Slacker (1990)
Directed by Richard Linklater
Austin, Texas, is an Eden for the young and unambitious, from the enthusiastically eccentric to the dangerously apathetic. Here, the nobly lazy can eschew responsibility in favor of nursing their esoteric obsessions. The locals include a backseat philosopher who passionately expounds on his dream theories to a seemingly comatose cabbie, a young woman who tries to hawk Madonna's Pap test to anyone who will listen and a kindly old anarchist looking for recruits.
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What critics compared Slacker to
In the end Richard Linklater seems the most obvious inspiration for this lo-fi but artistically ambitious indie focusing on a group of Los Angeles skateboarders, with Hill channelling Dazed and Confused and Slacker and Kevin Smith's Clerks .
His directorial style is naturalistic, containing echoes of Larry Clark’s Kids (writer Harmony Korine makes a cameo appearance) and Richard Linklater’s Slacker ; every scene feels as if he started rolling the moment the boys showed up and started hanging out.
Shot on 16mm film with a retro 4:3 aspect ratio by Christopher Blauvelt, it’s grainy and naturalistic – a kind of cross between Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Larry Clark’s Kids , but with added profanity.
Waking Life, written and directed by Richard Linklater (Slacker) is a visionary animated film of deep play that is stylistically innovative and spiritually rich in content.
Waking Life is the breathtakingly original new film by Richard Linklater, Austin, Tex.-based director of indie classics Slacker and Dazed and Confused.
He wanders from one person and place to another (something like the camera did in Linklater's first film, " Slacker ").
Waking Life's pace parallels Linklater's debut feature, Slacker; both unfold with similar oddball characters and neo-philosophers.
Like previous Linklater movies (Slacker [1991], the Proustian Dazed and Confused [1993], Before Sunrise [1995], even the lovably wayward The Newton Boys [1998], the only one of the director's films without a time-sensitive structure), Waking Life walks a deceptively simple path.
The sense of naturalism that permeates “Boyhood” is reminiscent of Linklater’s groundbreaking 1991 debut “Slacker,” with its shaggy vibe and easygoing pace.
In its later stages, Boyhood begins to feel like a talk-heavy Linklater movie in the Slacker and Waking Life vein: Characters reveal themselves (or not) through conversational riffs.
By the time Richard Linklater embarked on his 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood project, he had a decade of well-regarded films like Slacker , Dazed And Confused , Before Sunrise , and Waking Life under his belt—and some of those movies were just as experimental.
It is the brainchild of Richard Linklater, who has played with time and form throughout his career; "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused" were day-in-the-life affairs, and his trilogy with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke took stock of a relationship over 20 years.
He rode out of Texas with “Slacker,” his unconventionally plotted—as in unplotted—indie-festival fave of 1991.
This movie is truly its own thing, as eccentrically unique as Linklater's breakthrough " Slacker ," another Austin-set feature to which "Boyhood" feels (curiously) like a companion piece, or perhaps a bookend.
RICHARD LINKLATER HAS BEEN PREOCCUPIED WITH DROPOUT CULTURE since the earliest days of his career: in the loopy Slacker (1991) and the larky Dazed and Confused (1993) he developed archetypal characters fueled by experimental lifestyles, mood- and mind-altering substances, and endless conversation.
The writer-director tends to traffic in a kind of peripheral, druggie subculture ("Slacker", "Dazed and Confused", "Waking Life") and Mr. Dick is known to have experimented with more than his fair share of substances.
The constant patter of these characters is amusing and provides lots of flavor (at times, itâs almost as if these chattering creatures have crept in from Linklaterâs Slacker rather than this cutting-edge science-fiction work), but as a whole, the film has too little character and/or plot development to sustain narrative interest.
Just as Before Sunset wondered if the idealism of Before Sunrise could have survived the passage of time, A Scanner Darkly ponders the inherent doom of Slacker transgressors.
When Richard Linklater made "Slacker" 15 years ago, he filled it with characters living in the margins of American society.
It’s a perfect fit for Linklater, in part because its focus on a group of junkies engaged in stoned, out-there conversation offers an episodic structure that recalls Slacker and Dazed and Confused.
In Days of Being Wild and Slacker, Ashes of Time and TheNewton Boys, Happy Together and Dazed and Confused, and In the Mood for Love and Before Sunrise they're especially astute observers of where and who we are in history.
With such early films as "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused," and more recently with the animated feature "Waking Life," the Austin-based director has become known for a discursive filmmaking style that favors words -- lots and lots of them -- over pictures.
Consider his surprisingly amusing "Slacker" (1991), his insightful "Dazed and Confused" (1993), followed by his tepid "Newton Boys" (1998), the pretentious and boring "Waking Life" (2001), and then the energetic and funny "School of Rock" (2003).
Romantic relationships don't get filmed any better than Richard Linklater's ("Slacker"/"Dazed and Confused"/ "Tape") Before Sunset, which is a sequel that matches in quality his wonderfully delirious 1995 Before Sunrise.
Since 1991, when his independent sleeper "Slacker" infiltrated the culture, the writer and director has yielded to a cinematic wanderlust, moving from genre to genre with varying success.
Linklater, whose early films included Slacker and Dazed and Confused as well as Before Sunrise, has always showed a fascination with personality - what makes people tick - and a willingness to trust an audience's intelligence and openness in understanding the complexity and appeal of seemingly ordinary characters.
From the antics of Slacker to the thought-provoking Me and Orson Welles, writer and director Richard Linklater has given us an unending stream of authentic independent films that take us to strange places and introduce us to colorful characters who stretch our souls and send us back to our own experiences with fresh eyes.
If Linklater's wide-ranging filmography — Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, Fast Food Nation, Me and Orson Welles — has a common denominator, it's the search for realistic personality at ground level.
Linklater, the director of movies as wide-ranging as Slacker, Waking Life, Before Sunset and Me and Orson Welles, has come up with a winning oddball of a movie.
Linklater, whose nimbleness has helped him stretch from low-budget indies ("Slacker") to mainstream Hollywood fare ("Bad News Bears"), goes back to his East Texas roots with "Bernie" - not just the subject, but the region's drawling style of storytelling.
It’s a true-crime black comedy that lets Linklater reconnect with the fondness for Texas oddballs that animated early films like “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused.”
But it's always a pleasure when he comes home to Texas, whether evoking the aimlessness of Austin alternative culture in "Slacker" or the ennui of '70s suburban Houston in "Dazed and Confused."
His low-budget indie debut Slacker defined the Cobain generation's response to the overwhelming materialistic demands wrought in school and work; his second film, Dazed and Confused, found kinship with '70s slackers who chose and who can blame them? to completely withdraw from the Watergate world into the comfort of Aerosmith-bred low expectations.
Richard Linklater (Slacker) directs this high-energy and spunky comedy which turns out to be an inspired portrait of how the enthusiasm of one person for what he does can inspire the best in those around him.
This is not to say that it isn't worth watching-it most certainly is-but for the few moviegoers who will be interested in seeing "The School of Rock" because it was made by the man responsible for gems like "Slacker" and "Waking Life", they may well find themselves walking away, as I did, with a few reservations.
Indie director Richard Linklater ("Slacker," "Dazed and Confused") may lose some street cred with this rather genre-specific picture, but he will win points with the masses (something he has not accomplished before, at least not in terms of box office grosses).
Linklater started off with Slacker, did Dazed and Confused, and precedes this as his most commercial film with his most avant garde -- Waking Life.
In the wrong hands, this movie could be awful, but White's script is sharp, and its director is Richard Linklater, deservedly revered for his first three early-'90s features: Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise.
And Richard Linklater, who has done conversation movies like the teen gem "Dazed and Confused" and "Slacker," really likes Vienna, and gives the whole land a romantic and interesting view.
After stashing their bags at the station, the two meander around the city and, initially, from the way they bump into colorful eccentrics along the way -- like the actor who plays a cow in an avant-garde theater piece -- it looks as if Linklater might simply be content to apply the same loose, free-associative style he unveiled in "Slacker" to an Old World setting -- a sort of "Slackers in Europe."
As in his previous films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused he still maintains a great attentiveness to characters and the influence of time, but with Before Sunrise his focus begins to include some larger human issues.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are a delightful couple in the witty, low-budget production "Before Sunrise," and the third effort by young filmmaker Richard Linklater ("Slacker," "Dazed and Confused") bubbles with old-fashioned cinematic romance, while still managing to stay firmly in the '90s.
Richard Linklater ("Slacker"/"Dazed And Confused") directs and writes (co-written with Kim Krizan) a brilliant two character romantic comedy.
"Before Sunrise," the newest film by the director of "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused," is filled with hope and optimism.
This is Linklater's follow-up effort to his low-budget independent feature Slacker, which put Austin on the lifestyle map and brought Linklater to the attention of studio executives.
As with "Slacker," Richard Linklater's first film, his latest low-budget, independent production, "Dazed and Confused," focuses on aimless young people in Austin Texas.
It’s clear this is from the director of “Slacker,” only without the wacky conspiracy theories and Madonna pubic hair.
Writer-director Richard Linklater's ("Slacker") second feature is a slightly above average plotless teen film filled with nostalgia that cuts both ways, showing things that were repulsive as much as some delightful lingering memories of rebellion and an innocence now lost.
Linklater, whose "Slacker" reaped similar culturally reflective success (the angst of young Americans with nothing political or life-threatening to fight for), sums up an even younger generation's absurdities, frustrations and joys.
His first picture, Slacker, made on a shoestring, earned him a lot of attention, and he somehow managed to persuade Universal Pictures to spend $6 million on his sophomore effort, Dazed and Confused, which follows a group of two dozen suburban Texas kids on the last day of high school in 1976.
Paterson at times recalls Richard Linklater’s Slacker, another story about characters casually going about their day.
With a boldness you'd never see in Dante, Smith followed the lead of Richard Linklater's homemade "Slacker" (1991) and patched together the $26,000 budget by selling his comic- book collection, maxing out his credit card cash advances and borrowing money from family.
Along with Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), which was released three years earlier, Smith’s scrappy black-and-white ode to the fears and loathings of post-collegiate misfits in a New Jersey suburb is the definitive Gen-X movie, one that rejects virtually everything that classical Hollywood stood for aesthetically and narratively: no stars, no story, and certainly no artistry, at least as that word is conventionally understood.
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Tangerine certainly owes a debt to Richard Linklater's classic Slacker, in the way it ambles around from character to character and from situation to situation.
By putting everything on the table with regard to the reality of life for modern young people, Davidson has managed to help create a movie that feels like Richard Linklater’s Slacker for a new generation.
In this respect, Garden State makes Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) look like a cavalcade of success stories.
The same kind of slightly warped Texas sophisticate humor graced "Slacker," the first film of Austin's Richard Linklater.
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From Richard Linklater's Slacker to Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, Austin is fast becoming the focal point for somewhat of a renaissance in "low-budget"; filmmaking.