Cheap Bright Lights Big City (Video) (Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland) (James Bridges) Price

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Customer Reviews of Bright Lights Big City

His best performance since Marty McFly!
Up until today, I didn't even know this movie existed. I went to the store looking at the great DVD deals and MGM had this great deal going buy one of their flicks get another one free, so I picked this and The Fog Special Edition as my choices (I got two others, but that's not important). What first attracted me was the fact that Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phoebe Cates were all in the same movie. That is quite a package in and of itself. I am a big big fan of Fox, and a new fan of Kiefer Sutherland after "Phone Booth" and "24". Phoebe Cates, well you can understand why if you saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Anyway, the whole reason why I gave the movie only four stars is because I don't like seeing drug content in movies, and the drug content was a major role in the movie, and seeing Marty McFly doing cocaine is not something I'm used to seeing in a movie. But other than that small, yet big in my eyes, complaint here is my overall opinion of the movie:

All three actors do a great job (not as good a job for Phoebe because she wasn't in the movie as much as I hoped, and her character was heartless) This movie is worth the ten dollars that I paid and is worth however much [the website] or anyone else sells it.

Overall grade: 9.5/10

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Not terrible; worth it for Fox
Over the space of three years, the reviled triumvirate of hot young (no longer young, these days) '80s New York novelists - Tama Janowitz ("Slaves of New York"), Bret Easton Ellis ("Less Than Zero"), and Jay McInerney ("Bright Lights, Big City") - watched Hollywood turn their books into tepid movies. This adaptation is probably the best of the three, due to a strong lead performance by Michael J. Fox as protagonist Jamie Conway and a lively supporting cast. The movie has an exciting title sequence, featuring a great-looking female bartender with a shaved head, but swiftly loses energy from there. The book was a vague celebration of the nouveau sex-and-drugs scene, with an undercurrent of yearning for simplicity and wholesomeness; the movie, made smack dab in the middle of the Just Say No era, fails to establish what would lure people like Jamie, who now seems to get high solely to blot out the pain of his mother's death and being dumped by Phoebe Cates. (At times the movie is like an '80s remix of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar.")

The coke-snorting, promiscuous Jamie was a stretch for the amiable Fox (remember, at that point he was best known as Alex P. Keaton and Marty McFly; the following year he would make "Casualties of War" and discover that moviegoers preferred him in comedy). He gives the film whatever core of feeling it has. But the coldness of the images (Gordon Willis shot this as if he were still working on "The Godfather") numbs us to his plight. We don't know whether to take Jamie's flailings as desperate comedy or as drama, and McInerney's own script is no help. The novel, written in ironic second-person present tense, like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book for jaded teens (it begins, "You are not the kind of person who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning"), didn't exactly cry out for film adaptation in the first place. The movie is inoffensive but pointless. Two stars, upgraded to three for Fox and the cool '80s soundtrack featuring Donald Fagen, Bryan Ferry, Prince, New Order, Depeche Mode, and others.

BOTTOM LINE: For $10, Fox fans can't go too far wrong.

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no widescreen, that's just scandalous
I am honestly shocked that MGM released this DVD with NO WIDESCREEN OPTION. I did not realize this was the case until the DVD arrived here at my apartment and I noticed on the back of the box it said, "Modified to fit your screen." ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?! I didn't just do a double take, i did like a 15 take; 'total disbelief' is the only way to describe my reaction.

Bright Lights Big City is a CLASSIC era film that helped define the '80s, one of the most culturally important decades in the history of the U.S. This film deserves a special release DVD, not some two-bit 'modified to fit your television' joke of a release.

This 'modified to fit your television' release is a slap in the face to all fans of Bright Lights Big City, the '80s, Michael Jay Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, or any of the the cast and crew of this film. Do not buy this dvd, for protest alone if for no other reason. If you really need to see it then go rent it instead.

Now I can't decide whether or not to return this joke of a 'DVD' and order the UK release which actually has a Widescreen option. I guess MGM just likes to spit in the face of North America. Be very wary of any DVD releases produced by MGM -- they obviously have no respect for the films or the format.