Mason M
The Last Picture show is supposed to be a depressing and dramatic film, and it does that. But that doesn't make it very enjoyable to watch.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
09/24/24
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Thomas P
A profoundly sad experience
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
07/22/24
Full Review
Jim R
[Thanks for the removal of all my formatting. Appreciated]
It is shamelessly undeniable for this fantastic classic:
Sex is the main theme of this film. It's not a thread running through a beautiful period-piece. It is the thread.
Every character is driven by it, for one purpose or another. Each person has (or reminisces about) a sexual conquest at some point in the film. It is, overall, a study of how sex is used differently by different people in different stations of their lives. Love is never the driving force to sex for the main characters. It's never intimacy. It's never the culmination a logical progression of a relationship. The closest to 'love' that is experienced by anyone we meet (except for a fine reminiscence of one of the characters who is past-his-prime) is youthful-infatuation.
Just as Kubrick would eventually attempt to "elevate" the universally academically-ridiculed horror movie with The Shining, Bogdanovich, in 1971 brings an incredible artistry to characters in pursuit of exactly the same thing as will eventually be hysterically exploited in Porky's. The pursuit of sex. Sophisticate critics elevate what are, at best, minor themes, or declare as a theme microscopic aspects at worst. Anything to avoid the obvious. Reviewers overwhelmingly characterize everything as 'bleak' about the town. But 'bleak' is a subjective matter -- and owing to the characters from this very small Texas town's range of experience, they don't find it bleak, at all. Should the viewer? To them, what they have seems to be enough, such that the fortunes of the High School Football Team is the shared experience from a typical Autumn Friday night in Texas. ("Do they teach you tackling?" is expressed in no less than four separate encounters with attendees the next day). Convening in the town recreation space for dancing -- they all seem to be enjoying themselves quite a bit. They do not seem to be shaking their collective fists as the lousy hand life has dealt them. And no one runs the town down.
The central character, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) is destined to merely 'be there'. All his friends, family and relationships (except with Ben Johnson -- we'll get to him) buzz around, scheming, planning, searching, while he takes any measure of good occurrences and bad without getting terribly high or low. Unless it is truly fortunate or tragic. For most of the people in his orbit, everything is either euphoric or catastrophic. He maintains an even, but not the least bit uninteresting keel. He naturally has his enthusiasms and dreads which blend in with his more dramatic friends. As the plot moves forward through the 12-months of the year, little-by-little, people and familiar things move away from him, metaphorically, but mostly literally. It is almost as if he is the personification of the town itself. He, like the town, is never much moved too far off his/its mooring.
The other characters are exquisite. Each one grounded in what they are and seemingly unashamed of their limitations, even if they don't overtly acknowledge their limitations at all. He, like the town, knows everyone and they know him. (It's almost charming when one of his hidden secrets is revealed to him to be 'old news' to the rest of the town. It's a small town -- of course everyone knows.)
The texture of the film is mostly the country-western chestnuts which emanate from whichever radio, phonograph player, etc. in the room or space of the scene. It is this town's soundtrack and places the viewer in that time and place better than all the dress and set pieces. And you'd better get used to it. It's also important. Every song is about love, lust, loss or longing as the movie's characters seek (or seek refuge from) one or more of these aspects of their current relationship.
The best character in the film is Sam The Lion (Ben Johnson). As well-grounded in who he is and who he isn't and has the finest perspective on a life lived and a home he is caretaker of as any character in any film. Like the lead, he maintains his moorings as everyone else plots, schemes or just floats around for the purpose of being anywhere other than where they call home. In fact, for almost every central character, "home" is only a place to be trapped in. A place to be anywhere else than.
But, back to the sex. None of it is romanticized or enticing. Nor is it comical. It is rarely anything except awkward. Which is the point. The viewer is a voyeur for acts which were never meant to be watched. It is the motivation of each person engaged which the viewer is supposed to consider. The viewer is left to perhaps ask "Was I ever like that?" or better "Thank GOD I was never like that!". But for the people in town, it is THE thing which, for each one of them, is what in life is to be pursued -- because sex is the prize -- or merely a means to one.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
06/19/24
Full Review
KB B
I watched this about 30 yrs ago and wasn't impressed and am still not impressed. It had many weird, boring scenes about desperate, hopeless under developed characters thrown together. I need more of a plot than this to care for a movie. I don't understand the glowing reviews.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
04/03/24
Full Review
Danton M
From the desolation of the opening scenes to the hopelessness of the closing scene, The Last Picture Show creates the atmosphere of a time long past. Set in 1951, it still speaks to the efforts of people of all ages to accept or escape their dead-end surroundings. Powerful, memorable, nearly perfect.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/09/24
Full Review
john e
I watched "The Last Picture Show" for the first time this evening and was looking forward to seeing this movie that had won so many awards and received overwhelmingly positive critical reviews.
I'm very familiar with the writer Larry McMurtry - his "Lonesome Dove "novel and my favorite Western movie/mini series Lonesome Dove. - outstanding! The LD novel and TV miniseries had real, believable characters in rough times, nothing sugar coated there are prostitute/whores, gamblers, rapists, savage half White Indians, but there is an overwhelming sense of honor, friendship, family and respect for Nature.
Peter Bogdodovitch's "Paper Moon" is one of my favorite movies set in a bleak place dust bowl Kansas during the Depression - but this movie also had characters of great love and effection - a father daughter pair who absolutely loved each other, though as in Lonesome Dove the father- daughter, father son admission was denied for a very long time
I read the reviews of "The Last Picture" show and I understood this film would have a lot of depression and bleakness in a dying Texas down, but I expected the same warmth and good characters the audience could identify and root for. Instead I found probably the most negative, evil presentation of an American town, it's people and extremely sick, hateful, perverted depiction of their lives I have ever seen in any American movie. These people's lives have nothing redeeming about them - everything is about perverted unsatisfying sex designed only to demean the people involve. Truly sick and hateful. I also felt that the extremely beautiful young actress Cybil Shepherd was presented in almost a rape and way as it was starting to be done that way in "Taxi Driver".
This movie was sick and extremely hateful, I don't think I could stand to be in the same room with it's hateful director Peter Bogdanovich without quickly starting a fist fight. I note that Peter Bogdanovich was directly involved in the exploitation and violent death of a similar beautiful actress Dorthy Stratton and I sense that Peter Bogdanovich had similar sexual views of our prettiest young girls, young woman as another talented but sick and hateful director Roman Polanski.
I guess this movie when it came out in ~ 1971 was considered very "artsy" and gritty real like another Academy Award winning movie about sexual and spiritual American degradation "Midnight Cowboy".
Sigh
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
08/28/23
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