Quentin Tarantino names the “only flaw” in Paul Thomas Anderson movie ‘Boogie Nights’
Though many believe Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film to be 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Quentin Tarantino thinks otherwise and has previously stated that Anderson’s masterpiece is his 1997 comedy-drama Boogie Nights, which details the pornographic film industry between the 1970s and 1980s.
The project stars Mark Wahlberg as Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler, a young dishwasher who becomes one of porn’s biggest stars, as well as Julianna Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, as well as several other high-profile actors. While Tarantino adores Anderson’s film, that doesn’t stop him from pointing out some of its problems.
It all comes down to Burt Reynolds’ character, the porn director Jack Horner. “I think Burt Reynolds is fantastic in the movie,” Tarantino once said. “Me and Paul have talked about this, though. I think actually think that there’s a slight flaw in Boogie Nights, and the flaw in Boogie Nights is the perception of the Burt Reynolds character.”
“Paul can say he’s not based on the director Gerard Damiano, who directed Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat. He is. He obviously is,” Tarantino continued. “He looks exactly like him, and Gerard Damiano has a very unique look. Burt Reynolds doesn’t look like him, so you have to go out of your way to make him look like Gerard Damiano.”
Tarantino believes that even if Anderson denies it, Burt Reynolds’ character is intended to be the famous adult filmmaker, and that’s largely where he thinks that Boogie Nights suffers. Because Damiano was indeed an acclaimed artist in his field, the kind of films Jack Horner makes are not quite up to scratch.
“Here’s my problem with the film, though,” Tarantino went on. “My problem is when he makes the cop movie, the porno cop movie, and he’s killing himself doing it, and then you see the film – the film looks like a piece of shit. It looks horrible.” The film Tarantino is referring to comes later in Anderson’s movie, and though it’s a hilarious moment, it’s easy to see where Tarantino is coming from in terms of its quality.
Tarantino went on to admit that he’s seen a lot of porn movies from working in an adult theatre when he was younger, so he understands the difference in quality. He raised an issue with one of Burt Reynolds’ lines in Boogie Nights, where watching the cop porn film, he says, “This is my greatest work yet”.
“Gerard Damiano was a better director than that. Gerard Damiano’s better footage looked drastically better than that cop crap,” Tarantino said, driving the point home. “He was a good enough filmmaker to know the difference between, ‘This is the best movie I’ve ever done’ and ‘This one has a little bit of story’. It’s a cheap line because that character would know that that work is not the best he could possibly do.”
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