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Harling also badly handles the final 15 mins in which eight years roll by like a series of Auld Lang Synes, signaled by the successive appearance of a new scrapbook, for each year. The passage of time feels out of joint, as if several hundred pages at the end of a book needed to be raced through, and the final two scenes, which are supposed to be the culmination of the heart tugging and life goes on vibe, bring the film to a lackluster close.

Watching The Last Picture Show and Texasville back to back is a jarring experience. The former is in heartbreaking black and white, the latter in gentle color. The former is a tragedy with some comic undertones. The latter is a comedy with bittersweet overtones. The Last Picture Show is set in the small town dead-end nowheresville of Anarene, TX in 1951-1952, but is really timeless in the way it evokes not small town life per se, but the way the movies capture small town life. The lingering opening shot, where the camera tracks down an impossibly dusty road, on which whipping fall winds send dust clouds and leaves sputtering and jittering, encapsulates the claustrophobia of Anarene, but also the air of unreality, as if no place could feel so ridiculously desolate and isolated except at the movies.

Texasville is set in the summer of 1984, 30 years + from the post high-school events of the first film, with an opening radio newscast that sets the larger backdrop for the story to unfold. Without any overt or easy “80s references” and without being all that political, Bogdanovich effectively captures the economic and moral malaise that has settled in across America as Reagan and Bush hurtle towards their landslide re-election.

The film opens on the sight of a lonely satellite dish pointing off with a shrug to the skies and then slowly pans left to reveal Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), former football "star," homecoming king, and golden boy, with pistol in hand taking drunken pot shots at his dog’s absurdly oversized doghouse, from the comfort of his hot tub. Duane has a crumbling marriage, crumbled financial fortunes ($12 million in debts) and frayed family connections (he finds his teenage son is his greatest competition for the ladies in town). And this is all before his high school sweetheart, homecoming queen turned famous actress Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd) returns to town following the death of her son and parents. Texasville follows their relationship, that of Jacy’s with Duane’s wife Karla (Annie Potts), and the climate of the town in general as it prepares to celebrate it’s centennial over Labor Day.

Like many elements of the past in Texasville, the death of Jacy’s son lingers there in the air, but isn’t discussed and dissected. Texasville is ultimately about healing and moving on from the past, but I don’t want to oversell the pathos. Texasville is more frequently than not bawdy, vulgar, larger than life and, like the apple that Jacy bites into as she and Duane do an Adam and Eve skit at the centennial, pretty damn sweet.

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