RICHARD LINKLATER

Both D&C and EWS are among my comfort movies, so naturally I rescreened them after I got power back last week. The latter is terrific.

I watched EWS! last week again. It's fine.

You lopped off one of the exclamation points, though--I think that've very, very meaningful.

(I should have mentioned the one scene I thought perfect, which won't be hard to guess if you've seen the film.)

"that's" (eyes, brain, fingers, I never know with my parade of typos)

the ones who can hang with the jocks, stoners, and outcasts without damage

i like that this is what the movie considers an essentially heroic quality. a character who actually deserves edie mcclurg's catalogue of subcultures from ferris bueller.

jim in van / pbkr otm; there is more than one scene of prolonged sadism! and if any of them happen to catch you wrong it can be doubly unpleasant because the movie doesn't really seem to be remembering them any less fondly than anything else, even if it doesn't like ben affleck (it might like parker posey well enough). obv it is part of its greatness that it won't commit to comforting you (just remember what you're celebrating).

yeah so I just watched EWS tonight and it fuckin ruled. 118 minutes of guys being dudes. liked it better than DAZED I think

Also really enjoyed EWS but I remember D&C much more vividly

same

maybe this is an unwelcome view but EWS seems so much richer to me; I liked DAZED a lot for its portrayal of the distinctly suburban feeling of invincibility and meaninglessness, but EWS actually has characters, it's much funnier, and maybe it's because it's college people rather than high school people but it's filled with people I'd much rather hang out with

The women aren't as thought out, though, but, boy, those boys are just...

in which film are they not as thought out, you think?

EWS!!.

I can't vouch for the truthfulness of the scene where the dudes visit the bar and disco dance, but it made sense to me: two years after its peak, disco hadn't gone away in Texas, and these guys grew up with long enough to accept it (plus, it's a way to pick up women).

really? the biggest weakness of DAZED to me is that the 4 or 5 main senior women in the ensemble were barely discernible. sabrina seems like the only one who really shows more than one dimension and it seems she barely has any lines

(plus, it's a way to pick up women).

yes, this is key. these guys are as chameleonic as they need to be to get some. the part at the theatre party where finn is talking to the girl about their horoscopes is the perfect emblem of this

I really like brody's take:

The first thing that strikes the eye and the mind as soon as Jake enters the house is the movie’s intense, almost dance-like physicality. “Everybody” is a story about athletes, people who live by the body and exert an extremely tight and precise control over their movements while at the same time yielding to irrepressible outbursts of speed and violence. From the very start, Linklater’s astonishingly well-cast and well-meshed ensemble of actors appears both swingingly choreographed in daily motion and exhilaratingly, swaggeringly free.

“Everyone” has a Jamesian framework, with Jake, as the movie’s central consciousness, providing the portal and the perspective onto the characters around him. Jake’s experience of his first days of college is at the core of the movie; the action is a countdown, from Thursday afternoon to the start of classes the following Monday morning. In that brief span, Jake sees and experiences much that seems rapidly but radically transformative, and Linklater, extracts from it, with the fullness of time and a contemplative distance, an element of wisdom that’s all the stronger for its undertow of bitterness and struggle.

The athletes’ nature comes through in scenes where teammates talk about their competitiveness, and scenes—of a wild comic fervor—that show it in games and sports of many kinds, from driveway basketball and Nerf basketball to foosball and Ping-Pong (the latter is a highlight), with sidebars involving made-up card games, a painful battle of knuckle-flicking, and even duelling bong hits. There’s also a verbal and intellectual competitiveness that’s an antic constant among the ballplayers, and Jake has just the name for it: “fuck-withery.” The endless stream of teases and insults, one-upsmanship and comic deception, gags and pranks and practical jokes suggest that wit and a sort of daily performance art are a crucial strain of the sporting life.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/richard-linklater-portrays-the-mentality-of-an-athlete-in-everybody-wants-some

I love both of them, but I think they're more different than alike despite obviously both being drawn from Linklater's own experiences. I think D&C has more of a socio-political argument to make about the era, where EWS is a more purely coming-of-age story.

EWS really does make guy culture about as appealing as it can be. My decidedly anti-bro-culture wife was sort of amazed how much she liked EWS, it was one of the first things she'd ever seen that she said gave her some sense of the joys of being one of the guys.

sorry, EWS!!

yeah that's a grea

*great insight, it's a remarkable distillation of a certain experience

yeah very otm. it felt like a rare(ish) & kind of refreshing depiction of male college athletics on film that showed it as being something that a reasonable well-rounded person could derive value from, rather than depicting it as either the domain psychopathic bullies or courageous quasi-militarized american heroes.

yeah EWS is v joyful and endearing, qualities you do not expect from a house full of baseball jocks

the attractiveness of said jocks helps as well :D

once you like disco, it's hard to be a bully

otm

weird, i was just wondering how Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly hold up, then i googled and found he has a new rotoscoped animation movie coming out this year

We got trailer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzuz5s_Qk-A

I’m on board with this

looks like archer

New film is enjoyable but inessential; another wistful nostalgia piece in the mode of Everybody Wants Some!!, basically. I await clemenza's take on the soundtrack (I recognized about 75% of the music in the film, so Linklater may not be digging that deep).

Ineffectual but I enjoyed it more than you, I suspect

I'm wondering how necessary the whole fantasy narrative is, to be honest. The segments I liked best--the breathlessly nostalgic recollections that reminded me of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, come to think of it--were mostly confined to the first half of the film.

yeah i loved hearing about houston & the reflections on the region in the 1st half. 2nd half was less interesting but still enjoyable. i liked "astronomy domine" on the moon, too. the alpine ride bit towards the end felt like the whole movie in a nutshell, just a breezy little ride, pointless but fun.

Pvmic, but overall I loved this.

That said, they could have also called it YAS BOOMER.

More thoughts to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd72I33RGV4

Greatest shot in all of cinema?

Knew nothing until reading about it here...Not sure if I'll see it or not: just not big on animated films. (Coraline might be it--not that I've seen a whole lot post-childhood.) Looked at the soundtrack on Tunefind (which I shouldn't do, in case I do see it); lots of great songs, but there are 41 of them, and that sets off my Flamingo Kid alarm. I'm wondering if they're either buried in the background, or trotted out for a few seconds at a time--neither strategy is the way to make pop music count in a movie.

(That clip above is great, but I'll see your "Legend of the Rent" and raise you "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.")

Oh yeah that's a great sequence! I was talking about "Legend of the Rent" in the context of great long single takes in movies--obv there are others more technically and aesthetically impressive, but I'm biased toward School of Rock generally and stand in awe of Jack Black's performance there

XPS It's an 'Animated Film' the way Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly were, i.e. live action filmed in real environments and/or a green/blue screen studio with rotoscoping utilized for coloring and building the visuals around the actors. In the latter case, this is a way to do the necessary f/x work without breaking the bank on conventional CGI to pull off the moon stuff, and--perhaps most importantly--recreating the Houston area circa-1969 (especially since 90% of the locations they needed are long gone).

It's rotoscoped.

xxxpost

I was talking about "Legend of the Rent" in the context of great long single takes in movies--obv there are others more technically and aesthetically impressive but I'm biased toward School of Rock generally and stand in awe of Jack Black's performance there

yeah thats in the special category of long takes that dont call attention to themselves, which i'm almost always more impressed by than long takes out of the I Am Cuba playbook. just rewatched it for the first time since it came out and didnt really notice that it was a single take until a few shots later, was just riding along with his performance and not really noticing the craft at all.

Bullshit.

Richard Linklater pissed at the Academy after it deems Apollo 10 1/2 ineligible for Best Animated Feature https://t.co/MQ5XGHiMk8 pic.twitter.com/iybjVcioAp

— The A.V. Club (@TheAVClub) October 8, 2022

agree with the academy (because it was bad)

Academy’s reason seems to make no sense, though I doubt Linklater is right that it’s masking some other anti-innovation/indies motive. More likely just ignorance and incompetence. Haven’t seen the film but if it was bad they could just not nominate it on the merits

I don't like Linklater, but he's right. Fantasia and Snow White used rotoscoping, there's just no possible way Apollo 10 1/2 isn't 100% an animated film. If it isn't, no CGI-animated film should be allowed in the category either.

Recentish interview. His new one, Hit Man was picked up by Netflix -- I went looking for a trailer and was mixed-up by the trailer for the action trash Hitmen (also 2023) which briefly gave me hope that he gave up curdled nostalgia for a Guy Ritchie knockoff. Oh well.

IMDB upcoming projects (Merrily We Roll Along, "Untitled John Brinkley Biopic", "Untitled Bill Hicks Biopic") continues the long streak of "meh"

Oh come on, that John Brinkley movie could rule!

Otoh, it could also be a DO YOU SEE Trump parallels thing that seemingly every film about a charismatic con man from here on out will be taken as, so...

Last Flag Flying and Where'd You Go, Bernadette were disappointing, Before Midnight is a fine movie but a letdown compared to the previous two Before films. But otherwise, I've really liked everything else.
Bernie, Boyhood, Everybody Wants Some!! and Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (not to mention nearly every feature from the '90s and '00s)...I think they're all really good to great. Looking forward to Hit Man.

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! is so underrated

^^It's become one of my comfort movies.

Otoh, it could also be a DO YOU SEE Trump parallels thing that seemingly every film about a charismatic con man from here on out will be taken as, so...

That was my immediate thought. I never saw Bernie, but Boyhood, Apollo 10 1/2, and Where'd You Go, Bernadette put me off. I did like Before Midnight, but I was ready for the two of them to turn on each other.