Episode 71: SLACKER

[devincf 102]

Richard Linklater's seminal Gen X movie is up for the Canon, rounding out the group of 'important' early 90s indie films. Does this unstructured, plotless film make the grade? It's up to you to decide!

 

And check out the other thread for discussion of Linklater's newest film, EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!.

[NRoberson86 78]

What perfect timing for this episode. Since a MoMI screening of Nashville two weekends ago I've been obsessed with baroque techniques in film. Nashville's DNA is in this incredible work, but it is by no means a mere clone. Linklater took Altman's ideas and ran with them in a bold, new direction, allowing the camera to entertain the realm of possibility.

 

It's an easy yes vote.

[beezyharps 125]

Easy yes.

 

This movie is great. I usually hate movies like this, but Linklater completely makes it work here. It's not my favorite Linklater by a long shot, but it is probably his most interesting to discuss. I agree though, we likely don't need another "important 90's independent film" episode for a while.

[DavidThomasWatson 8]

I was honestly prepared to vote No before listening to the episode. I remember appreciating the film when I first watched it but it didn't stick with me. Listening to Amy & Devin talk about the film brought back the memory of the things I enjoyed about it on that viewing.

It's also a yes based on its effect on 90s cinema, and if we have Clerks in the Canon then this certainly deserves a spot.

[Shrek & Donkey Kong 4336]

Great episode. I'm totally Team Devin on Everybody Wants Some, it's my favorite 2016 movie thus far.

 

Slacker is such an easy yes for me, it's crazy. The funniest art film I've ever seen, a film that really challenged me the first time I watched it, and the defining film of Linklater's hangout style. My first viewing did not go over well, I thought it was boring and pretentious...good thing I held off Waking Life until I really was sold on Linklater by rewatching this. The way Linklater moves the camera in this film is as good as any (save for the Before trilogy). Devin talked about Linklater not wanting to show the big moments in his films. I love how Slacker shows these moments that are adjecent to the big moments in these characters' lives, or even for these wondering slacker characters, they are the big moments, and that's the point.

[AdrianVomBaur 1]

The podcast gave me an excuse to finally check out Slacker last week and I like it quite a bit! It's not my favorite Linklater movie (I looove the Before trilogy and Boyhood) and it maybe kind of suffers from the wooden amateur acting in places, but it's really interesting, has a great concept, and still works really well 25 years later. And I'm not even talking about its cultural significance. So, yeah, it's a pretty easy YES.

[j_scanlon 59]

Slacker is so damn good. It's a movie so many student filmmakers clearly strive to make, or think is easy to make, but it's just not. It required thought and genuine affection for a place and people.

[AndyFritz 12]

I vote no. Nothing happens.

[ChrisStevens 3]

Does anybody else get frustrated with how extremely condescending Devin can be towards Amy on this podcast.

 

I enjoy the podcast and enjoy listening, but Devin can be a "yuge" condescending dude a lot of the time.

[JonHillman 40]

There was a question a few days ago about what what our least favorite film in the canon is. Based on the results so far, this will be my answer in about a week.

[bri-witched 60]

I'm not in love with this film, but I get its cultural impact in the 90s indie scene and how important it is in Linklater's filmography. I'm voting yes primarily because of those reasons. I didn't hate watching it, but something about it has never clicked with me.

[HoldenMartinson 221]

I vote no. Nothing happens.

 

 

Does anybody else get frustrated with how extremely condescending Devin can be towards Amy on this podcast.

 

I enjoy the podcast and enjoy listening, but Devin can be a "yuge" condescending dude a lot of the time.

 

I can see it, but I don't know. Both have valid perspectives on Everybody Wants Some!!. Amy was clearly more combative, but they fuel each other's fire plenty.

 

On to the film: I LOVE Richard Linklater's work. I love Dazed and Confused, I love the Before trilogy, I love Waking Life, I love School of Rock, I like Bernie and Me and Orson Welles, and I LOOOOOOOOOOOOVE Boyhood. Slacker probably falls in the bottom half of Linklater's filmography for me. That said, it's still a genius piece of filmmaking. Other filmmakers might be more cinematic and acrobatic with how they tell stories, but Linklater can get at humanity like nobody else. Slacker is the perfect thesis statement for what he would spend the rest of his career doing.

 

Also, Rotten Tomatoes is fine, but Metacritic is a lot better, because it averages the actual scores critics give it. It tends to be a little more selective about which critics are featured--usually those with ratings attached to their reviews--but Everybody Wants Some!! isn't a 70 film. It's an 85 film, as of this comment, which denotes "Universal Acclaim," and is only five points fewer than Rotten Tomatoes' aggregation of positive and negative reviews. Given Metacritic's averages, Everybody Wants Some!! falls at around a soft A- to a high B+ with critics.

[bri-witched 60]

Does anybody else get frustrated with how extremely condescending Devin can be towards Amy on this podcast.

 

I enjoy the podcast and enjoy listening, but Devin can be a "yuge" condescending dude a lot of the time.

 

Yeah I haven't been able to see Everybody Wants Some but I really sympathized with Amy's position and was surprised Devin was so against it and just assumed she "didn't get it." I'm sure it's a fine film so I'm not saying no one should enjoy it. But I can't get too excited about Yet Another film that explores what I'm gathering is young white heterosexual masculinity complete with disposable female characters. It's tired.

[Marsellus_H 118]

I vote yes. I wasn't quite sure where I'd land on Slacker, partially because this is such an American film with a very specifically American point of view - which is by no means any negative criticism towards it. It's simply sometimes very hard for me, as a middle European guy, to adjust to it. I often feel like I overlook some small fun details that seem to be like inside jokes in American culture. For example, this doesn't happen in Tarantino movies, which, as he likes to say, are films for the earth, made by a guy from earth that just happens to be American. I feel that Linklater can't really escape his roots.

 

That being said, Amy's and Devin's arguments on the show convinced me in the end, and I'm not going to argue against a film, simply because I don't "get" it fully. Also, the one-take-sequence about 10 minutes into the film, in which this guy drives overhis mother, must have been a small miracle to pull off.

[AlexChristianLovendahl 34]

I'm inclined to be a tolerant "no" vote. I like Slacker well enough; it sits around the 60% mark on my Flickchart. But the meandering tone and amateur acting don't quite give as powerful a sense of place or purpose as Before Sunrise or Dazed and Confused. I won't mind its entry, but it's an incomplete experiment in my book.

[Threshold 93]

Soft no, not really good enough to be one of the first of Linklaters' to make it in (so many others to choose from)

By itself it's really nothing. A great feature debut- but doesn't really amount to anything more than a one-note joke

[FictionIsntReal 79]

Still the only Linklater I've seen, but a fitting representative work. A very unique movie which could hardly be done better, and seminal in the history of independent films. People may say that inspiring Kevin Smith is a bad thing, but that still makes it canonical. Even the credited character names are funny.

[nickperkins 52]

I don't think I've ever seen a movie without a traditional plot structure that I've actually enjoyed quite like this. It's really quite expert filmmaking, with the illusion being the camera just making a choice every few minutes of who to follow, and giving us some great vignettes of a specific time & place in our culture. It's just a neat little time capsule of a movie.

[joel_rosenbaum 1269]

Amy studied abroad in Lund?

 

That's something we share in common. Wonder what year -- I'm guessing not the same one, although we are close in age, since the international/english speaking students all tended to know each other.

[alt0782 29]

Does anybody else get frustrated with how extremely condescending Devin can be towards Amy on this podcast.

 

I enjoy the podcast and enjoy listening, but Devin can be a "yuge" condescending dude a lot of the time.

I quit listening to the podcast about 15 minutes in. Couldn't handle it this episode.

[gene_shallot 79]

Does anybody else get frustrated with how extremely condescending Devin can be towards Amy on this podcast.

 

I enjoy the podcast and enjoy listening, but Devin can be a "yuge" condescending dude a lot of the time.

Don't mean to further derail this into the 'dump on Devin' thread (maybe we need a new Subforum! I kid.), but I do feel like he was in 75% troll/25% actual debate-mode in that argument. Kinda like with Working Girl. I get the feeling he's the type who likes to take the piss out of friends, but I can see how that might be grating.

 

The only thing that actually gets to me is saying "you're not watching the movie right"*. There's no one specific, right or wrong way to interpret a movie, as long as you can back your argument up!

 

* may not be exact quote

[cantaloupe 8]

mom and dad are fighting again :/

[GregoryJamesAnderson 15]

YES on Slacker and everything Linklater. I loved trying to figure out who the movie was gonna follow next, and there was no boring vignette throughout the whole thing. You spend enough time with the person to really get a sense of them then you move on. It's gentle, it's thoughtful, and mostly upbeat. I actually can't wait to watch it again very soon. I like the guy coming from the funeral the most I think, just enough hints dropped about his life to love/hate him then it moves on. Fantastic.

 

About the argument in the beginning, I agree that Devin can be condescending, but both hosts absolutely refuse to listen to the other's point. Although yes, there are a million movies making statements on young, white masculinity, I don't think that diminishes in any way the quality or importance that EWS!! may or may not have.

[AashishSreedharan 0]

I'm actually surprised at how much I liked this movie. When I read the description of the movie, it sounded boring, but because it's Linklater I figured I'd give it a show, and I'm glad I did. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I enjoyed it, and I'll gladly vote it into the canon. I found it's lack of a plot interesting, and the pretentiousness of nearly everyone in the movie was actually kind of hilarious. I think the conspiracy theorist form the coffee shop was my favorite too, he just sounded so sure of himself and everything he was saying as if it's natural to assume everything he said. So yes, let's put this in the canon!

[LanceHunter 7]

Registered for the forums specifically to vote this into the canon, because I am a resident of Austin since the 90s and am thus legally obligated to support this movie whenever possible. Slacker is an amazing document of the city and its culture in that era and most of the people that were here at the time have lived at least a couple of its scenes. When I was working as IT support for the UT Chemistry department one of my co-workers had published several conspiracy theory books. He would occasionally come into our multimedia lab to scan new photos he had gotten from the LBJ library and going on at length about how they proved one thing or another (usually about Jack Ruby).

 

As much as Slacker was documenting Austin, though, it also reshaped Austin. I don't think the city would be the way it is today if not for that movie. Beyond the personal influence Linklater has in our local film industry, Slacker gave a sharper focus to what the city was (or was at least trying to be). People moved here because they liked the mood of Slacker. In turn, when Dell got huge and the dot-com boom shut the door on the "Slacker" era, the movie stood as a signifier of what was being lost.

 

By the way, if you want to see other movies that capture Austin like Slacker did. I have two recommendations. First is the documentary Hell On Wheels, about how modern Roller Derby got started (and the subsequent schism between the flat-track and banked-track leagues). It really captures that early-00s period when the dot-com boom had busted, suddenly everything was too expensive for people to live the Slacker lifestyle, but the tech jobs that raised all the rents had vanished so there was this kind of weird desperate edge to everything. The other one is The Happy Poet, which is basically what would happen if one of the characters in Slacker decided to say "fuck it" and start a business. And since saying "fuck it" and starting a business is basically what the whole city did in the last decade, it really fits. (Even if the movie itself is just another cookie-cutter Sundance-lab-style indie comedy.)