Boogie Nights / YMMV

Award Snub: The film went relatively unnoticed outside of commendations for Burt Reynolds (ironic, given how much Burt disliked working on the film), Julianne Moore, and the Screenplay. Many now cite Moore's loss for Best Supporting Actress as an unfortunate Academy Award decision. Perhaps even more mind-boggling is the film not getting nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Cinematography or Editing.
Awesome Music: Several, but Rahad Jackson getting high to "Sister Christian" and "Jesse's Girl" is by far the best.
Best Known for the Fanservice: Even amongst the copious nudity in the movie, Heather Graham's nude scene and Mark Wahlberg's fake wang stand out. Both induced a lot of sucking noises in theatres.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Reed Rothchild, who's basically Dr. Steve Brule if he worked in the porn industry.
Harsher in Hindsight: A deleted scene shows Becky dealing with an abusive husband who’s played by Michael Jace, who in real life ended up shooting his wife April in 2014.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Thomas Jane running around with a gun, blasting everything in sight. Sound familiar? And then getting blown away by Doc Ock.
- The song^note performed by Mark Wahlberg, now that he's the human lead in a Transformers film.
- Film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel had differing opinions on this film when they reviewed it on their television show Siskel & Ebert. Ebert praised the film, naming it one of his favorite films of 1997. Siskel, while praising the film's excellence, was more critical, feeling that it lacked substance and failing to find anything meaningful behind the story. Flash forward fifteen years later. Ebert gave a review of Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master that was, more or less, identical to the review that Siskel gave for Boogie Nights, praising the film's craftsmanship, but failing to find any larger meaning behind it.
- Robert Downey Sr. has a brief but memorable cameo as a recording studio manager who holds Dirk and Reed's tapes hostage after they record them. The film also stars Don Cheadle, who would become the sidekick of Downey's son in the Iron Man films about a decade later.
- A key subplot of the film is Amber's difficulties in acting as a mother to her child due to her profession and her lifestyle. Her next major project was The Big Lebowski, a film in which she plays an artist with a very tense relationship with her much-younger stepmother, due to her profession... as a porn star. And for bonus points, after the numerous scenes in this film lampooning the general poor quality of acting and direction in pornography while the characters take it completely seriously, the later film includes a scene where she plays the Dude a snippet of her mother's work and thoroughly dismisses it ("The story's ludicrous.")
Informed Ability: Heather Graham is pretty shaky for someone who supposedly spends her entire life on Roller Skates.
Jerkass Woobie: All the main characters spend a little time being this, but Little Bill is probably the prime example. It helps that he's played by William H. Macy.
- Eventually, Little Bill becomes Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
- For that matter, the dude who got badly beaten up by Jack and Rollergirl. Would be an Asshole Victim had the beatdown not been so disproportionately brutal.
One-Scene Wonder: Alfred Molina as Rahad Jackson, though Anderson said he intended for the part to be larger.
Padding: Anderson freely admits in the commentary that he treated the film as "a present to myself," and left in several scenes that don't add much to the story simply because he liked them.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: We're supposed to sympathize with Amber Waves (Maggie) when she does not get custody of her son, and the scene of her sobbing outside the courtroom is a tearjerker. But we learn absolutely nothing about her ex-husband, who for all we know may be a wonderful father. And even though Amber's career choice should not be a factor in judging her fitness for motherhood, she is a heavy drug user and lives in a house with Jack, who frequently throws drug-fueled parties with all kinds of strangers.
- Alternatively, we are supposed to sympathize with her desire to be reunited with her son and recognize that she does, on some level, want to be a good mother, while simultaneously acknowledging that she nevertheless should not have custody over a child.
Values Resonance: One of the major themes of the movie, how the rise of videotape changed the industry from something where creators could at least try to tell a story along with the sex, to where you just cranked out product quickly and cheaply, is similar in many ways to how the internet changed the way the business worked. The rise of sites with lots of free videos, many of them just uploaded personal sex tapes, further reduced the ability of performers to make a living as they try to compete with an ocean of free clips. This has become more apparent in the late 2010's and early 2020's, in which porn has become far more accessible and far easier to find online, but also has become a hot topic among Moral Guardians and people who believe it's an inauthentic depiction of sex.

YMMV / Boogie Nights

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