That isn't to suggest that Linklater had failed to create a plausible scenario just that time had hardened Celine into someone with whom I could no longer sympathize or relate. I couldn't wait for the film to end so I could get away from her-a reaction Delpy has never elicited in me before. Over the years, unfortunately, Celine had become resentful of Jesse's more successful career. Ironically, Boyhood arrives only a year after Before Midnight, the rare Linklater effort to actively irritate me, which took me by surprise since I had found Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) such agreeable company in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the first films in the "Before" series. Dick's A Scanner Darkly (both films feature rotoscoping, in which he animated live-action sequences after the fact). Which made him a good choice, I thought, for a suitably tripped-out adaptation of Philip K. Two of them hated it, but I've thought a lot about lucid dreaming ever since-Linklater planted that seed in my head. It was worth the wait, and that's when I decided, "Hey! I like this guy." I even liked Waking Life, which I saw with a group of friends at the Broadway Market Cinemas (R.I.P.). I remember, for instance, waiting in a line that snaked around the Neptune just so I could see his third film, Dazed and Confused, at SIFF '94 with Linklater in attendance. Considering the length of his filmography, that's a pretty good record. "Slacker" is a movie that grants itself that freedom.Since that first disappointing experience, I've seen every film he's made, with the exception of Fast Food Nation, and I've liked most of them. In a conventional Hollywood movie, as the brain-dead characters repeat the few robotic phrases permitted them by the formulas of the screenplay, they walk down streets and sometimes I yearn to just peel away from them, cut across a lawn, walk through the wall of a house, and enter the spontaneous lives of the people living there. The movie, a hit at Sundance, touched off a 1990s renaissance in independent filmmaking and earned Linklater a cult-like. A virtually plotless tale, Slacker follows the lives of some young adult bohemians as they move through a day in their lives. The point is not really what is said, but the tone of voice, the word choices, the conversational strategies, the sense of life going on all the time, everywhere, all over town. In 1991, Linklater released his first full-length movie, Slacker, which he made for 23,000. The movie maybe runs on a little too long. He doesn't need a car chase to wrap things up. He doesn't want to go anywhere with them. In a sense, Linklater has invented his whole style in order to listen to these people. Listen to them and you will learn how things really are. They have special knowledge, occult beliefs, revolutionary health practices. We are listening in on a whole stratum of American life that never gets paid attention to in the movies - the people who believe the things they read in magazines sold in places that smell like Vitamin B. We don't get a story, but we do get a feeling. This sounds like an annoying method, but actually it's rhythmic and soothing - and funny - as Linklater moves through an apparently unlinked assortment of people, including a thief who is buttonholed by his victim and taken for a walk a man who "knows" that one of the moon astronauts saw an alien spacecraft, but his radio transmission was cut off by NASA a woman who owns a vial containing the results of an intimate medical procedure carried out on Madonna, and various folk singers, strollers, diners, sleepers, paranoids, do-gooders, quarreling couples, friends, lovers, children and conspiracy theorists. Then, outside again, we follow some passersby until they. We join the driver of this car in his flat, until he is arrested by police and charged with running down his mother. As help is called, the camera moves in a leisurely circle until it regards a rooming house just as the same hit-and-run car pulls up in front of it. He drops off his fare just as a car speeds away and some passersby find a woman hit-and-run victim in the street. Example: Early in the film, a taxi driver picks up a fare (Linklater), who hangs over the back seat and expounds at length on his theory that every time you think of a possibility, that possibility becomes a separate reality on some other level of existence. Linklater does the same thing at a speeded-up pace that allows him to carom through the slacker community of Austin, Texas, like a cue ball with a camera. Surrealist directors such as Luis Bunuel, in moves like " The Phantom of Liberty," would follow one story for a scene or so, and then - when the characters bumped into another group of people - spin off and follow them for awhile, and so on until the end of the movie. So he has borrowed an excellent technique from the surrealists and pushed it to its logical conclusion. Linklater wants to watch these people and listen to them, but he does not much want to get involved in their lives, or follow them through the mechanics of a plot.
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