Slacker - Criterion Collection

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Richard Linklater's debut feature is a comic kaleidoscopic portrait of the quirky characters stuck in a college town (it's Austin, Texas, but it could stand for hundreds of such places), a devilishly clever and endlessly inventive film that overcomes its nothing budget with scene after hilarious scene of short, sharp cinematic shots. Structured something like Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, Slacker is a comic series of character pieces, each lasting a few minutes before the camera picks up and follows someone, perhaps simply an extra in the scene, to the next conversation. Characters spout off theories on everything from JFK and Charles Whitman (we even get an eerie glimpse of the water tower he climbed for his killing spree) to Elvis and UFOs, and more (wanna buy a Madonna pap smear?) on our bohemian tour of a condensed day-in-the-life. Linklater lets the characters set the pace but provides a loose, almost imperceptible rhythm to the film as a whole, giving a kind of structure to what seems like a series of improvisations. But the heart of the film is the freewheeling array of obsessed, self-absorbed, or simply lost souls wandering streets and coffee shops ready to talk your ear off about absolutely nothing. Killing time has never been more fun. --Sean Axmaker

Description

Richard Linklater's Slacker presents a day in the life of a subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in and around the University of Texas at Austin. Shooting the film on 16mm for a mere $23,000, writer/producer/director Linklater and his close-knit crew of friends eschewed a traditional plot, choosing instead to employ long takes and fluid transitions to create a tapestry of over a hundred characters, each as unique as the last, culminating in an episodic portrait of a distinct vernacular culture and a tribute to bohemian cerebration. Slacker is a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants, and one of the keynote films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s.

Customer Reviews:

The infamous "movie about nothing".......2007-07-18

About 6 or 7 years ago, I saw a movie on television called "Suburbia". I even reviewed it way back in the day, and gave it a meager 3-star review, because while I appreciated it as being well-written, it didn't seem to be, well, about much of anything, really. It had some semblance of a plot, but for the most part, it was just a bunch of people sitting around talking. Now, as a high school kid, I at the time found it intriguing, but for the most part it was just kind of over my head. Since then, I've come to gain a greater appreciation for it, and it's a good thing, because otherwise I never would have been prepared for this.

The reason I bring all this up of course is because the aforementioned movie was made by one Richard Linklater, a very talented local director with an affinity for cinematic minimalism. "Slacker", his debut, takes that minimalism to whole new levels. Man, if you thought "Suburbia" was about nothing, wait till you see this! There is no plot, there is no main character, there is no climax, no conflict, no resolution, no nothing. Basically the focal point meanders from one random conversation to another. And that's it. That is the entire movie. 20 or so minutes in, you'll think to yourself, "Ok, this has to be going somewhere". It's not. No character is on camera for more than a couple of minutes, and as quickly as they are introduced, they are gone. Everything sort of connects in this very surreal way. For instance, there'll be a guy talking to one guy, they chat for a few minutes, then one guy will leave and then strike up a conversation with another guy. Then that guy will leave and go talk to someone else. And so on and so forth.

Now many people will see this movie, and undoubtedly consider it a complete waste of time. And you know, I can completely understand that. I'm not even entirely sure why I liked it. Maybe it's because I live in Austin myself, and find it somewhat relatable in an odd way. We've got a lot of interesting and unusual people here, and I think that's what makes it intriguing. This is Linklater's point in making the film, just to show what it's like to be here, and in that sense, I think this film is a success. If you were to make a movie like this taking place in almost any other city, it probably wouldn't be worth it, but because Austin is chock full of weirdos, you just can't stop watching it. You might feel like reaching for the stop button, but you just can't. Well, maybe. Plus, if you're from around here, you get some neat local cameos, including the drummer from the Butthole Surfers, Whammo from the Asylum Street Spankers, Lewis Mackey (an acclaimed philosophy professor at UT, who is sadly no longer with us), and of course Linklater himself.

Anyway, I think this movie is a lot of fun, and I recommend it if you want to see something different. Linklater would go on to create far superior masterpieces, like "A Scanner Darkly" and "Dazed and Confused", but this is the film that really got people's attention. Check it out...if you dare.

Write what you know.......2006-06-06

The old adage "write what you know" has been used to good effect here. Richard Linklater, hailing from Austin, Texas, has decided to grace the silver screen with his appealing look at what he and his friends must have spent their days doing, just so that he can make a movie and practice his craft.

The result is something of a movie that, interestingly enough, is almost like a companion piece to Gummo, of all things. These characters wander around a city trying to fill their lives with whatever they can, mostly conversation and the occassional cigarette, kind of like the characters in Gummo crawl over the wasteland that is their hometown. However, these characters mostly succeed and the movie isn't really about emptiness, so while it's apathetic it's certainly not nihilistic. At most the characters are willing to give in to some eccentricities just so that they have something to do.

It seems like something that would be boring, wouldn't it? Following random characters around, watching as they do next to nothing with their lives... kind of like an American Neo-Realism. However it's actually pretty visually interesting, and heck, if you want something to do with the time you can actually listen and think about the things that they're talking about. Indeed it's easier to philosophize and argue subjectivity than it is to actually get up and do anything, but if you're going to wax poetic you might as well aspire something to it, like Wannabe Dostoyevsky and his notebooks, or write a book about what you've managed to distract yourself with, like the guy focusing on JFK's assassination.

It's also kind of a prelude to Linklater's Waking Life, though I'd say that this is better merely because it's not nearly so self-serious as Waking Life is. Fundamentally, these characters don't really mean anything by their conversations, they're just looking for something to do. That makes it a lot easier to engage with, knowing that somebody actually isn't going to base their life around these things.

--PolarisDiB

Captured Vibe.......2006-01-28

This movie perfectly captures the inexplicable vibe of Austin, Texas before the tech boom transformed it into a trendy traffic jam.

Latter Baby Boomer me.......2006-01-02

I am not Gen-X, . . . wasn't really a hippie either, although I liked Led Zeppelin back in 1968. Anyway, what I like about Slacker, the movie, is that it does define Gen-Xers who, to me, are really scary people.

They may have broken boundaries that formerly bound the world to "prehistoric" social-economic cultures (i.e., vertical business structure, white-male dominated government and business, American Imperialism, royal sovereignty, rampant communism, etc.); yet, in spite of all this, they are essentially just a "modern" version of the same-old-sh*t.

I am disappointed in Gen-Xer's lust for status and material things. Moreover, if you don't pay them huge bundles of money, they will not do anything. Does anyone wonder whom it is that writes all those horrible computer viruses? What a waste of genius.

Oppressing/destroying white supremacy, egomaniacal monarchs, egregious sexism, and very steeply tiered business structures is meaningless if you just only change hands and types of oppression and injustice. For example, I feel that Puffy, the fashion designer, both profits from "sweat shops" and overseas manufacturing like any greedy capitalist. Also, is white supremacy really removed from American culture/society? Women may be having a field day economically, but it seems to me that this cannot last forever, as only in America are women tolerated thus, anyway. And women's rights are too politically driven. Not many people really have more faith in a woman's military or business acumen, compared to a man's. It really is a man's world still. Gen-Xers have perpetuated all the dysfunctional systems of old, just thinly disguised

Nevertheless, the surrealistic stream-of-consciousness style of SLACKER is interesting, although the people themselves are not. They are simply scary, and it is no wonder that they are not better than whom they replaced. Everybody before and now are motivated by self and greed, even fame (with few exceptions). This movie is brilliant insight into this problem.

For radical, positive change, I still respect Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Clinton, and William Gates the most, who all are both classic and modern. These men are necessary to ground these ultra-modern slackers.

I'M PRETTY SURE THIS IS THE DVD!.......2005-11-05

I don't know what that dude below me is talking about, the whole page says that its the DVD.

ANYWAYS... This is a very cool movie. It starts early some morning in Anytown, U.S.A (ok Austin, Texas; but really, this could be ANYWHERE) with a guy taking a cab home.
It ends about twenty four hours later with some twisted concept and I can't begin to tell you what happens in between.
All I know is that I really like this movie. The first time that I saw it, it took me almost the whole first hour to realize that nothing significant was going to happen at all. NOPE, there is absolutely zero plot to this one, we just go from one set of people to the next around a town for 24 hours.

This was RICHARD LINKLATERS first film, a couple of years before he wrote and directed DAZED AND CONFUSED. Much in the same veign the movie relys entirely on interesting dialouge and zany situations rather than any type of actual plot. Only in this one its much rougher around the edges, it doesn't stop this film from being hillarious and well acted.

I would highly recommend to any fan of RICHARD LINKLATERS or the movie DAZED AND CONFUSED.

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