Slacker Review
Slacker ***
Richard Linklater, 1991
Okay, so I claimed that this was maybe my favorite movie ever. I suppose, given my hierarchy of pleasures, that means it must be formally adventurous, featuring characters who are at once transgressive yet sympathetic and marginalized in some way or another. Probably someone smokes in it and it evokes a location indirectly but powerfully. Near preposterous yet clearly rooted in a reality that is essentially our own. The answer, if that's indeed a question, is yes. I could probably do this kind of survey more comprehensively, but that can wait for another day.
Clerks is often mentioned as a direct result of this project, and as much as I love that movie, it seems almost insignificantly minor in comparison. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by the hundred-plus actors who share screen time almost evenly. Then again, I'm probably at the right age to absorb this as I'm supposed to, perhaps a little more cynically than some. Charles asked me, not because he watched the film, if I fantasized about becoming a slacker. I don't and never really did while watching the movie. My fascination with the social scene portrayed here is not one of infatuation but one of aggrieved empathy. At the same time that I recognize the same frustration with society in almost every way, their lifestyle doesn't seem to me to be any sort of valid option. Partly this is because Austin or anywhere like it has seen skyrocketing housing costs in the fifteen years since this was released by a major studio. Linklater paid $133/month, bills and utilities included, at the time he was making this. Admittedly there's been a little inflation since then, but even so, places like this have been gentrified, I would expect in no small part by the formerly impoverished students who lived there and have now done well for themselves, Linklater himself being an improbable but perhaps representative example. Actually, Andrew O'Hehir has a very personal essay-cum-book review on Salon about the disappearance of this exact culture, though in San Francisco and Chicago rather than Austin.
Ultimately it's not the conspiracy theorists or the jerks or the circus freaks or the criminals or any of those people who get me, but the two old men, the anarchist more than the wistful microphone holder. "It's taken my entire life, but I can now say that I've practically given up on not only my own people, but on mankind in its entirety. I can only address myself to singular human beings now."
Richard Linklater, 1991
Okay, so I claimed that this was maybe my favorite movie ever. I suppose, given my hierarchy of pleasures, that means it must be formally adventurous, featuring characters who are at once transgressive yet sympathetic and marginalized in some way or another. Probably someone smokes in it and it evokes a location indirectly but powerfully. Near preposterous yet clearly rooted in a reality that is essentially our own. The answer, if that's indeed a question, is yes. I could probably do this kind of survey more comprehensively, but that can wait for another day.
Clerks is often mentioned as a direct result of this project, and as much as I love that movie, it seems almost insignificantly minor in comparison. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by the hundred-plus actors who share screen time almost evenly. Then again, I'm probably at the right age to absorb this as I'm supposed to, perhaps a little more cynically than some. Charles asked me, not because he watched the film, if I fantasized about becoming a slacker. I don't and never really did while watching the movie. My fascination with the social scene portrayed here is not one of infatuation but one of aggrieved empathy. At the same time that I recognize the same frustration with society in almost every way, their lifestyle doesn't seem to me to be any sort of valid option. Partly this is because Austin or anywhere like it has seen skyrocketing housing costs in the fifteen years since this was released by a major studio. Linklater paid $133/month, bills and utilities included, at the time he was making this. Admittedly there's been a little inflation since then, but even so, places like this have been gentrified, I would expect in no small part by the formerly impoverished students who lived there and have now done well for themselves, Linklater himself being an improbable but perhaps representative example. Actually, Andrew O'Hehir has a very personal essay-cum-book review on Salon about the disappearance of this exact culture, though in San Francisco and Chicago rather than Austin.
Ultimately it's not the conspiracy theorists or the jerks or the circus freaks or the criminals or any of those people who get me, but the two old men, the anarchist more than the wistful microphone holder. "It's taken my entire life, but I can now say that I've practically given up on not only my own people, but on mankind in its entirety. I can only address myself to singular human beings now."
Labels: Film
Posted on Monday, February 20, 2006
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