Everybody Wants To Be Dazed and Confused

I finally caught this one, the most recent film by Richard Linklater.  His most famous project would be “Boyhood”, a film he took 14-something years to make allowing the actors to actually grow, which was remarkable.

Now that I’ve seen “Slacker” through “Everybody Wants Some” I can comment on the majority of his films – certainly the most high profile and popular.

Good

A Scanner Darkly.   Fantastic rotoscope, killer cast (Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder) but much of the credit has to go to Philip K. Dick for providing the essential plot.  It’s clear to me that Linklater is a big PKD fan – as I am – but I’ll give him credit for doing justice to this story.

School of Rock.  Jack Black teaches private school students how to play heavy metal.   I share Black’s musical tastes and probably give them a pass for this reason alone.

Dazed and Confused.   The first film which put him on the map.  Ben Affleck and Matthew McConnaughey are here, but at the time they were nobodies.   Excellent soundtrack.  Basically it’s a day in the life of a bunch of high schools students in the middle 1970s, leading up a night of shit happening.

Bad

Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight.   Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet in Vienna (Sunrise), then Paris (Sunset), then Greece (Midnight).  They simply TALK for the entire films.  It’s boring AND pretentious.

Slacker & It’s Impossible To Learn to Plow By Reading Books.  The first two.   Highly pretentious stream of consciousness crap.  

Waking Life.   Similar, but uses the rotoscope effect from “A Scanner Darkly”.  But this time he didn’t have an excellent PKD story, he simply strung together a series of unrelated sketches which are basically people bullshitting.  Guess what – Ethan Hawke is here.

Tape.   Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard talk and argue in a motel room.  The highlight is UT’s character pretend to narc on EH’s character (a drug dealer), inducing the latter to flush his stash down the toilet.

In Between

Boyhood.   A remarkable gimmick, but aside from that the film is pretty boring.  The Oscar is won by a gimmick.  There you go.  Ethan Hawke’s character originally drives a GTO.

Everybody Wants Some.  A de facto sequel to “D&C” even if no characters or actors remain the same.  It takes place at some south Texas college in 1980.  A bunch of baseball players hang out, drink, smoke dope, and eventually play some baseball.  Almost all of them are complete assholes, which gets tiresome immediately.  Like “D&C” it has a killer soundtrack but a less than compelling story.

Fast Food Nation.  Interesting story and a quasi-documentary, better than “Supersize Me”, with which I get it confused. 

Bad News Bears.  Competent remake of the 1976 Walter Matthau film, with Billy Bob Thornton as Matthau’s character.

Overall I’d say he has a terrible habit of making extremely pretentious films.   If I were running a totalitarian dictatorship and this guy was mine to order around and execute if he didn’t do as he was told, I’d have him simply make PKD stories into movies with killer soundtracks.  That or a bullet to the head.