"The Last Picture Show" (1971), Peter Bogdanovich

A few pointers about this known masterpiece. Bogdanovich goes back twenty years from the seventies and maintains his typical documentary feel. This time he shows one year in the life of high school seniors in Abilene, a small Texan town in the middle of nowhere. Music is diegetic, silence and boredom only broken by rampant promiscuity and the movies screened in a small cinema. The end of movies is the end of the world for somebody like Bogdanovich, a guy that expressed a couple of years before that all the good ones were already made. Time jumps are plentiful and keep the misery moving along, personal stories depend on fortunes made, forty-somethings feel ancient and just want to kneel and die. Actors are wonderful, all of them, especially the main trio (Bottoms, Bridges, Sheperd). The strange thing is that we seem to have gone backwards in many areas (the ubiquity and representation of real-life sex and romance being one), but now we have unlimited entertainment content in every smartphone. I wonder how's life now in today's Abilenes.