Bright Lights, Big City

Plot synopsis:
The film follows one week in the life of 24-year-old Jamie Conway (Michael J. Fox). Originally from Pennsylvania, Jamie works as a fact-checker for a major New York magazine, but because he spends his nights partying with his glib best friend Tad (Kiefer Sutherland) and his frequent cocaine abuse, he's on the verge of getting fired by his boss, Clara Tillinghast (Frances Sternhagen). His wife Amanda, a fast-rising model (Phoebe Cates), just left him; he is still reeling from the death of his mother (Dianne Wiest) from cancer a year earlier; and he follows a tabloid story about a pregnant woman in a coma. The movie captures some of the glossy chaos and decadence of the New York nightlife during the 1980s, and also looks at a man desperately trying to escape the pain in his life.
After Jamie gets fired from his job, he goes on a further downward spiral with more cocaine and alcohol abuse. He attempts to go on a date with Tad's cousin Vicky (Tracy Pollan) as a favor. Jamie also avoids phone calls from his younger brother Michael (Charlie Schlatter) who has come to New York to look for him. Megan (Swoosie Kurtz) attempts to help him out with finding a new job as well as try to open up about his troubled life and the reason why Amanda left him. After a confrontation with Michael, and attending a party where Amanda is in attendance, Jamie finally decides to open up and come clean with himself before he ends up either dead or in jail. He phones Vicky and tells her that he and his brother Michael helped their dying mother commit suicide to end her suffering. Jamie refuses Tad's offer of more drugs and women to spend time with and leaves the party. Jamie wanders the streets until dawn when he decides that today will be a better day to get his life back on track.

Tags: flashback

Review:
There is a surprising appearance from the wonderful Jason Robards which, shamefully, is uncredited according to IMDb. Considering the size of his role this is kind of odd.Negatives: Phoebe Cates seemed completely unconvincing as a model and Michael J.
And that last point sums up the problems with this film: it eventually becomes apparent that the movie is trying to be taken seriously.
Fox does an admirable job in the lead role of this movie adaptation of Jay McInerey's book.
I must say this is not a bad film by any means, and has quite a bit to say about the struggles of young adults trying to "find their place" in the world.
The subject matter is not something that one would think people would flock to see, but maybe the producers thought it might be a new kind of "Breakfast Club" type film.
Who knows, but it was an interesting risk that didn't pan out, as I do not recall this being a very successful film at the box office, but I admire the attempt at bringing it to a wide audience.Some of the scenes seem a bit awkward, like the opening of the film at the former, great, NYC club, The Paladium, and the ferrit scene towards the end, and the confrontations with Pheobe Kates.
I think Michael J Fox also deserves a lot of credit for doing "Bright Lights, Bit City" because this was the height of his career and to take on such a risk and a challenging as an actor should be commended.
Willis, known for his fabulous work with dark, muted colors and characters in shadows or silhouettes, seems absolutely lost within this night-life milieu, which isn't bright and hardly seems big.
Jay McInerney adapted his own 1984 novel about a would-be writer in New York City whose job in the research department of a prominent magazine (Gotham!) is constantly threatened by his drug use, which may stem from a broken marriage and memories of his deceased mother.
Fox (whose plastic voice-over narration was probably supposed to sound hard-boiled) is too well-scrubbed and corn-fed to be convincing as a party maniac; acting disoriented by blinking his eyes heavily and tightening his thin mouth, Fox is strictly a morose good-time guy, mourning the separation from fashion model spouse Phoebe Cates.
When Fox goes out on a blind date with Tracy Pollan, we know instantly these two clean-cut kids will click on their appearance alone: they look like an upscale young couple coming home from a Republican fundraiser.
He makes Jamie the handsome, vulnerable guy who really "wouldn't be at a place like this at this time of the morning." I can't say someone else couldn't have done it better but Fox pulls it off without trying to sneek around any drama with jokes like a lot of comedy-gone-drama actors try to do.
This is one of my favourite Michael J Fox movies.
We really get to see him in a dramatic role, though I hadn't bothered with that turkey, Light Of Day. This refreshingly original film was something totally different totally for me, a hard hitting drama that plays well on screen, though it might of not had the impact, the novel intended.
An R rating slapped on, as a few were back in the day, supposedly for drug use, like Fox's bleeding nostril when he does too much coke, didn't make much sense.
We see two hot women kissing in a cubicle, when Jamie (Fox) walks in then quickly retreats, spouting a funny response of dialogue, in that great comic timing of his.
Robards was fun to watch too, and Wiest was great as always, as Fox's mother, seen in flashbacks, that we're a bit heavily laid on.
There's a major plot point toward the end of the book (which I won't mention here, not so I won't spoil the movie, but the book), that puts all that you read into perspective and makes it all worthwhile.
Instead of reading and wondering "Why is he like this?," which was one of the main reasons the book was such a page-turner, the movie tells you why he does it, and you just sit there and watch him do it, knowing why.
Me Me Me. You guys have got to be kidding---this is one of the worst movies ever made, for one simple reason: not only does Michael J.
Fox did an excellent job with tihs role and it's a movie that anybody who appreciates movies about the pitfalls of addictions and the destruction that living on the darkside can wreak would enjoy.
The movie definitely has the essential qualities for a good film with it's intelligent script, compelling drama, sober realism and superb acting.This is Michael J Fox's best role and he does a great job.
I think he's such an underrated actor, he made Family Ties what it was and will never be forgotten as Marty Mc Fly in Back to the Future, but this is his peak film.I could very much symphatise and identify with the main character that slowly loses grip on reality, eventually spending most of his time in a drugged state of mind.
My favorite scenes are the ones at work, where his incompetence becomes painfully evident.Having recently watched Requiem for a Dream (also about drug addiction), I realize this movie's even better.
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (1988) is one of my favorite movies of all time and no doubt the best Michael J Fox film ever.
The story is follows a young kid (Michael J Fox) who lives in Kansas who goes off to New York City and gets slowly into more and more trouble with Drugs.
Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, Phoebe Cates, Swoosie Kurtz, Frances Sternhagen, Dianne Wiest, Jason Robards, John Houseman, Tracey Pollan , Charlie Schlatter, Kelly Lynch, Jessica Lundy,  William Hickey, Sam Robards.
Excellent adaptation by Jay McInerney of his widely popular novel of decadence with Fox making the most of his troubled character on a bender of booze and drugs in NYC  while trying to keep his personal life under wraps unsuccessfully.
Sutherland would have been a better choice for that role and Fox the party guy..
But far away from all of this, 'BLBC' is an unique, strange opus, faithfully based in a simple but wonderful book and magistrally composed by a lot of little strange details that make it unrepeatable: from the eclectical soundtrack to the atypical actors, performances, situations and almost everything involved in this great movie, a totally underrated, underestimated and mostly misunderstood masterpiece, with no place for square heads or conventional people ready to see only what they expected.
in an all-in-one-movie but in an sophisticated, elegant way, placed in the New York of the 80's, shining like never before, but here on its decadent side, where the bad has always something beautiful, and the good something ugly, where sadness leads to laughter, and laughter is always bittersweet.
M. Fox Best movie performance..
Bright Lights, Big City is by all means not an awful film and in fact, it's actually quite interesting.
But it was interesting to watch a Kansas guy barely holding his own in a big city while struggling mightily with his inner demons.James Bridges film is about a guy named Jamie Conway who is a fact-checker for a huge New York magazine, but at nights he is a convulsive partier with a bad cocaine addiction.
He is also struggling with his past as he moved to New York to get away from anything and he is also having problems with his estranged wife who left him as her career exploded.The acting is actually pretty good.
There are some good supporting turns by Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Robards here.Overall, I dearly wanted to love this film, but I wasn't able to.
It was still interesting and a rather good watch and so I rate this film 7/10..
This movie was made along the same lines as Less than Zero which is about what I would rate this movie.Lets just say when I left the theater my thought was "There is 2 hours of my life I will never get back".Don't waste your time rent Back to the Future and enjoy a movie where Fox is entertaining not a depressed coke head..
Bright Lights, Big City is a 1988 film starring Michael J Fox as a cocaine addicted newspaper editor.The movie shows him and his friend played by Keifer Sutherland, the partying & the coke that they do together, plus some parts of the past.Apparently he does cocaine to forget about how his wife left him and how his mother died.It has been a year since this has happened.There is also some messed up part with a coma baby, which he has a dream sequence about.The acting is fairly good from Fox and Sutherland.There are some fairly powerful dramatic scenes, also one funny scene involving a ferret, also the 1980's soundtrack was fairly good as well, especially "Century's End" by Donald Fagen.But other than that, the film was fairly boring.It was realistic as a lot of business-types were doing cocaine.Movies/Video Games such as "Carlito's Way", "Grand Theft Auto Vice City" & "American Psycho" will show this.I have never read the book and only heard of the author when he was mentioned in Ellis's semi-autobiographical novel "Lunar Park".I personally thought "American Psycho"(another movie which is partly about business types in the 1980's) to be a better movie.This is a decent film, it was just sort of boring..
Bright Lights Big City A truly Amazing Movie it's now one of my favourite Movies.Bright Lights Big City is about a Jamie Conway (Michael J Fox) a writer who moves to Manhattan and gets caught in the New York scene partly because of his friend Tad (Kieer Sutherland).
But mainly because of a reason I can't say as it will spoil the Movie.The best thing about a Michael J Fox Movie is when Michael acts the character perfectly.
This movie shows the consequences of leading a self serving, indulgent lifestyle where being seen at the right place and moving on in the pursuit of glamor and 'good times' becomes life's aim, but sadly no one ever really "arrives".
Keifer Sutherland nails the character - Tad Allagash, the protagonist's rich cousin - a coke snorting hedonist who's game is to party hard and then party harder, with the constant fear of missing a good time snapping at his heels.
Fox is sympathetic as Jaime, floundering at his NY job, partying, losing his fashion model wife.Kiefer Sutherland is also appropriately narcissistic, onto the next party, next girl, next high.
Fox does not want to turn out like him, and anyone who is interested in his character may want to read the book.
If I recall correctly, the book is less than 200 pages.The theme is more realistic in the book; for example Jaime finds himself reading the New York Post; retracted to absurd sensationalism, the meaninglessness of current events, the random anonymity of his life.While some of the scenes now seem contrived, at least the disco scenes are kept to a minimum, and the story is an interesting character study of a young graduate floundering in NY.
Jamie Conway, by Michael J Fox...graduated from University and work in a magazine (50-yr history) as a french writer there.
I made the mistake to read the book Bright Lights, Big City before I saw the movie, so I was quite irritated by the fact that the screenplay was almost exactly the same as the lines from the book itself.
Kiefer Sutherland on the other hand is almost perfect as coke-addict and womanizer Tad Alligash (you could have strange thoughts of that, but I just mean Kiefer's a great actor and he plays his part very, very well.and he looks hot in a suit).
Here he's teamed up with Kiefer Sutherland, the second best-looking guy in a ruffled suit, and all seems to be set for a zany, New-York-in-the-Eighties comedy along the lines of Fox's previous The Secret Of My Succe$s.
Only that they decided to make a dire "serious" movie instead, probably to allow Fox to work beyond the comedy genre for a change.So Fox plays the young would-be writer of the Great American Novel who struggles with:*the death of his mother a year ago*being left by his model wife (meaning they're married and she works as a model -- everyone did in the Eighties) for a swanky French fashion photographer*having to work as a fact checker for a The New Yorker-type magazine instead of being recognised as a literary maven*New York City*partying too hard, taking too much coke and hanging around models with earrings the size of dinner plates too muchHere's how the story went down with me: the main character and his entourage live the affluent life of New Yorker young urban professionals that everybody dreamed about in the Eighties.
Fox just looks so damn perky and apple-cheeked all the time.Finally the ending: Jamie meets his estranged wife at a party, starts laughing hysterically, then his nose starts to bleed from doing all those lines.
So I guess its not particularly a happy-shinny outing and it isn't suppose to be, despite some periods played for laughs (namely the scenes with David Warrilow and a payback prank that gets out of hand involving a ferret), it remains powerfully confronting in its depiction.Jamie Conway finds himself wasting his days in a banally demanding job, because as an aspiring fiction writer he's completely stuck with writer's block and to make matters worse his model wife (Phoebe Cates) left him to advance her career.
This symbolic insert (where it does have one oddly surreal dream sequence) perceives the manner of how Fox's character lives in a bubble (or coma), not wanting to face or hear about reality at first despite his troubled and bitter mindset and best efforts from those who "really" care for him (especially his scenes involving his brother --- admirably performed by Charlie Schlatter).
A fitting Phoebe Cates in what small scenes she does have looks great and creates an interestingly vain character that has you totally hook to why she left Jamie.
Throughout the story Michael J Fox (Jamie) reads about a "Coma Baby" who does not want to leave the womb.
Fox's better dramatic films, in my opinion.
Fox in a serious movie, watch this..
He was real good in his poignant, compelling and touching role as a talented, successful, but troubled and misguided young man dealing with two recent major blows in his life: The death of his beloved mother (A situation I can personally relate to), and his break-up with his beautiful, talented, aspiring model wife.
OH, MAJOR SPOILER ALERT HERE, READ OVER TO END: One main point of this film that deserves true credit is that it didn't go with a truly depressing and downbeat ending; Fox's character really faced reality and decided to go on the right, better-guided path for a change.
"Bright Lights, Big City," in my humble opinion, is NO "Back to the Future," by any means, but it did it's job well with story-telling and acting.
Jason Robards in an uncredited stint as the drunken editor from down the hall did his usual excellent job.Some of the other reviewers seem to have missed the point - this is a story about a man hitting the bottom and beginning his bounce back.One of the best movies I've seen that portrays the reality facing young adults in the 80's in the USA.
Watching the movie without having read the book, I catch many of the nuances, and get at least the gist of the story being told.
Jay McInerney's story of a young man's broken life, and his struggle to become somebody, would probably have made better reading than viewing.
Fox does well with the character of Jamie Conway, making him quite believable and easy to identify with.
Support comes from Kiefer Sutherland, Phoebe Cates and Swoosie Kurtz.Ending without really resolving itself, this is no must see film, but it's worth a look.
"Bright Lights, Big City" is an unsatisfying movie about drug abuse and pain and loss that never really goes anywhere bold with its ideas and leaves you wondering, "is that all?"I was intrigued at the casting of Michael J.
Fox in the lead role, finding it hard to imagine him as a drug addict.
Sure, he uses drugs and gets fired from his job, but he never really hits "rock bottom", as anyone who has seen an addict in a movie knows he must.
I fully expected the old cliché, you know the one: an old friend of the protagonist grabs them by the ears and thrusts their face at the mirror: "Look at yourself!" We don't get there, because Fox's addict never sinks that though.For anyone who knows anything about addiction, it's hard to believe what the movie wants you to think at the end: that he really is going to clean up.
Movie characters often get hooked because they are careless and go with the flow, but does it work that way in real life?
But just as Fox never descends to the real depths of addiction, we never see enough of the pain he's trying to run from, save for one scene with the great actress Diane Wiest.In short, "Bright Lights, Big City" just isn't willing to go to the places where it could have distinguished itself.
But the worst is Fox's real-life wife Tracy Pollan.
This movie is made even richer if you've seen Fox in "The Secret Of My Success" as "Bright Lights" plays like the flip-side version in the bizarro world.In "Success" Fox can do no wrong...
in "Bright Lights" his character Jamie can do no right.
Ouch...But this is precisely what makes "Bright Lights" a good movie...
This was probably the most mature performance Fox ever gave, and the supporting cast- Sternhagen, Sutherland, John Houseman, Dianne Wiest- are superb."Bright Lights, Big City" is a brilliant snapshot of a lost soul in a lost world...