DINER (the movie)

Barry Levinson's other two movies about growing up in Baltimore, "Tin Men" and "Avalon", are also both worth seeing.

Who likes Beautiful Girls?

so OTM!! they were great in this great movie

adam i did a monologue from beautiful girls once live on stage

(Also, I apparently was taken to a local cattle call looking for the Elijah Wood role. I don't remember this, though.)

But, yeah, Diner, totally classic film. What the hell happened to Levinson recently? He just seems like he can't pick a good film for the life of him.

Blasphemy!! He's easily my all time favorite actor - I've endured some really shitty movies just because he was in them.

There's been a biography in the works for a long time, I can't wait until it's finally published.

Anyway, Diner is good, yes, but not as good as Barfly or The Pope of Greenwich Village. And I only judge Mickey Rourke movies by their Mickey Rourke-ness.

Which one?

Anyway, I think Diner kind of invented, or at least prefigured, a whole generation of sitcoms. Not just the ones that the guys in Diner were in, but most obviously Seinfeld and Friends, that whole '90s slacker jokes-and-arguments-about-nothing thing. The ensemble cast works really well. Daniel Stern ranks in the top 3 music geeks on film ever. I love Kevin Bacon in this movie ("He was punching out the wise men?"). And Ellen Barkin -- rowr. Mickey Rourke's great, yeah. It's real real good. Maybe the best thing anyone involved in it has ever done. Definitely the best thing Levinson ever did.

Italian actors typecast as jews = hilarious!

-- adam.

I just saw this, I liked it.

More?

what is another movie like this?

I suspect that half of ILX sympathizes with Daniel Stern's record organizing criteria.

I have this on DVD but never got around to watching the movie. :-(

can you believe what happened to Mickey Rourke in between this and The Wrestler? It's well documented i know but i mean.. jeez.

saw this the week it came out, cuz I knew Paul Reiser's cousin in college.

"people come from Europe"

i still believe i am otm here:

I think Diner kind of invented, or at least prefigured, a whole generation of sitcoms. Not just the ones that the guys in Diner were in, but most obviously Seinfeld and Friends, that whole '90s slacker jokes-and-arguments-about-nothing thing.

mickey rourke has knocked this movie in recent interviews :(

Never seen the other films in the "tetralogy."

I loved Tin Men as a teenager. Completely forgot about it, but would love to see it if it's out there.

you could be right Strate. and a load of other movies, like When Harry Met Sally and what have you. i love jokes-and-arguments-about-nothing movies now i come to think of it.

I had some friends over the other night and we watched it.

AND??????

I commented upthread: I love this. This and The Shop Around the Corner are holiday traditions Chez Soto. Also:

When I saw this, all I could think was how amazed I was at how great a movie with such a shitty collection of actors - Mickey Rourke, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern.

― n/a (Nick A.), Tuesday, September 21, 2004

totally OTM when I first saw it in '96.

well when I first saw it, they were all young and promising near-unknowns.

in the featurette included with the DVD, Ellen Barkin and Levinson express gratitude to Pauline Kael, whose very enthusiastic review finally got it a wide release.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/03/diner-201203

I have never bothered to watch this movie. is it worth it?

yes, it's great

It's worth $5.50.

Quickly, the cast’s offscreen dynamic began to unfold in an uncanny shadowing of Levinson’s script. Daly, so green that he didn’t know how to hit his mark, and Reiser were both film novices playing men unsure of their place. Rourke, 28 and just married, trafficked in a world-weary patter, much like his character, the gambling hairdresser Boogie. Earnest Eddie was played by the wide-eyed Guttenberg, who found himself startled by Barkin’s swearing and was soon under Mickey’s spell. “[Guttenberg] kept coming up to me,” Daly recalls, “and saying things like ‘Mickey says that if I don’t have sex or beat off the whole time, my acting will get a lot better: I’ll have this endless tension.’ I’m like, ‘You listen to this shit?’ ”

Guttenberg and Rourke would retreat to a hotel room after hours for acting workshops. Once, Guttenberg and Rourke began a mirror exercise, face-to-face, their palms pressed together. “Fucking David Keith!,” Rourke chanted until a mystified Guttenberg repeated it. “No fucking David Keith!,” Rourke yelled, and Guttenberg repeated that too, over and over, until at last Rourke roared, “He gets all my fucking parts!,” and whirled away to punch a window.

I have never bothered to watch this movie. is it worth it?

it wasn't worth it

buzzkillin anti-nostalgia Heritage.org-chart poster!

I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype

It's so worth it. Funny that Vanity Fair actually wrote a piece based on tipsy mothra's point upthread (I'm assuming now no one from here's involved in it).

What do you call that storage device found in restaurants and diners, where there's a little round platform that sinks into a round hole under the weight of a stack of clean plates and then, when you remove the plates for orders, the load gets lighter and the little platform gracefully rises up to bring the next plate to the top of the hole?

Because there's like a one-second shot of something like that in Diner and I think of those devices each time this movie is mentioned.

I don't know the name but they're awesome except when tomato water and bread slip between the cracks.

Hadn't seen this in a long time and my girlfriend had never seen it, so we watched it last night. (Was actually sort of hard to track down -- library doesn't carry it, not on any of the streaming places. I bought a used DVD online for 5 bucks.) My girlfriend did a lot of double-takes at the beginning at how young everyone was, and how cute Mickey Rourke was -- she's only seen old, scary Mickey Rourke. Halfway through, she said, "How come this movie isn't famous? It's great!" Which made me wonder whether it's famous or not -- I've always thought of it as a minor classic, but maybe it's sort of slipped from the public consciousness?

Anyway, I still loved it.

I don't know why dudes between 19-21 don't watch this together each Christmas break like everyone else watches Home Alone the week before.

bcz there are no more Baltimore Colts

Levinson movies don't seem to make it into the Heat/Godfather constant rotation on cable.

I want to read Shakey's complaints.

finds Shrevie's filing system sadly inadequate

Disappointed that Billy never got to punch that 9th guy.

makes perfect sense that Billy, the dullest of the bunch, is my crush.

i too watched this a few nights ago for the first time in years and loved it. how are avalon and liberty heights?

xpost

He is dull, but he has reservoirs of rage. He's carrying around that baseball grudge, he threatens to punch that one guy "so hard I'll kill your whole family," he gets weirdly irate and manic at the strip club. He is basically written as the straight-laced guy, but he has an edge.

You miserable creature.

I should poll the characters. I always watch this movie between Xmas and NYE.

watched this for the 50th time recently and it was my wife's first time seeing it. she was mildly horrified at a lot of it, like 'you're not supposed to identify with these guys, right? they're terrible!' -- it was hard to disagree. such a great hangout movie nonetheless, though.

yeah I mean Boog first looks like the most attentive to women and alert but it's actually shtick that's gotten him laid and still works. I love though how every character has shit he keeps from everyone else, so despite their camaraderie the most intimate parts of their lives they still won't share.

reread the Vanity Fair article from '12 and I'd no idea (a) overlapping dialogue was still considered risky in early '82 (b) Paul Reiser as catalyst scared the shit out of the actors.

some dude's wife has a dawning realization

lol i promise i've never given any "DON'T TOUCH MY RECORDS" daniel stern lectures

How 'bout that, I just now discovered this movie is the source of the sample on Double Dee and Steinski's "Jazz" (one of my favorite moments in sampling ever):

"I just want to hear the music, that's all."

"Is it too complicated to just, put my records in the category, OK? Put the R&B in with the R&B! Put the rock and roll in with the rock and roll! I mean you're not gonna put Charlie Parker in with the rock and roll, would you?"

"I don't know. Who is Charlie Parker?"

".....JAZZ!!!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXjCtgiUEu8

Holy shit, that's Daniel fucking Stern?????

Gesture. Gesture's a good word.

It's a stage musical now! Book by Levinson, songs by SHERYL CROW. Opened in Delaware last week, lukewarm at best NYT review.

"You ever get the feeling there's something going on we don't know about?"

"It’s just music. It’s not that big a deal."
Fuck you, Beth.

She knew how to piss off this young sociopath.

Beth otm

This has always been a real blank spot in my filmgoing, but I recently got around to it and enjoyed it hugely.

I was wondering, are there any other movies similar to this in setting and tone?