Boyhood (2014)
Directed by Richard Linklater
The film tells a story of a divorced couple trying to raise their young son. The story follows the boy for twelve years, from first grade at age 6 through 12th grade at age 17-18, and examines his relationship with his parents as he grows.
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What critics say influenced Boyhood
The result is a fascinating exercise in fictive filmmaking, one that cannot help but be compared to the seminal Seven Up! documentaries directed by Paul Almond and Michael Apted.
When a character brandishes a jumbo bottle of fizzy drink, it feels almost perverse for it to be Sprite when that beverage is so similar to another that shares its name with the film’s main antecedent – the British television documentaries, still ongoing, which began with Seven Up! in 1964.
Not merely the story of a boy coming of agethough rest assured that this ranks alongside 1959's "The 400 Blows," 1985's " Smooth Talk ," and 1986's "Stand by Me" as a new apex of the "coming-of-age" subgenrethe film just as emphatically encapsulates what it is like to be a sibling, a parent, a teenager and a grown-up.
Not merely the story of a boy coming of agethough rest assured that this ranks alongside 1959's "The 400 Blows," 1985's " Smooth Talk ," and 1986's "Stand by Me" as a new apex of the "coming-of-age" subgenrethe film just as emphatically encapsulates what it is like to be a sibling, a parent, a teenager and a grown-up.
Coming of age stories usually fall into the spectrum of nostalgia ( Stand By Me , The Tree of Life ), yet Boyhood is a 21st century tale, where post 9/11 politics play just as much a part as the stellar soundtrack (a speciality of Linklater’s) that mark the passing of time as much as the aging, maturing faces of the cast.
Earlier, Francois Truffaut introduced actor Jean-Pierre Leaud in the semiautobiographical role of Antoine Doinel in "The 400 Blows" in 1959, and they made four more Doinel films together across the next 20 years.
Boyhood feels unprecedented in its intimacy; the process is quietly radical (with a hat tip to François Truffaut’s 20-year Antoine Doinel series that began with The 400 Blows in 1959), but the unassuming script even more so.
Among the very few notable exceptions is François Truffaut’s 1959 The 400 Blows , which focused on the restless 14-year-old Antoine Doinel, and grew into a five-film series spanning 20 years, all starring Jean-Pierre Léaud; it’s available in the Criterion DVD set The Adventures of Antoine Doinel.
Not merely the story of a boy coming of agethough rest assured that this ranks alongside 1959's "The 400 Blows," 1985's "…
This joyous, authentic gem already seems destined to take its place amongst such seminal works as The 400 Blows, Kes and Pather Panchali as one of the greatest-ever films about childhood.
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This method does have a screen precedent of sorts: With his Up series, Michael Apted has been filming the same group of people every seven years since he first began the project in 1970 (the most widely seen of the bunch was probably 1991's 35 Up, and the series is now up to 56 Up, released in 2012).
This method does have a screen precedent of sorts: With his Up series, Michael Apted has been filming the same group of people every seven years since he first began the project in 1970 (the most widely seen of the bunch was probably 1991's 35 Up, and the series is now up to 56 Up, released in 2012).
“Boyhood” is like a fictional feature film version of the dazzling “56 Up” documentaries about British schoolkids, with the singular focus on a boy that could well be Richard Linklater: The Next Generation.
There have been inevitable comparisons with Michael Apted’s superb Up series, in which he has followed the lives of 14 British schoolchildren since 1964, starting at age seven and revisiting them every seven years (56 Up was released in 2012).
The titles tell the subjects’ ages: The most recent of the eight films to date was 2012’s “56 Up.”
He has met with them every 7 years since and the most recent instalment in his documentary series, 56 Up, was released back in 2012.
“Boyhood” is something else again, almost a combination of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” and Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” but translated into Linklater’s Texas-Zen aesthetic and the world of the 21st-century American family.
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At its best moments (many of them involving Hawke), Boyhood reminded me of the great Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, about the highest compliment I can deliver, who made several sweeping epics that focused on family, youth and urban society, the best-known of which is his final film Yi Yi , which also leaned on some melodramatic twists in its enrapturing portrait of a middle-class family.
The pinnacle of its dazzled subjectivity happens when young Mason and a group of kids, all dressed in homage to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter , line up to receive copies of the newly published Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince .
Some years later, the kids are lining up at midnight to buy “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
In contrast to the professor and the Iraq War veteran Olivia marries next, Mason Sr. turns out to be a lovable companion father, taking them to purchase Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and treating them to an Astros baseball game.
Pop music and culture moments serve as markers: Lorelei’s sassy impersonation of Britney Spears’s 2000 hit Oops! … I Did It Again; a 2005 night-time trek to buy the first copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; the Nintendos and iPods and speculation about the future of Star Wars.
Linklater introduces “time markers” into the movie so you sort of know where you are in time: The young boy, named Mason after his dad, lines up in costume one midnight to purchase “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
There are ball games and bowling, notes passed in class, the resentment of having to move, the awkward feeling of facing classmates after a bad haircut, the thrill of attending a long-anticipated event (in this case, the 2005 midnight book-release party for "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"), the fear that goes along with being trapped in the middle of unhealthy adult relationships, and the pubescent excitement of talking to the opposite sex.