Texasville

Considering that the book this was based on was not very interesting, I didn’t have high hopes, and I was right. It’s pretty bad. Which is a shame, as Peter Bogdanovich accomplished something that’s pretty rare by getting all the major cast members from The Last Picture Show back together, almost twenty years later. (Both Ben Johnson and the character he played were dead.) The problem is that all these people who were so interesting when they were just getting out of high school are now just middle-aged schlubs and I have no interest in them whatever. Duane has gotten rich in the oil business, but the price of crude has plummeted and he now owes twelve million dollars. He doesn’t seem to care, and neither do I. He’s married to the only interesting character in the movie, Annie Potts, and they have three children, all of whom should have been drowned at birth. They’re all bored, and what is worse, boring. They meander through life having affairs that are even more boring than they are, and there are so many characters who are not developed very well that I had little idea who was fucking whom, and didn’t care, anyway. They all gather every day at the Dairy Queen and the Kwik-Sak and get caught up on everyone else’s affairs. Poor Sonny is losing his mind, sitting in the ruins of the Royal picture show and watching movies only he can see. Filming this in black and white, like the original, might have helped; at least it might have given the movie some atmosphere, but nothing could really have saved it, as Larry McMurtry wrote a boring novel about silly, shallow people. The movie lumbers along for two hours, and at the end Duane’s kids break into an egg truck and there is a big egg fight that I guess was supposed to be comical, but is just dreary. The whole scene reeks of desperation. In my review of The Last Picture Show I said that Anarene was not actually Hell. Twenty years later, it is.