You gotta love a movie that holds up.Not much needs to be said.Written and directed by Barry Levinson, nominated for Best Screenplay and set in Baltimore 1959.I'll try not to spoil anything, because if you like movies and haven't seen this gem, you must catch it soon. It's funny, poignant and has a spectacular cast.I can't get enough of Paul Reiser's character, Modell. Good Golly he's funny.Discussing the concept of evolution, Reiser speaks one of my favorite lines, "The guy who makes up this stuff it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard - people do not come from swamps. They come from Europe."This line comes from potentially the best post-movie credit sequence I've ever seen (or rather, heard). It's a philosophical comedic audio layover, a bonus diner conversation; an adequate apology for the abrupt freeze-frame ending.I love how Reiser's constantly hassling Steve Guttenberg's character for rides. They're all such close friends, Reiser manages to never actually ask for the lift, he always gets The Gute to offer.A young Mickey Rourke is almost unrecognizable in this film. And he delivers a spectacular performance.Daniel Stern's character is also great, now that I think about it. You know him from Home Alone. His character is such a well-meaning fella. When he argues with his wife over his records, you don't know who to root for, and it'll set your heart-strings aquiver.It can get dusty at times.Stern also has a great moment with Guttenberg, when he explains that getting married doesn't necessarily make life any easier.Kevin Bacon's character is, as always, excellently executed. He is like a tightly wound spring, but worth much more than first appears.The minor character who memorizes the lines from "Sweet Smell of Success," cracks me up every time he interrupts a conversation.I'm not sure if women will enjoy this film as much as men. The themes seem very masculine; they reflect the subtleties of my interactions with my male friends. I'd be interested to hear if women feel like they really connect with certain aspects of the movie.One might say Diner is misogynistic.I say, "Feh!"One could argue that the pacing is slow at the beginning, but personally, I won't do so.The only criticism I can muster is about the moment of most tension, the pinnacle of the film's conflict. It gets resolved in such a quick fashion it might make your head tilt.Otherwise, this is a spectacular film.As always, don't expect too much, and you'll be oh-so-sweetly rewarded.

Unsullied, well-acted and lively American movies by new directors with the audacity of their assurance are in danger of becoming extinct because they're either few in numbers, or threatened by changing environmental or predation parameters. They ought to be defended and preserved, not to mention valued and treasured. This naturalistically acted movie isn't extravagant or lengthy, but it's the kind of minor, truthful, enjoyable movie that should never go out of fashion, even now that the tradition of sequels and blockbusters has been thoroughly established. It's not quite seamless, yet its intermittent patchiness is part of its allure. There's an exhilaration in watching a gifted hatchling filmmaker skate on thin ice.This wistful, charismatic sleeper sounds initially like a genre movie in the always trendy Stand by Me While I Look Dazed and Confused at American Pie and/or Graffiti at Ridgemont High pattern. Like American Graffiti, or like Porky's, etc., it's set in a youth-driven bygone era marked by perpetual nostalgia, routinely revisits some favorite place and highlights young men moving toward maturity while talking relentlessly about sex, to the jingle of a ceaseless line of hit records.Yet the similitude stops there. One of the most sensitive youth accounts about the vacuum between genders, it's a lot less blithe than any of its foils. The ambiance is reverberated by the set design, which is actually rather gritty and dingy. In just one crucial scene do two characters find themselves beyond Baltimore's worn boundaries, and amidst a vast, sunlit countryside in a well-heeled hamlet. Riding horseback past them is an advantaged, beautiful girl. "You ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?" one character asks the other, and then they zip right back to the movie's dim daily backdrop.Barry Levinson, the film's writer and director, almost treads more Mean Streets-style water with such strokes, and those are actually the few scenes that seem to slightly miscarry, forthright as they are. But Levinson's sentiment for and interest in his young-at-heart characters are distinctive. And his immoderation, like theirs, is effortlessly absolved.His tribute to the fine art of screen writing is about a cluster of high-school buddies who, in 1959, are a year or two graduated, and now starting to belatedly come into their own. Shrevie has already tumbled into an early marriage with a woman with whom, he entrusts to a chum, he cannot have a meaningful exchange. Sex is no longer a god to him, but he's already melancholy for the time when it was. His wife Beth, rendered very movingly in only a few scenes in Ellen Barkin's first big-screen role, knows him so little that she cannot even fathom something as essential and imperative as how he keeps his records categorized. At the end of a lingering marital clash in which he has berated Beth about the LPs, Shrevie, intending to express his recollection for details, roars at Beth that Ain't That a Shame was playing when he first met her in 1955.Another of the boys, Eddie, is about to wed a girl whom we incessantly hear about though never see. Eddie's such a Baltimore Colts devotee that he's asserting that their colors be the theme for the wedding. He's such an anxious bridegroom that he's requiring Elyse score higher than 65 on a sports quiz of Eddie's own design. If Elyse fails, he declares, wedding's off. He's for real. What'll he do when she scores 63? The other leads are self-indulgent, ill-mannered trust-fund rebel Fenwick, who, in one remarkable private scene shows an uncannily encyclopedic intellect; persuasive charmer Boogie, who gambles on everything, counting his sex life and who works as a beautician though scores better with chicks if he tells them he's studying law, and Timothy Daly's smartly played polite, square-shooting collegian Billy, who can't convince his pregnant girlfriend to marry him. These characters are well drawn on their own individual merits, and they're played stunningly. Levinson unearthed a top-quality cast, most of them no-names but few for long.Guttenberg and Stern had previous film experience, though neither played such rich characters as Shrevie and Eddie before. Kevin Bacon, who thus far had any been teen #2 and annoying jock #1 in a handful of slasher flicks and frathouse rom-coms, makes Fenwick a remarkable fusion of indulgence and despair. Rourke gives one of the best of his many memorable performances. Low-key and crafty, his shiftless Boogie also ends up being arguably the most good-natured character, and Rourke makes his gentleness feel engaging and genuine.Levinson fluctuates the movie's temper greatly from scene to scene. Some sequences, like one at a strip club, where two of the boys get the band to play lively jazz and everyone begins bopping, are wholesome whimsy, and don't quite feel like anything else. Others, as when the group sits quarrelling over who's better between Sinatra or Mathis, have a gracefully authentic ordinariness. So does a scene in which Shrevie, who works in a TV shop, attempts to sway one patron to buy a color set, although the man claims he once saw Bonanza in color and the Ponderosa looked faked. Levinson isn't above sending his characters to see Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee at a local movie house, either. The melancholy characteristic of his material is engaged to its maximum degree.However Diner has a lot more to it than that, and it doesn't seem to aspire to the calculated dependability that other, likewise constructed movies are after. Levinson isn't simply a fuddy-dud with an affectionate or comprehensive reminiscence for his own youth. He's someone trying to grasp that era, not just to evoke it. Indeed, Diner is ultimately a film we can all understand on a universal level.

This was the debut film from director Barry Levinson (Good Morning, Vietnam; Rain Man), and it also introduced us to many then mostly unknown actors that each went on to do bigger things. Basically the film is set in Baltimore, 1959, where a group of twenty-something male high school students reunite for the wedding of one of them. The group's regular hangout and meeting spot is in the Fells Point Diner, and they are challenging their relationships as they head for adulthood. Edward 'Eddie' Simmons (Steve Guttenberg) is the one getting married, Laurence 'Shrevie' Schreiber (Daniel Stern) questions why he is married to Beth (Ellen Barkin), Robert 'Boogie' Sheftell (Mickey Rourke) is a gambler with many debts, Timothy Fenwick Jr. (Kevin Bacon) is an irresponsible drunk with attitude problems, and William 'Billy' Howard (Tim Daly, as Timothy) is in love with a woman who is pregnant but doesn't want to marry him. There is no real plot as such, it is just taking a look at each of the five group members one at a time as they struggle with whatever problems they face as they grow up. Also starring Paul Reiser as Modell, Kathryn Dowling as Barbara, Michael Tucker as Bagel and Jessica James as Mrs. Simmons. It was nominated the Academy Award for scripting, but actually the actors were mostly ad-libbing which makes it look all the more naturalistic. My favourite scene is Stern getting moody when his wife doesn't order his record collection properly, I can be like that sometimes with my DVD collection. I think the big reason to see this film is to see where big stars like Guttenberg, Rourke and Stern really had their careers kick off in the way they did, it is a good old fashioned comedy drama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for Levinson, and it was nominated the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical. It was number 57 on 100 Years, 100 Laughs. Very good!

Diner, Barry Levinson's writing and directing debut belongs to so-called "small" or "minor" movies and it indeed does not have spectacular locations, breathtaking action sequences or even dramatic story. As Kevin Bacon comments in the Behind the Scenes Documentary, "There's not that much of a story, really. What do we do? We drive around..." What the movie has is "a very honest portrayal of a group...of guys that people relate to on a very personal level." The different generations of viewers react to film with devotion and recognition, and Diner has become one of the beloved long time cult favorites. Based on its writer/director's memories of growing up in Baltimore, the film takes place during the week between Christmas and New Year in 1959, and tells of the friendship of five guys in their early twenties. During the course of the film, we will get to know the young men, their fears of growing up, facing responsibilities, and making decisions, their fascination and insecurities with the girls.From his Oscar-nominated script, BL makes the study of young men who hesitate to grow up but rather hang out in their beloved Diner. Daniel Stern's 'Shrevie' is an owner of LP collection that he seems to value more than his young and pretty wife (Ellen Barkin in her film debut). Mickey Rourke, played his best role (at least, IMO) as Boogy, the cynical womanizer with the most charming smile. Steve Guttenberg's Eddie puts his fiancée through the enormously difficult football quiz and the passing score is the must for the marriage because he is scared to get married. Kevin Bacon plays Fenwick, a permanently drunk and lost kid, the character much darker than the rest of the guys. Timothy Daly is Bill who seems to be the most successful of the bunch, and know what he wants but can't make the girl he loves to love him. By making Diner, Levinson actually put his native city, sleepy and provincial 1959 Baltimore, on the cinema map, and that's just one of movie's pleasures. And there are plenty. Diner is filled with authentic and believable scenes, situations, and conversations that everyone can relate to. The Diner's menu has a lot to offer to the grateful viewers and fans of the insightful, ironic, entertaining, small but bright and shiny gem. Barry Levinson does not flatter six protagonists but he understands them and loves them because he sees in them the indelible part of his own life, his experiences, and his own childhood friends. As another great film about childhood friendship says, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" Barry Levinson went on to create many good and very good films after Diner. These are just a few: The Natural, Good Morning, Vietnam; Bugsy; Avalon; Sleepers, An Everlasting Piece, Disclosure, Wag the Dog, and his Oscar winner "Rain Man" but Diner will always have a very special place for me. This is the film I keep coming back to again and again, and as the time passes it only gets better.