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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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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.