Barry Levinson's very "personal," yet very derivative, portrait of young manhood in Baltimore, 1959. The production is unstinting in its collection of period cars and haircuts and toggle-button jackets and what-have-you (and are those pink-flamingo lawn decorations a sly tribute to that other cinematic bard of Baltimore and fellow pop-culture connoisseur, John Waters?), but the problem with all these cultural signposts, beyond how familiar they are, is how jammed together they are: more like a museum storage room than a selective and spacious public exhibit. There is, in all areas, a tendency to overdo, to not know when to ease up. The entire movie, in fact, is so feverish, so TV-ish in its desire to deliver quick gratification via funny stuff or poignant stuff or scabrous stuff or any sort of stuff, that Levinson hardly seems aware when he is exaggerating. Which is most of the time. If each individual scene isn't an exaggeration (many of them are, however), the cumulative effect surely is. With Steve Guttenberg, Mickey Rourke, Daniel Stern. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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