Dimming Over Time

Bright Lights, Big City


Jay McIerney
Based on his novel

Jamie (Michael J. Fox) is a coke-addicted magazine fact-checker who dreams of being a novelist but spends every night partying until dawn with his friend Tad (Kiefer Sutherland) at various New York clubs and lamenting the wife (Phoebe Cates) who left him. While Bright Lights, Big City was well-received in its day, the two intervening decades haven't been kind to this film. The dialogue meanders between expositional, cliché, and pointless. The non-linear story starts to drag less than 10 minutes in. Jamie's on-again, off-again second-person voiceover seems more pretentious than artistic. It's a very '80s attempt at a deep, character-driven movie, which probably spawned the current generation of shallow indie films where "character" is valued over either story or coherency. On the commentary track and featurettes, novelist-turned-screenwriter Jay McInerney (Gia) admits his story of a suffering, wannabe writer is almost entirely autobiographical, but past that it's just random reminiscing about the production, the actors, and where the film matches up with his own life, with only the faintest notes of adapting his book for the screen. Bright Lights is a perfect example of a film that may have seemed great in its time, but probably should've been left in the safe cocoon of memory and not revisited.

Bright Lights, Big City

MGM Home Entertainment
Rated R; 108 min.
$14.98

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Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.




Bright Lights, Big City courtesy MGM Home Entertainment