RICHARD LINKLATER

a very erratic filmmaker but always dear to my heart for A Scanner Darkly and Dazed and Confused

wow this is kinda tough.

guess I'll go with before sunset, edging out dazed.

He's only gotten erratic lately actually. This is tough. There are a lot of good movies on this list, but there isn't one that just pops out at me as okay that's the BEST.

Can safely eliminate FFN, WL, BNB though.

Slacker. or,

slacker

he achieved everything he couldve wanted to with dazed & confused & he'd probably admit as much under influence of truth serum

I wish they'd release subUrbia out on DVD.

i kinda wish he had ended up doing Friday Night Lights.

wow i really dont like most of his movies. never seen them all in a list together like that but ugh, just not for me.

ok with the exception of SubUrbia, which i have a bizarre soft spot for.

A few years ago I would have called him my favorite working director (because of Dazed and the Before movies, mostly), but I just don't have much interest in seeing whatever he comes out with now.

i wrote a chapter about him a few years ago and limited it to his original screenplays, which makes him seem a lot more coherent. (i included scanner darkly because he adapted it by himself and i think the finished thing feels very linklater-y in its methods and content.) anyway, i think dazed and confused really is his best. i really like the sunrise/sunset movies, and slacker and waking life have a bunch of great moments. scanner darkly is kind of a mess, but the woody harrelson/robert downey jr. scenes are good. woodshock is pretty entertaining, but it's impossible to learn to plow... is a great big student-film bore.

http://www.popmatters.com/images/film_art/s/slacker.jpg

dazed and confused, but i love sunrise/sunset.

Haven't seen some of the well-thought of ones here (Waking Life, Before Sunset) but look, barely anybody ELSE has ever made a movie as good as Dazed and Confused so I figure Linklater hasn't either.

i think the politics of dazed and confused get overlooked a little, it tends to get talked about like it's just a feel-good period piece. it's really about that moment, the total collapse of authority in america, the particular kind of freedom it promised, the reactionary pushback. all in 24 hours.

you just convinced me that I need to rewatch it.

it's also about that gto easing into the parking lot and "sweet emotion"...

Oh, and how many times the one kid touches his brow in the course of that one single scene.

dazed & confused, slacker, the before movies, all pretty much untouchable. school of rock quite good. scanner darkly major letdown and pretty lame. bad news bears and everything else pretty much whatever. but fast food nation i liked a lot.

Tape is as good as Waking Life is terrible.

I'm torn in great part between D&C and Waking Life and Slacker on historical grounds but actually my vote is going toward underdog School of Rock on behalf of the rare category of Favorite Movies My Son And I Share.

fast food nation i liked a lot.

it was better than i expected. the immigrant storyline was really good, i sort of wish the whole movie had been that. the anomic high school kids and morally conflicted corporate lackey seemed more pro forma.

fast food nation was prety weak, i thought the kinnear/willis part could have been the basis for a good comedy if fleshed out a lot. the ethan hawke part was one of the most embarassing things i've ever seen.

I really admire his erraticness. I'll go with Before Sunset

D&C, but a vote for anything but the Befores is OK with me. Even The Newton Boys.

Tape has Ethan Hawke's best performance. Voted for D&C over Before Sunrise.

i'm surely way out on my lonesome here, but I've never understood the hard-on people have for this dude. Slacker and D&C had a couple of chuckles in them, and he's uh, technically competent...
but really?

I really enjoyed Tape; would screen again.

And Slacker is just one of my favorite films ever, art's best defense of Texas -- but I D&C never clicked for me, at all.

How busy was he 2001-2006? Wow, didn't realise he was that productive then. Well, I did, but I've never looked at titles and dates and considered it before.

Arguably a little too busy.

D&C did click for me, in part, cuz apparently Texas was just like how I remember New Jersey being in 1976.

D&C is the only movie yet made that I can watch ad infinitum. Such a fun, easy-going flick.

Before Sunset, easily.

PARTY AT THE MOON TOWWER

Dazed and Confused is one of my favourite movies ever. So, um, yeah.

I haven't seen very many of his films. A Scanner Darkly was extraordinary, though.

I wish they'd release subUrbia out on DVD.

Oh yes. Warners were supposed to have it out last fall.

Linklater came down to Houston last year to introduce a screening of Minnelli's Some Came Running at the MFA. He did a Q & A about the film afterward. After that he signed some autographs and chatted with fans. Nice fellow. There was funny moment during Q & A when this one prick kept asking about A Scanner Darkly and his usage of Keanu Reeves. A real pain in the ass. Linklater finally told him that Keanu was a good guy and easy to work with.

Before Sunrise. Obv.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Waking Life is a mess, but I love it.

D&C is very good, but I don't really love it.

Before Sunrise is his best and I like it a lot.

Voted Waking Life.

saw part of FFN today. BO RING.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Waking Life (2001) 4

!!!

nono

The School of Rock (2003) 4

!!!

The School of Rock >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Waking Life

I want to like totally revolt in this poll thread omg

Worthiest winner ever.

most accurate poll results ever

Waking Life is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. (BOGUS is the worst.)

"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.

Before Midnight is dreadful, and I loved the first two.

Otherwise I more or less endorse his career moves.

That Bernadette one is dogshit, just the worst kind of DTV slop