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I love this movie so much

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Look, I'm a guy. I like guy sh*t. I actually happen to like guys more than just hanging out with them, but beyond liking having sex with guys, I'm pretty much a guy's guy. This movie made me HATE guys. Hate men. Hate every simpering, punchable character who was male. From someone who likes guys (both sexually and platonically), and for a movie full of (at the time) very cute, talented male actors, this movie worked very hard to make me LOATHE each and every one of them. Moreover, I really liked the females. I sympathized with them. From Steve Guttenberg's mother who didn't want to make her piece of sh*t son a sandwich, to Ellen Barkin, who was stuck with an idiot as*hole who didn't want her touching his records and actually conned his good friend to fake seduce his own wife (WTF?), to the girl that Guttenberg finally married (and why the F**K any girl would marry a bag of SH*T that makes her pass an inane test about football is beyond me). This is incredible. Barry Levinson - who was shockingly (or maybe not so shockingly) nominated for an Oscar for this drivel - should be more than ashamed, he should be flogged publicly. All he managed to do was make me want to eviscerate and choke the life out of every male character in this movie. I'm serious. If the flick ended in a bloodbath with the women killing every man painfully, I would be cheering!

I have seen a heck of a lot of bad movies in my day. Most of the ones I would qualify as being "the worst" fall into that MANOS/PLAN 9 variety of really crappy B-movies that no one in their right mind would find enjoyable, except in a so-bad-it's-good vein. DINER is a different story. So many people find it "funny" and "charming", with even the great Siskel and Ebert calling it one of 1982's best films. Why? WHY? This film has absolutely nothing to offer anyone, yet it is so beloved. It's not incompetent or repulsive, I suppose, but in all my years as a film buff I have yet to see another film this boring. Say what you want about Ed Wood, but at least his schlock keeps you awake. While watching DINER I had to fight to keep my eyes open. This film has no laughs, no charms, no characters I cared about, no insights into life, no interesting technical merits, no quotable dialogue, nothing I could possibly recommend it on. And to make it even worse, people LIKE it. I've actually heard it compared to George Lucas' coming-of-age classic American GRAFFITI, which is one of the biggest insults to American GRAFFITI one can give. DINER should be avoided at all costs, unless you are looking for a cure for your insomnia.

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.

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.