june-sasser With this kind of talent at his disposal, Bogdonovitch obviously was not even trying to make a great picture here. This is like a really bad 1980's television sitcom about rednecks. It's like Dan Jenkins but without the humor. The Last Picture Show is in my top 10 of all time. I tried to watch this again after 20 years went by to see if it was me. It wasn't me, Bogdonovitch,it was you. When Sheppard sticks her head out of the water and starts talking, I was out of there.

bkoganbing 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.

claude_beaudine Would the Peter Bogdanovich who make The Last Picutre Show have made this? I don't think so. It scored a high dull rating. Maybe Peter should have got a script writer in, or taken some early advice. Peter had the cast, the location, the talent, so, how come this film came into its dullness. The last ten minutes gave a taste for what the film should have been. Mostly focusing on Jeff Bridges was pointless, he did his best strut, but that ain't enough to carry any film. This film is classifed as comedy, um, someone must be laughing at us for spending money to watch this.

J_Knox Texasville is easily one of my favorite movies of all time because it doesn't go down the easy road, trying to please everyone, by being the same movie as Last Picture Show was. However, after having seen both Picture Show and Texasville back to back I noticed how surprisingly similar in context and theme they are. Both are about sad adults who look longingly onto the younger generation, all the while committing adultery as a way of recapturing their youth. I love both Picture Show and Texasville equally; but have a soft spot for Texasville because I was 11 during the timeframe shown in the movie, and 17 when it came out in 1990 so it is a bit more relevant to me. Also the dark humor helps make the film more enjoyable for those hot summer nights when the urge hits me to see it.I've never thought of Texasville as fiction, more as cinematic fact. It's about as close to real life as you'll get without living it yourself. It was one of the first films I saw in a theatre as a cinema "connoisseur" and it'd be a shame to let it fade into obscurity. I highly recommend it to anyone reading this, a true minor masterpiece