Little Ronny Howard

A few weeks ago, I went to another film in the Flashback movie series running on the giant screen over at Denver's Continental theater. This time, I went with Shocho and his LWC to see American Graffiti, which I had never before seen. (Yes, talking about this nearly three weeks after the fact is odd, but I figure as a movie review, I'm already actually about 35 years late.)

As it turned out, I'm very glad that I went out to see this in a theater with people who loved the movie, because I don't think I would have enjoyed it much at all just sitting and watching it alone on DVD. It has somewhat interesting characters, and makes good use of its all-takes-place-on-one-night narrative conceit. But it has some flaws too, chiefly a thin plot made even thinner as it splits off into four separate character arcs that really don't interact at all through the movie.

It was a little interesting to me (though I suppose not surprising) to learn that the 2 LP soundtrack of this movie I'd listened to so much as a kid was simply a faithful presentation of all the songs in the movie, in the exact order they appear in the movie. In my head, I'm almost thinking, "that's where side 2 begins... that's where you got to put on the second record..."

In fact, that soundtrack is one of several ways in which American Graffiti is a movie that could not possibly be made today. No one would ever be able to secure the rights to a lineup of songs that long and varied anymore. Nor would a "nostalgia movie" be made in quite this way. The movie is all about conveying a love of life in 1962, which works much better today than I imagine it could have at the time of its release in 1973. I mean, could you imagine today going to see a movie that was all about "the nostalgia of 1996?" I don't know about you, but I'm just not missing it yet.

Of course, I'd be remiss not to mention the director, frakkin' George Lucas. With my own personal nostalgia of my youth about Star Wars long since stripped away, I was able to look at this movie and recognize that he wasn't much of a filmmaker even back then. American Graffiti has moments of the same wooden, fake-sounding dialogue that would dominate the Star Wars movies he wrote without outside script help. He displays that same uncanny ability to take actors who we know are capable of delivering great performances (in this case, Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard), and dragging them down a few notches.

Still, you just can't deny that there is some fun and liveliness to the movie, despite whatever flaws might be there. As I said, maybe it came from the crowd at the theater, but I still found I enjoyed it well enough. If you haven't seen the movie yourself, though, I'd recommend you be careful to view it in the right circumstances, should you ever catch it. Because even with things working in the movie's favor, the fact remains that I'm not an enthusiast of classic cars and I don't remember the early 1960s, so the movie couldn't really do much better than a C+ for me.