movie backdrop

over 3 years ago

The Last Picture Show

a review by Peter McGinn

I must have watched this movie a few years after it came out, but I had no specific memory of it, no feeling of deja vu of having seen a scene before. It is a good film in many ways, certainly achieving its apparent goal of portraying a bleak landscape of a dying town.

The dialogue, which I notice since I write novels that feature a lot of dialogue, is excellent, just what you expect from Larry McMurtry. The acting is solid, though a little dreamy and perhaps overdone in places. I like how the camera focuses on faces at times even when nothing is being said.

Because there are so many young men and women characters, there is a lot of sex and obsession about sex. That is the intended audience, I imagine, the young and young at heart.

I liked the imagery I saw in the life blood of a town symbolically blowing away gradually in the ever-present wind. For that reason I wish there had been a tad less sex and more of a focus on the social aspects of a town fading away, taking the dreams of the young with it. But I suppose that would be a different film aimed at a different audience.