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Wednesday Movie - The Last Picture Show

It’s 1951, and love is in the air. Love of all kinds, whether it’s smooching-in-the-back-of-the-theatre love, feel-ups-in-the-front-seat-of-your-shitty-pickup love, hook-ups-on-the-pool-table-with-your-mom’s-boyfriend love, or sexiest of all, boning-Cloris-Leachman-in-a-creaky-old-person’s-bed love (which I like to think of as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’). Welcome to Anarene, Texas.

The Last Picture Show follows a year in the life of a few small town folk, particularly a group of teens in their senior year. The main players are: Sonny, an innocent-faced, directionless kid played by Timothy Bottoms (who—imdb tells me—plays Dubya more than any other character these days); his volatile friend Duane (Jeff Bridges); and Jacy, the school hottie and Duane’s girlfriend at the onset (played by an especially nubile Cybil Sheppard).

It’s a movie about tedium, and the cruelty that comes as a result of it. Jacy leaves Duane to move on to other men that aren’t necessarily better or more promising so much as just different; Sonny starts a lengthy affair with the basketball coach’s wife, but then he all but forgets about her when Jacy makes an advance on him—these are the day-to-day cruelties that they visit upon one another. They aren’t cruel hearted people, just self absorbed. And they all want sex… although once they get it, they’re not quite sure what to do with it—other than lay back and think of Texas. The movie is overtly sexual but not at all sexy.

The adults are in no better a state—they’re in dead end jobs, or in loveless marriages, or pining for loves that got away. They don’t offer a great deal of hope, and what little promise of it there is evaporates after the death of Sam the Lion, a prosperous businessman and the town patriarch. From then on, the town’s depression gets worse, businesses begin to close, and the kids take on adult lives that were an inevitability.

Not a feel good one, this one, but it’s part of the pantheon of seventies movies that critics consider Hollywood’s golden age. The movie is credited with being one of the first American films to be frank about sexuality, for depicting it not stylishly or glamorously but in a matter of fact manner.

Comments

Anonymous said…
So, does that mean it's a documentary?
You know, a movie that I could learn things from in a very efficient manner?
Anonymous said…
Not to do with the post, per se, but...

Although you do have superior mental math skills, I am better THAN you at using the correct form of the words "Then" and "Than". :)
Anonymous said…
But can you grow a beard?
Dave said…
Jorge: If your goal is to have awkward missionary sex without ever looking at or speaking to your partner, then yes, consider this a how-to.

Sarah: Quick! Eight times twelve! No, put the pen down.
Anonymous said…
96, smart guy!

For shame! Mr. Rowe would be appalled if I forgotten how to multiply in my head!
Anonymous said…
although I clearly can't spell check...I'D forgotten...
Anonymous said…
SELF BURN!
Jay said…
I can multiply in my head, but only in french. I count money in french too, and tell time.

Also, if a movie doesn't have strippers in it, it's not for me.
Anonymous said…
Factoid about Jay: She only kisses in French, too!

Sweet...

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