North for President" T-shirt. Or just turn on VH1 and listen to C-list celebrities explain the plot of The Accidental Tourist.

And these good-looking dudes on the left want your attention: Bright Lights, Big City, baby.

Some lessons learned from BLBC:

1) A lot of these old movies that have unwittingly become period films are not very good - even considering them from a historical angle. Pretty in Pink - besides James Spader's brilliant impersonation of a 28 year-old teenager - is another example of this phenomenon.

2) A lot of upper middle-class kids move to New York, work in the Fact-Checking department at The New Yorker, yearn to be novelists, develop drug habits, and meet shallow people, but why do they all feel the need to write about it? A wise television writer once told me, the only thing more boring than hearing someone's drug stories or drug addiction drama is listening to someone describe their dreams.

3) Most biographical films are only as interesting as the protagonist's life. Rudy is a mildly entertaining film, but you can't help walk away thinking, this guy gave his whole life just so he could play the last two inconsequential minutes of a Notre Dame game?!? What's more pathetic than the main character, plotting, dialogue, and general themes of Bright Lights, Big City the film is that a man named Jay McInerney actually lived this life and also lacked the common decency to avoid making his story into a bad semi-autobiographical novel and motion picture.

4) This film is worth watching just for a scene of a fake ferret attacking Alex P. Keaton and a drunken Jason Robards.

5) Eerily, this film might as well have been made in New York 2006. The only difference is that people in clubs don't dance to M/A/R/R/S "Pump up the Volume" quite as much.

Posted by marxy at January 29, 2006 12:06 AM
Comments

After reading this post I was doing an IMDB search for this movie and I accidentally found the inevitable wordplay:

Posted by: Sameer at January 29, 2006 6:44 AM

only 4.8 stars?

Posted by: Chris_B at January 29, 2006 3:46 PM

The novel is actually not that bad (I don't know the film), and McInerney went on to write other, even better books.

Posted by: der at January 29, 2006 7:14 PM

i have a little tenderness for mcinerney, too (my favorite post 80s coke-snorting novelist, if you will). "brightness falls" is a touching little book.

Posted by: odot at January 29, 2006 9:04 PM

I can't find the Nostalgia Calculator. I can only conclude that this site is a massive hoax.

Posted by: craig at January 29, 2006 10:52 PM

craig: if your system is pre 10.4 look in the Utilities folder, I think it was inlcuded in the 10.3.8 cluster update

Posted by: Chris_B at January 30, 2006 12:17 AM

Speaking of hoaxes, can we have a follow up to the Densha Otoko exposé in which you prove that the new Saiyuki drama *isn't really* based on a true story? Or is. Either way.

Posted by: Carl at January 30, 2006 10:56 PM

McInerney's follow-up novel, Ransom, was set in Kyoto's gaijin community--pretty terrible stuff.

Posted by: amida at January 31, 2006 12:53 PM

I hope Karl Taro Greenfield used Jay McInerney's example to option his own heroin addiction, knowing that it would make fascinating reading!

Posted by: marxy at January 31, 2006 1:01 PM