Dazed and Confused (1993)

USA, 102 minutes
Director / writer: Richard Linklater
Photography: Lee Daniel
Music: Classic rock classics (nonstop)
Editor: Sandra Adair
Cast: Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Shawn Andrews, Rory Cochrane, Sasha Jenson, Matthew McConaughey, Marissa Ribisi, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Renee Zellweger

My DVD copy of Dazed and Confused is packaged with Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High so apparently at some point it took on epic proportions as a teen comedy (when the only teen comedy it should be aligned with is American Graffiti—that's a recommendation for a double feature). There's more evidence for the stature of this movie in Quentin Tarantino's including it on his last two ballots in the Sight & Sound poll. As a jukebox musical soundtrack movie it is practically heroic but that's more in terms of the ambitious licensing work—something like 15% of the budget went to securing the rights to the music here, even though Led Zeppelin remained implacable and never yielded the title song. Yet amiable as it is, warm with scattered laughs, Dazed and Confused has always seemed to me more funny-strange than funny-haha.

The first time I saw it, for example, I was not just struck but dumbfounded by the accuracy and fine points of the '70s period detail: girls using pliers to zip up tight jeans, those sphere-like chairs with speakers built in ("egg chairs," per google search), the look and feel of keggers in the woods, the ubiquity of weed. All this amazing detail is the only thing I took away from it then. I was prone to saying things like it was the first time I'd seen my youth ripped off by a movie. And that's not far wrong—Dazed and Confused is formally about the classes of '76 to '79, only a few years past my time. But, on the other hand, the hazing behavior on display here—senior boys terrorizing freshmen boys with a bizarre spanking ritual, and senior girls doing something like it with freshmen girls—is like nothing I ever saw, experienced, or even heard of. I wrote it off as Texas. Now I'm more inclined to take it some kind of flights of fancy by director and writer Richard Linklater, who has produced an impressive body of work. (But it could still be Texas.)

Boyhood (2014)

USA, 165 minutes
Director/writer: Richard Linklater
Photography: Lee Daniel, Shane F. Kelly
Music: Family of the Year, Coldplay, Blink 182, Flaming Lips, Ethan Hawke, Wilco
Editor: Sandra Adair
Cast: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater, Marco Perella, Steven Chester Prince, Jenni Tooley, Elijah Smith

I guess it's fair enough to call Boyhood a stunt movie, so I'll start there. Even as a stunt movie it's a little different. In most of them—Russian Ark, say, or Boyhood's contemporaneous Birdman, or even the big-dog stunt movie of all time (because it has so many stunts), Citizen Kane—it's not always easy to see much around the dazzling corners of the stunt. By contrast, Boyhood is one of the warmest and most comfortable movies I know, whose longish running time of nearly three hours always zips by too fast. The fact that it's the stunt itself that is ultimately responsible for that is just one more amazing piece of this amazing movie.

The stunt, on the off-chance you haven't heard, is that director and writer Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood in bits and pieces over a 12-year period, from 2002 to 2013. The idea was to make an ultrarealistic movie about growing up—and it is indeed that, but in the process it grows to be much more, almost a meditation on aging itself. It asks the most profound questions of life and our purpose simply by showing images that include time, real time. It's not, of course, just Ellar Coltrane as the boy Mason who ages and changes (from 6 to 17), but everyone in this picture, including the adults who play his mother and father, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. Twelve years is enough time to mark anyone with the subtle scars of aging and emotional maturity.

Before Midnight (2013)

USA / Greece, 109 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Kim Krizan
Photography: Christos Voudouris
Music: Graham Reynolds
Editor: Sandra Adair
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

The third installment of the Before series, which has increasingly become a collaboration by director and cowriter Richard Linklater and its two stars, Ethan Hawke as Jesse and Julie Delpy as Celine, is probably the weakest. Thirds in sequels usually do poorly as movies, but that's not exactly the problem, partly because this is not a typical series. Before Midnight certainly has some of the strongest scenes of any of them. But the ending is hard to believe, flipping an unlikely switch out of the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory it has wandered at deepest levels and into sparkly upbeat, in order, one suspects, to help guarantee another installment (providing everyone makes it another nine years). It's a bit of a fairy tale, in other words, and not in a good way or one that really works with the title. Jesse and Celine are more like pumpkins until midnight, at which point they become a prince and a beautiful love relationship with glass slipper, etc. Maybe—it's also ambiguous, as all the endings are.

I should say I've never liked Before Sunrise that much, which possibly leaves me with just the second, Before Sunset. I had to check it out again this week just to be sure it's as good as I remember. It is. The strength of the later movies is that they look like real relationships. Before Sunset has a good deal of hope and an ingenious way to make it believable, with a relationship renewed before our eyes. In Before Midnight, Jesse and Celine are married, with twin girls, and settled after nine years into a comfortable life—conventional bohemian bourgeois, more or less, on vacation in the summer in Greece. Dig the scenery.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Rather than some reprisal of Dazed and Confused, as often reported, this felt to me more like director and writer Richard Linklater in a Damsels in Distress mood. Although I see the point. Baseball is involved in both, and all the characters in Everybody Wants Some!! are dazed and confused. But then, everybody in Dazed and Confused also wants some. The new one, at any rate, takes place over a few days in the late summer of 1980 as students gather on a small campus for the fall term. It's focused specifically on a group of baseball players—jocks, not to put too fine a point on it. By day they furiously compete at games of all kinds. At night, they careen from one subculture of the time to the next, from a disco, to a honkytonk inspired by Urban Cowboy (did I mention this is set in Texas?), to a punk-rock show. These scenes are animated by the soundtrack and are very exciting. They're the best part, but it's also pretty funny. As comedies go, you're likely to laugh, as long as you're OK with a bunch of adolescent horseplay. Linklater chases the mindset down with a look at the bunch of them constantly competing: playing ping pong, video games, gambling on stunts, and more. There's even a game that involves abusing one another's knuckles. It's all high-spirited with a sweet late-summer romance theme playing out as well. It switches up on expectations by going off in such unexpected directions. What does a bunch of post-adolescent baseball players at a small college in Texas have to do with anything? That's the beauty part of it, or one of them. It's more focused on getting certain period details right, exactly right, such as the state of men's facial hair, which ranged a bit but focused mostly on mustaches. The music is perfect, all of it, and things like the punk-rock show are unexpectedly vivid (and right). I don't know much about any of the players—they're young and fresh-faced and often very good, at least as an ensemble. Justin Street takes it right over the top as a Napoleon Dynamite style social maladapt who thinks a flaming fastball is going to be his ticket to everything he's ever dreamed of. He is otherwise randomly spastic and out of control. The group stoner turns out to have a totally unexpected secret, though it somehow seems familiar to Linklater, or perhaps that is Texas. Everybody Wants Some!! is mostly awkward male bonding, falling all over one another like colts. It's a poignant historical moment, just months before Ronald Reagan's first election, about which it wisely has nothing to say. I think this movie is counting on you to bring your own baggage, although it's possible this is aimed at a youth market? I don't know. Somehow I doubt that. It feels more like late baby boomer nostalgia, but it's done effectively and is fully entertaining surprisingly often.

A Scanner Darkly (1973)

I have to admit I was a little surprised when I reached the Author Note at the end of this novel by Philip K. Dick, which threw the whole thing into another context, or perhaps confirmed an unsettling undertow of mood and themes. There Dick tersely discusses the ravages and casualties of drug use before a list of the names of friends and loved ones and their dispositions: "Gaylene, deceased; Ray, deceased; Francy, permanent psychosis; Kathy, permanent brain damage," etc. There's even a "Phil, permanent pancreatic damage," which appears to be him. Thus it clearly has a more sober intent than usual. It is still trippy, Dick is always trippy, riffing on ideas of the bicameral brain producing separate consciousnesses coexisting within a skull. It's at least as paranoid as ever—probably more. In fact, written in the earliest years of Richard Nixon's enduring gift to us, the War on Drugs, the novel in many ways is a chronicle of paranoia exactly, with its deeply embedded network of undercover narcs. At the time it was published, 1977, we were hard at work rolling back some of those surveillance excesses, so it may have even read as exaggerated paranoia once. In our post-9/11 world it feels more like journalism than speculative fiction, and mundane journalism at that. That's just a measure of how good Dick was at imagining the future in certain ways. It is set in 1994, so the world he imagined was actually still 10 more years out, but that's a good call notwithstanding. There's a pall of depression that hangs over this, and not necessarily in a good way. The usual strong points are weak. There's a drug intriguingly called Substance D, for example, but it doesn't seem to do much more than create desperate addicts. Undercover agents wear "scramble suits" to disguise themselves from one another (to avoid blowing covers, I guess) but the description of the technology is way too complicated for the incidental role it plays in the narrative.

That's handled better in the movie directed by Richard Linklater from 2006, where it works as a pleasantly puzzling visual element. The movie loses a key thread in the story of the fanciful suggestion of a competing left-brain / right-brain foundation for mental breakdowns, but it's otherwise less gloomy than the book, energized by a madly riffing all-star cast of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder, among others, rotoscoped to good effect. The rotoscoping somehow gives it exactly the look and texture of a Dick narrative, cartoony, trembling in and out of existence, impossibly plastic. For that reason it has to be counted with the class of Dick-based movies, with Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall. I still give the edge to Total Recall, which seems to me best at capturing the core of Dick, his orchestrations of multiple realities interacting. But none of them is better at the look and feel of Dick than Linklater's picture. But it does verge on being a dreary affair—the book, I mean. There's a kind of 12-step recovery tone to that Author Note. A Scanner Darkly is weird, Dick is always weird, but it is also sad, and troubling. There's definitely a sense of soul-searching, as if Dick were losing interest in his greatest themes and capabilities even as we watch along. Addiction used to be an incidental side product of drug experience. Now it is the drug experience. From here on out, his work more and more began to entertain religious ideas I've never been able to connect with. But there's an amazing amount of his best work, most of it written in the '60s.

In case it's not at the library.

Before Sunset (2004)

#41: Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

This is probably a fantasy of the way relationships work (I'm hardly one to say), but it's as fine and heartrending a romance as I know, not least perhaps because the sputtering front end of it, Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise, is so fatally slight. But in this inspired sequel, the three principals—director Linklater and stars Julie Delpy (Celine) and Ethan Hawke (Jesse), who all collaborated on the screenplay—are nine years older, with that much more experience under their belts and showing in the lines on their faces and the circumstances of their (fictional) lives.

The premise of both pictures is practically identical: Celine and Jesse, who barely know one another yet experience a mutual and profound connection, are irresistibly drawn together. In Sunrise, they get off a train and spend a night prowling Vienna, talking and talking and talking. That movie ends with solemn promises to meet again six months later. In Sunset, it's nine years later, and they are meeting again for the first time since that night. It starts at a reading for Jesse's novel (the book based on their night together), and it's as unplanned in its way as their first meeting—he has no idea she will be there, she has no idea how it will go. Almost immediately they fall in again, and spend the afternoon prowling Paris, talking and talking and talking. The warp and woof of their conversation is continually intruded on by their mutual bewilderment, even resentment, at the feelings they share toward one another.

Before Sunset (2004)

USA, 80 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Kim Krizan
Photography: Lee Daniel
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Nine years later, in the story and in reality, our heroes meet again. The rendezvous they had planned for six months after their wonderful night, agreeing to meet again in Vienna, never came off, at which point they had no way of reaching each other again. That's one of the problems with extravagant romance. Too many pitfalls. Now thirtysomething Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) has written a moderately successful novel based on that night and is in Paris to give a reading, at which thirtysomething Celine (played by Julie Delpy) surprises him by showing up. He must leave for the airport that evening to fly home, but almost immediately they pick up where they left off, and if the years between have not been very hard on either one they have not been so kind either. They have been fortunate in their careers and material circumstances, but Celine has gone from one unsatisfying, vaguely distant relationship to another, while Jesse finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage. This is by far the better of the two Before Sun--- movies Linklater has made about them, and it's so good that it even tends to redeem the slender offerings of the first, instantly creating a context that widens and deepens both. Jesse and Celine are still young, in their early 30s, but life has already begun to work its erosions on them—which instantly, and profoundly, creates the stakes that were never there in the first adventure. Now they both know too well, and indeed acknowledge as much explicitly to one another, that the kind of opportunity they once found with one another does not often come along, and must be seized when it does. Unless, that is ... unless it's just another cruel false illusion—could that be? The kind they both also know so well now. As do we all; and here is our connecting point. After all, they only had that one night in Vienna and, now, this one afternoon in Paris. Is it real? How much do they really know each other? How can they know? And so they cling to one another instinctively, almost desperately, unwilling to part, fondling the connection, nervously joking and deeply engaged and occasionally sparring out of doubt and pain and insecurity, but never without an unmistakable sense of the ludicrous, even dangerous, rightness of it. They open up to one another so beautifully. He tells her how he was thinking of her on his wedding day, thought he saw her even. Her face grows quiet. It might have actually been her. Inevitably they end up at her apartment, where she plays him a lovely song on her guitar. "Baby," she tells him, "you are gonna miss that plane."

Before Sunrise (1995)

USA/Austria/Switzerland, 105 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan
Photography: Lee Daniel
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

A deceptively slight romance with a concept at once so familiar and so simple as to verge on hackneyed. American twentysomething Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) meets Parisian twentysomething Celine (played by Julie Delpy) when they are both traveling by train in Europe. After a brief conversation, Celine, on an impulse, gets off the train with Jesse in Vienna and they spend the night together, roaming the city, talking, growing closer, and ultimately falling in love. In the morning Jesse will be flying back to the U.S. and Celine will reboard the train and continue on to Paris. Jesse is naturally charming, composed of equal parts swagger and unsure timidity, while Celine is also charming, but more brash and outspoken, unwilling to trust a man but unwilling not to. Both, more than anything, are young, happy to indulge romance and idealism. They barely have money to feed themselves, let alone for a place to spend the night, but the company of one another provides all the entertainment and comforts they need—or, indeed, that we as an audience might require. In fact, for the most part director and co-writer Richard Linklater does an admirable job of staging a legendary first date, a greatest night of one's life, the sense of astonishment and joy and the continual testing and retesting of a deep and powerful newfound connection with another person. If we are lucky, we have had an experience like this in our lives, and it's not hard to recognize a version of it here: the conversation that never wants to end, happily unloading all the stories of one's short life, with startling happenstance encounters along the way, flare-ups of difference quickly smoothed over, and an unforced wandering from place to place amidst wondrous sights and experiences. The late-night weariness that occasionally threatens is quickly overcome by the energy of the connection that burns through it. But for all that, some patience and indulgence may be required here. The story amounts to little more than said date, virtually devoid of any personal context other than what one character tells the other, or stakes of any kind except insofar as they have seduced us into caring for them. And I don't know about you, but nothing Celine has to offer (let alone Jesse) much gives me any reason to care particularly deeply, beyond a general happiness in seeing others connect and do well. Speaking strictly for myself, that's not going to get me to Paris or anyplace like it without having to pay for a ticket first.