Slacker (1991)

Plot: A group of mostly twenty-somethings bump into each other, have strange conversations, and move along in one day in Austin, Texas.

There's no so much a plot to this movie, so I can't really give you more to go on than that. You know how with writer-director Richard Linklater's Waking Life talking about it as a lucid dream that allows the protagonist to slip into the collective unconscious is just a way of labelling what occurs on the screen in conventional forms in order to facilitate discussion of what follows? I can see now, having finally sat down with Slacker, that Waking Life is really an attempt to continue/expand on the former while conforming it to a slightly more recognizable pattern. Of course then he rotoscoped it, I'm beginning to suspect, just for funsies.

I'm having the same sort of love/hate relationship with this movie as I had with Waking Life. It can be frustrating to watch, but it grows on you as individual characters and moments float back into your mind in the days following. There's a picaresque quality to the way Linklater put the vignettes together that manages to have a certain day in the life feel that, in its best moments, nears Killer of Sheep for sheer veracity. It's wholly possible that all these conversations are going on in one day; it's just unlikely that you would hear all of them.

There's just something weird about how he made the film. As a paean to a certain place and generation, it's superb, but, as an actual film that people sit and watch, it's odd. Linklater rarely shows his non-actors' faces. A lot of the scenes feature one or more of the characters from behind. I don't recall a single close up. I'd like to praise these choices as excitingly post-modern and experimental, but I found them too distracting. In my distraction, I think I may have missed some stuff, but the movie's hazy quality deterred me from going back to check. It made me wish the whole thing was available as a collection of short stories, so I could go back over the stuff I wanted to and skip over other sections. Oh, well, I guess that's why the scene selection function exists. B