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Last Picture Show on TCM

OWLVIS

By OWLVIS
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Texzilla58

Texzilla58 4732

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Blood Simple. Honeysuckle Rose i forgot. Ain’t a great movie but Slim Pickens is awesome, and Hank Cochran singing Make the World Go Away and Willie’s concert scenes made me want to get back to Texas during my exile periods. Junior Bonner was an underrated Steve McQueen movie. I agree with Fandango and ND40 and No Country.

State Fair with Pat Boone is maybe the worst Texas movie.


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ztejas

ztejas 43411

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This has diverted into a discussion about Texas movies instead of talking about The Last Picture Show and I'm culpable myself.

I had never seen it and bookmarked it to watch ASAP when I saw the thread and just did. 

 

That's a pretty damn good movie. This especially - one of the best things I've seen in any film (like - ever - this is just stupendous):

Some of it is meh and there's some ham handed scenes. Sonny acts circles around Duane. Maybe partially because Bridges doesn't seem to nail the Texas roughneck very well. The plot is a bit heavy on everyone sleeping with each other, gets a little messy, and the strongest element kicks it halfway through. Randy Quaid is a funny cameo in hindsight. 

Overall it's a solid flick set in Texas. I don't think it touches No Country nor even comments on the state as much necessarily. But thanks for the rec and thread @OWLVIS

(And obviously Jacy Farrow is a hot little slutty piece of ass that deserves everything coming to her and then some. Sounds like she went to SMU, too. Damn. Oh shit - did I say all of that out loud?)

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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2 hours ago, ztejas said:

This has diverted into a discussion about Texas movies instead of talking about The Last Picture Show and I'm culpable myself.

I had never seen it and bookmarked it to watch ASAP when I saw the thread and just did. 

 

That's a pretty damn good movie. This especially - one of the best things I've seen in any film (like - ever - this is just stupendous):

Some of it is meh and there's some ham handed scenes. Sonny acts circles around Duane. Maybe partially because Bridges doesn't seem to nail the Texas roughneck very well. The plot is a bit heavy on everyone sleeping with each other, gets a little messy, and the strongest element kicks it halfway through. Randy Quaid is a funny cameo in hindsight. 

Overall it's a solid flick set in Texas. I don't think it touches No Country nor even comments on the state as much necessarily. But thanks for the rec and thread @OWLVIS

(And obviously Jacy Farrow is a hot little slutty piece of ass that deserves everything coming to her and then some. Sounds like she went to SMU, too. Damn. Oh shit - did I say all of that out loud?)

It is a damned good movie, even with the flaws.

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ztejas

ztejas 43411

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35 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

It is a damned good movie, even with the flaws.

Agreed. I thoroughly enjoyed it and at times it displays a pretty rare level of filmmaking - I just wish it was a bit more consistent and focused.

For me, it's a step below No Country - which I watched again as soon as I finished LPS. I think I finally, truly, fully understood No Country this time around which was probably my 4th viewing but maybe just my 2nd or 3rd where I was fairly sober and attentive the whole time. Not only is that film set in Texas - it is extremely reflective of a lot of characterizations of the state that may or may not be misconstrued (personally I think they're pretty fair) and for me - objectively - it's just a straight up better movie. 

If someone stopped me on the street and said "Hi - I'm not a total mouth breathing idiot and as such I'm intelligent enough to digest complicated movies - yet I know very little about your great state of Texas" I'd tell them to watch No Country ten times/10. LPS wouldn't be a bad double feature after that. 

(I mean... it features Tommy Lee Jones AND Woody Harrelson - both in hilariously Texan roles. C'mon...)

Edited by ztejas
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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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7 minutes ago, RPM said:

LPS & NCFOM are both snapshots of time in Texas. You can shoehorn Lone Star inbetween.

And you have to look at a film in the era when it was made.  There are lots of great old flicks I dig that don't have the production quality, acting style, or more natural/ real dialog, etc. They're still great flicks.   

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phdhorn

phdhorn 6224

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LPS is a decent enough movie (B+) but it's really not necessarily a Texas movie.  The story lines about emptiness, rites of passage into adulthood, and the heavy weight of nothingness and desloation could apply to almost any small town in the middle of the U.S., and even to a degree a common urban trope (even Panic in Needle Park parallels many of the hopeless directions in LPS).  I don't think it's a gripping story as much as one you just kind of view as an outsider, it's hard to not just feel like an observer of "that stuff over there."

LPS has two things going for it.. it does a reasonably good job of not insisting on itself purely as "Texas" (i.e. stereotyping).  It barely manages to stay above water on such tropes as the old, creaky pool hall, overstuffed accents, and the like.  The other thing to me is Cloris Leachman.  Her character was brilliantly written as a "bird in a cage" underemoted but internally extremely pent-up Housewife in Nowhere.  Often sex stories are just directionless pap, entertaining without much depth.  But her character might be the only one in the move that you go beyond observing and actually feel the motivations for her seemingly flippant and reckless behavior.  In almost all of her scenes there is a two-fold tension; first that you're never quite sure hubby won't be coming in (the entire subplot is rife with that kind of sub-terrestrial boiling tension, and second, that her desperate attempt to find something good in life is drawn out so beautifully that such an easy-to-stereotype thing as 'the high school kid and the MILF' comes off as completely understandable.  And of course she plays it magnificently - deserved the Oscar.

Beyond that, I don't really think it's a definitive statement of Texas as much as it is in the Industrial Fifties, where small towns from Minnesota to New Mexico and back were dying out with the huge, massive migration to cities from small, agriculturally-driven towns.  It's just Texas' contribution to the very uniform norm of many states.

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77horn

77horn 216

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CSBs--

#1: The rich kid in Wichita Falls was based on a real person, Bobby Burns.  My mother went to high school with him.  His mother was locally famous for her Christmas display.  To this day, that display is put up on the grounds of Midwestern State University.  His wife killed him and then shot herself.

#2:  I was in HS in Wichita Falls when the movie came out.  It stirred up a controversy among residents for portraying sex, especially with the schoolteacher.  One of my friends looked at me with a very serious and disgusted face and said, "It's a lie."  I looked at him and said, "John, it's fiction."

#3:  The actor who played the preacher's son, was a local kid named Barc Doyle.  I went to high school with him, but as he was a couple of years older, I didn't really know him.

 

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31440

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2 hours ago, 77horn said:

CSBs--

#1: The rich kid in Wichita Falls was based on a real person, Bobby Burns.  My mother went to high school with him.  His mother was locally famous for her Christmas display.  To this day, that display is put up on the grounds of Midwestern State University.  His wife killed him and then shot herself.

#2:  I was in HS in Wichita Falls when the movie came out.  It stirred up a controversy among residents for portraying sex, especially with the schoolteacher.  One of my friends looked at me with a very serious and disgusted face and said, "It's a lie."  I looked at him and said, "John, it's fiction."

#3:  The actor who played the preacher's son, was a local kid named Barc Doyle.  I went to high school with him, but as he was a couple of years older, I didn't really know him.

 

Bobby's uncle is my uncle.  Which I guess makes Bobby my cousin.  But the brothers were somewhat estranged, despite both living in Wichita Falls, in part because they were 15 years apart.  My "actual" cousin, with whom I have always been close, has always had kind of a special place for LPS and Archer City.

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Texzilla58

Texzilla58 4732

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Urban Cowboy is the most Texas movie I can think of but that’s from the view of someone not born in Texas.

I agree it’s a very good snapshot of Texas in that specific period. I was in college in Memphis and lots of folks wanted to go to Houston after graduating.
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The Original Greaser Bob

The Original Greaser Bob 2822

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My votes:

Best movie for reminding you of the Texas you may have experienced when you were tiny and everything seemed kind of mythological and scary. (Mine was Bracketville circa 60s)  - Last Picture Show

Best movie for reminding you of your big Texas suburban public school - Dazed and Confused

Best movie for capturing how time flies in Texas where you go to school and then need to get a job and get married and raise children who go off to school. - Boyhood

Best all around Texas movie  - Lone Star

 

Edited by The Original Greaser Bob
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futureman

futureman 22444

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10 hours ago, ztejas said:

Agreed. I thoroughly enjoyed it and at times it displays a pretty rare level of filmmaking - I just wish it was a bit more consistent and focused.

For me, it's a step below No Country - which I watched again as soon as I finished LPS. I think I finally, truly, fully understood No Country this time around which was probably my 4th viewing but maybe just my 2nd or 3rd where I was fairly sober and attentive the whole time. Not only is that film set in Texas - it is extremely reflective of a lot of characterizations of the state that may or may not be misconstrued (personally I think they're pretty fair) and for me - objectively - it's just a straight up better movie. 

If someone stopped me on the street and said "Hi - I'm not a total mouth breathing idiot and as such I'm intelligent enough to digest complicated movies - yet I know very little about your great state of Texas" I'd tell them to watch No Country ten times/10. LPS wouldn't be a bad double feature after that. 

(I mean... it features Tommy Lee Jones AND Woody Harrelson - both in hilariously Texan roles. C'mon...)

have you seen Lone Star?

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