![]() And there’s a good reason for that: The soundtrack is a K-Tel bonanza of hits from the likes of Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, and Foghat the script is loaded with quotable one-liners, many coming from future stars of tomorrow and the loose-limbed narrative, only slightly more taxing than Slacker’s, allows for a casual drifting of attention, leading to nothing more consequential than a quarterback asserting his right to hang with his burnout friends and score Aerosmith tickets in the morning. When viewers did finally catch up with Dazed And Confused on video-and about half a billion different psychedelic-themed DVD special editions-it became a stoner classic, the ideal background noise for parties and joint-passing sessions. More than 20 years later, Linklater remains in Austin doing just that.Īfter Slacker became a minor indie phenomenon, the upstart distributor Gramercy Pictures gave Linklater the resources to make 1993’s Dazed And Confused, a bittersweet nostalgia piece about the last day (and night) of school in 1976 small-town Texas, but it couldn’t find an audience for it. The eclecticism that defines his career comes through in the glorious final sequence, when the film breaks down and follows local kids who just pick up the camera and have fun experimenting with it. (“It gets closer to the rock god herself than just a poster.”) If there’s a common thread uniting this daisy chain of vignettes, it’s an overall sense of profound disconnection, a refusal by young people to participate in a system that will bring them no joy and wither their souls. To outsiders, that refusal looks like laziness-the slackerdom of the title-but it’s the type of political statement that some of Linklater’s subsequent films deliver with more obvious conviction. ![]() Starting with Linklater’s own delightful existential ramble to an airport cab driver en route to downtown, Slacker follows the musings-some absurd, some profound-of a JFK conspiracy-theorist, an anti-government paranoiac, and, in its funniest and most famous scene, a young woman hawking Madonna’s pap smear on the street. But it also changed people’s conception of what a movie could be, asking them to coast along on an amiable roundelay without the need for dramatic stakes. ![]() With an ironic title that hit the sweet spot for conceptions (and misconceptions) about Generation X, the film confirmed, post- Sex, Lies, And Videotape, that an audience existed for low-budget American fare. Linklater 101 When Richard Linklater’s Slacker was released in 1991, there was barely any apparatus in place for independent film, much less a formless slice of life about fringe-dwellers, crackpots, dreamers, and self-made philosophers in Austin, Texas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |