Boogie Nights (1997)
You knew this would be here. For about the first half of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful second film, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg, in his best role) finds a chosen family under the tutelage of adult filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Jack’s partner Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and rising starlet Rollergirl (Heather Graham) even have kind of a mother-daughter dynamic.
But as drugs and video take hold, Dirk descends into darker and darker stuff, and it quickly becomes apparent that the romanticized good times of the ’70s aren’t sustainable in the ’80s. Lots of people would love to live Dirk’s high-flying ’70s life, but no one would want his wretched existence in the ’80s.
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