Bright Lights, Big City

1 9 8 8 (USA)

You are a painfully dated 1984 novel by Jay McInerney. You are about the coke-fuelled nightlife of emotionally dead New York  fact checkers. You inspire an embarrassingly moronic 1988 movie starring Michael J Fox (You can at least be thankful you are not Doc Hollywood!).  You are written in the rare and annoying second-person present narrative form.

Fox comes of age in this grim descent into yuppie hell. As a nice country boy hypnotized by the glitter of the Big Apple, he experiences life in the fast lane, sweats bullets, falls in with the cocaine crowd, and almost self-destructs. 

While his life fails apart, Kiefer Sutherland, as his coke-sniffing pal, Dianne Wiest, as his dying mother, and Jason Robards, as his pickled boss, all lend excellent support, but it's a newly matured Mr. Fox who makes this movie seem like Oz photographed through the bottom of a double vodka martini.