Posted on 07/25/2026 2:27:47 PM PDT by Twotone
Barry Levinson's 1982 film Diner is set in Baltimore at the end of 1959, in the final days of what had been a momentous year, and just before what would be a pivotal decade. The year had begun with the success of the Cuban revolution and its recognition by both the US and Soviet governments, and Barry Gordy's founding of Motown. Pope John XXIII announced the Second Vatican Council and Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa.
Later in the year China abolished the Tibetan government and replaced the Dalai Lama, NASA introduced the first seven Mercury astronauts, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue and Hawaii was made the 50th state. Nikita Khrushchev was invited to tour the United States by President Eisenhower and, later that same month, met with Mao Zedong in Beijing. The Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City, the Clutter family were murdered by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith in Kansas, Ben Hur topped that year's box office and Bell Labs invented the MOSFET transistor.
But none of these events are mentioned in Levinson's film, which concerns itself entirely with a half dozen young men, brought together by the democratizing machinery of the American public school, barely a few years past graduation and living in a holding pattern on the threshold of real adulthood. For a period picture set during the lives of the culturally dominant baby boomer generation, it's remarkably free of nostalgia; its focus is on these six friends, and Levinson could have swapped the cars, clothes and music with that of any point in time ten or even twenty years on either side of 1959.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
One of the favorite movies of my friends and me when we were in college. We even recreated the Diner wedding picture for our yearbook.
Really!
I actually have a family connection with this movie. My uncle was one of this group of friends. He passed in 2021 (he was living in Oregon) & I ended up being responsible for his final affairs. I mailed his cremated remains back to a couple of the guys who were still in Baltimore. I was told that they wanted to spread his ashes at their favorite haunts.
The plot of ‘Diner’ is shared with that of ‘Hollywood Knights’ starring Robert Wuhl. I am a film aficionado. I am a busy guy but I try to watch 12 to 15 hours of films a day.
The scene with the records I can totally relate to.
I would spend hours organizing my record collection.
Barry Gordy?
Marking.
Poor proof reading.
Saw it only once, when it came out in the theater. I was living in Pennsylvania. The last scene with Mickey Rourke really stuck in my memory. Years later, when I chanced to drive past the horse farms in the countryside north of Baltimore, it sprang to mind. That, and the scene with the records really registered. The rest just seemed like normal life in the 80s. Now, of course, it’s museum-quality anthropology.
That’s quite the connection.
You might also be interested in Tony, the upcoming Anthony Bourdain film. It's not the sort of thing that I would ordinarily watch based on general genre preferences and careless assumptions, but since attending some local film festivals, I suddenly started getting invitations to free early screenings of upcoming movies.
I try to get to half a dozen or more a year, just to keep my "cinephile and potential influencer" status current with whoever makes those lists. Tony is one that I would never have seen otherwise ... and it was a complete surprise.
About 20 minutes into the movie, I was thinking that young Anthony, a completely boring, pretentious, fraud of a human being -- a "Vasser Man" in 1973, if I may appeal to crude prejudices (and no offense to any Vasser Men lurking on FR) -- should have just committed suicide 40 years earlier and saved us all the tedium of another feckless and directionless manboy.
Then he gets a most unexpected wakeup call and stumbles his way to a complete change of life. Once that is set in motion, a lot of the film is hilarious, and all of it packs a punch. Antonio Banderas is superb and should get some serious awards attention.
Tony will be release August 21. Murphy's Law now rules the streaming ecosystem; if a movie is of interest to you, there is a very high probability that it will stream on a platform you don't subscribe to, and you will have forgotten all about it by the time it pops up on Tubi. Just one more way that streaming is destroying the ecosystem that used to support good movies. As always, take a chance now and then and see some movies in theaters.
My rule of thumb is that the background scenery must be as much a "character" in the movie as are the speaking parts. Then it's imperative to see it on the big screen!
I only caught a few episodes of the Bourdain culinary show, and he seemed pretty decadent to me (and died a repellently decadent death). But one of his episodes really moved me— he went someplace down in Appalachia and hung out with some good ole boys, went shooting with them, cooked squirrel and other country game, sat around having a great time as Southerners do. It seemed so incongruous from his usual schtick, and yet he seemed to be sincerely enjoying and respecting his hosts. Wish I still had the link. It was some years ago.
I was only vaguely aware of who Anthony Bourdain was and only went to the movie because I was offered a free early screening, whereupon I checked some reviews, read some good things, and noted several very solid actors, so I took a chance that it had some merit.
I had only associated Bourdain with the travel writer who did the foodie-around-the-world gig. I hadn’t realized that he had started as an aspiring writer at Vasser ... and that while he may have finished as a writer, he spent 27 years in between doing useful work in kitchens. He took up the foodie trek thing as a retirement gig.
Some of the decadence is foreshadowed. Some of that was Bourdain’s own proclivities, but some of it was apparently tied into the odd subcultures that exist in the cooking world. In the movie, we only see his coming of age summer, at the end of which he enrolls in the Culinary Institute of America. But the foreshadowing is there.
I was chatting with a neighbor about the movie. The neighbor happened to have taken an interest in Bourdain — it might be an overstatement to call him a fan, as he’s more a backyard grill kind of guy — but he had read Bourdain’s autobiographical book, which I gather was a big success. That must have been gratifying, given his youthful literary ambitions. But my neighbor assured me that Bourdain was ruthlessly critical of the decadent weakling he had been before taking up a real job.
It also seems clear that Bourdain never outgrew some things that he should never have started in the first place. We dump on the toxic underside of Hollywood with great regularity on FR, but the movies are only one domain with some extraordinarily destructive subcultures.
Levinson made other films about Baltimore. They make something like a trilogy — Diner, Avalon, Liberty Heights — but Diner is the best. It had a life and energy of its own.
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