Texasville
Summer, 1984: 30 years after Duane captained the high school football team and Jacy was homecoming queen, this Texas town near Wichita Falls prepares for its centennial. Oil prices are down, banks are failing, and Duane's $12 million in debt. His wife Karla drinks too much, his children are always in trouble, and he tom-cats around with the wives of friends. Jacy's back in town, after a mildly successful acting career, life in Italy, and the death of her son. Folks assume Duane and Jacy will resume their high school romance. And Sonny is "tired in his mind," causing worries for his safety. Can these friends find equilibrium in middle age?
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- Cast:
- Jeff Bridges , Cybill Shepherd , Annie Potts , Randy Quaid , Cloris Leachman , Timothy Bottoms , William McNamara
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Reviews
I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
The acting in this movie is really good.
Unless you saw Peter Bogdanovich's classic The Last Picture Show, if you even start at the beginning of Texasville you'll feel like you've walked in on the film in the middle and have to catch up. I'm not sure the film is capable of standing on its feet so to speak.Anarene, Texas in The Last Picture Show is about the passing away of the old values that gave Texas the culture it has, the small town looks like it's about to shrivel and blow away like a tumbleweed as that film ended. But in the intervening thirty years, the town seems to have experienced a renaissance due to oil and the high prices it commands for energy. If you remember in Urban Cowboy, John Travolta leaves home and hearth in a place that looks like Anarene for a job in the Houston petrochemical industry which was booming in 1980.But if you also remember between those years the OPEC nations let loose a glut of oil on the world market which drove the price down worldwide. The bank that Jeff Bridges is now the head of is caught in a nice financial squeeze investing in some wells locally that better produce and soon. Sad to say that's another historical point that might even get lost on an audience 25 years later.Still of the half a dozen or so cast members who repeated their roles from The Last Picture Show in Texasville, materially Bridges has made out the best. But he's also got a wife in Annie Potts who's bored with the marriage, half a dozen kids, including William McNamara who's having sex with half the women in the town. Just a chip off the old block. Bridges facing financial ruin just about caps things off for the Jackson family.Cybill Shepherd the teen dream queen of the Fifties went to Europe and became an actress, but whose marriage to a continental fizzled and a son died. Rich and somewhat dissipated, she's just back to her roots.Timothy Bottoms the other half of the running backs from the high school with Bridges has not done really well. He owns a greasy spoon eatery and he's getting by. But he's struck with a mysterious malady which could be anything from a brain tumor to early onset Alzheimer's. We never really find out in Texasville.Texasville has ambitions to be a character study like Long Day's Journey Into Night and these people are interesting though not the same league as the Tyrone family. But the film, interesting in spots though it is, relies too much on its roots from The Last Picture Show to stand on its own.
This is one of my favorite movies, because it brings me smack dab back to my four years of college in Houston. I can understand people who haven't lived in Texas thinking this movie is poor or nonsensical. I'm not even sure what it is about it, that so perfectly captures what I love about Texas and Texans, but I'll try...First off the Dairy Queen! You have to have at least driven through a big swathe of TX to realize that every small town has a DQ, and its often more of a town nerve center than City Hall. In some places I think it IS the City Hall. That's a delicious inside joke.Let's see...making a hobby of sitting in the hot tub, drinking vodka and shooting up the dog house. "Our steaks are in the deep freeze...we'd all be so drunk by the time they thawed out, no tellin' who'd get shot!" Lester getting suicidal, then springing himself from "the quiet room" to go help look for the old man that fell out of the car, when he tried to spit out his tobacco.Um, four people and a dog driving in a pickup truck. Voluntarily. (OK two of them were the tweeny twins, but still.) I don't know about all of the sleeping around, but all of the moving around (Karla and kids at Jacy's, Jacy at Karla and Duane's, Mary Lou and Jacy taking road trips with Duane just for the hell of it)...so many of the native Texans I've known are restless to the point of ADD.And just the wacky, emphatic but heartfelt attitude, Karla more than any of them. As others have noted, Annie Potts darn near steals the entire movie. But I thought the whole cast did well.
Although I like Annie Potts, I think she was miscast, even though she did a good job as Karla. Karla should have been a tall, Texas blonde-type. Annie got Karla's personality down, but after the book, a petite brunette just didn't fit the bill. Overall, though--Texasville was a disappointment. Movies are rarely as good as books--this I realize--but Texasville was a huge disappointment. Part of it was the period made--the late 80's and early 90's produced few good films. And Texasville, to me, felt more like an average sitcom than a movie.To return again to the book vs movie them--I do believe a great movie can be made from a great book, especially most of Larry McMurtry's. Lonesome Dove was superb, as of course was The Last Picture Show. Perhaps the problem was that Texasville is funny, as opposed to heavy, like Picture Show. And funny is harder to do without being sitcom-like. Texasville seemed to me to be lacking balance (as a picture--the book was plenty balanced).
With the exception of Timothy Bottoms and Cloris Leachman, and the addition of Annie Potts, the acting fell far short of its predecessor, The Last Picture Show. I felt as if fading legends returned for one last curtain call, leaning upon greying memories of better times rather than reaching in and dusting off their talents. Bottoms and Leachman were, again, superb. Quaid was immediately tiresome.Another note: the sound (not soundtrack) left something to be desired - many scenes had background levels that over-rode the centerpiece of attention. I watched it twice and still was distracted by it. Reviewing the Soundman's credits (over 300 items), I was unable to discern if this film was a fluke or if it was his trademark - because none of the listed items had I ever had the inclination to watch. So, overall, this is a 3 of 10, unless you catch it for Bottoms, Leachman and Potts.. then an 8.