And in late July the man who was once asked to speak for a generation of American twentysomethings turns sixty. It’s been 30 years since the debut of Slacker, which established him as a singular voice among a new generation of independent filmmakers.
#Richard linklater slacker movie#
It’s been 35 years since he started a nonprofit that transformed the Texas film industry and turned Austin into a television and movie production hub. Watching his films while we cloister ourselves in our homes, it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss for all that we’ve had to set aside during this lockdown. His most celebrated works-such as Boyhood, Waking Life, and Slacker-ask us to appreciate how even seemingly minor encounters contain the power to dramatically alter our futures. And the social distancing we’ve all practiced since then starkly reminds us that Linklater has made a career of immortalizing “the poetry of day-to-day life,” to borrow a line from Before Sunrise. The crowd’s bonhomie served as a reminder that Linklater owes his career to having drawn together a community of creative people who supported and promoted his work at critical junctures. We didn’t know then that many of us would soon be isolated for months at home. Gallows humor abounded, along with chuckling at the novelty of exchanging elbow bumps instead of handshakes. Being there felt like fiddling while Rome burned any of the 250-plus of us present could have been a vector for COVID-19. The city had yet to issue a stay-at-home order or ban large gatherings, so the group decided that the show would go on.
The evening before, we’d both attended the Texas Film Awards, the annual big-dollar fundraiser for the Austin Film Society, of which he’s the founder and artistic director. For weeks I’d been told the Oscar-nominated director wouldn’t be available for an interview until after South by Southwest, but officials had called off that mega-event a week earlier. Based on the description on the inside sleeve of the book, I was expecting something different, I’m just a bit disappointed to find out that this wasn’t a novelization or a story and more of a rehash of the film.“Last night felt like the end of something,” Richard Linklater said as we sat outside his Austin production office in mid-March, on the day Donald Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency. There are little instances of really interesting reads in the book and the whole 90’s Austin Slacker lifestyle can be insightful and relatable to a lot of people who may be interested in reading “Slacker” but there’s just not enough of that. Yeah you get to learn some of the little details of the film, but a majority of the book is just a direct script and storyboard of what was in the movie. There’s basically zero reason to read this book if you’ve already seen the movie, as it barely introduces anything new beyond some character bios of the cast and production notes from Linklater. I was really disappointed to find out that this wasn’t actually a novel or story that contained the attitude and themes of the movie but instead just an in-depth look at every aspect of the movie and how it got filmed and eventually produced and distributed. There’s basically zero reason to read this book if you’ve already seen the movie, as it barely introduces anything new The book “Slacker” is basically a retread of the film of the same name written by that movie’s director, Richard Linklater.
The book “Slacker” is basically a retread of the film of the same name written by that movie’s director, Richard Linklater.
#Richard linklater slacker full#
It goes on.like TV channel-cruising, no plot, no tragic flaws, no resolution, just mastering the moment, pushing forward, full of sound and fury, full of life signifying everything on any given day. Faustus hold equal sway over the mind, where the Butthole Surfers provide the background volume, where we choose what is not obvious over what is easy. I'm in that white space where consumer terror meets irony and pessimism, where Scooby Doo and Dr. Okay, here I am, a tired inheritor of the Me generation, floating from school to street to bookstore to movie theater with a certain uncertainty. I'm not building a wall but making a brick. I'm what, a slacker? A "twentysomething"? I'm in the margins.
0 kommentar(er)
