Slacker (Linklater, 1990): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm
This 35mm presentation (introduced by season programme assistant Sean Atkinson), also screened on January 29th, is part of the 'Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague' season at BFI Southbank. Details here.Chicago Reader review:
Richard
Linklater's delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second
feature (1991) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture
of Austin, Texas; it doesn't have a continuous plot, but it's brimming
with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised,
though it's all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some
of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime.
“Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality,”
remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and
in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply
illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and
assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists,
college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and
layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of
narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly
evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of
60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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