Slacker (1991)

I bought this movie decades ago when it came out on tape! I cannot tell you why I love this movie. Because I don't know why. Why I never included it in my list I don't know."Slacker" is my go-to-movie when I'm overwhelmed with life or just in a funky mood. So I watch this film and it's like good medicine. It makes me feel good, feel better. It's as if Richard Linklater made this for me. I want to be in the world he created for that 24hrs in Austin.I realize some people cannot tune into what's happening in Slacker but the movie makes sense to me.

I give this movie a 9 just for how unique the story-line (or non- story-line) is. 20-something characters and scenes come and go, seemingly at random in Austin, TX in the early 1990s. The fluid segue technique is like nothing I have seen before. There's some 'Butterfly Effect' sprinkled in. Truly, a one-of-a-kind film. You don't have to be a Gen-X/Y to like it; I'm an old goat, and I loved it and will re-watch it tonight.

If you're one of those people that goes through other reviewers' history of activities here in IMDb, you'll see that I've complained about other good directors abusing their personal "styles". And I don't mean terrible directors whose styles have none or minimum appeal to my personal taste - Michael Bay, David Cronenberg and Ang Lee, for example. I mean competent directors whose styles, although not being my favorite ones, have many good qualities which I just can't deny - and here I have a numerous list of directors with distinctive styles, like Coppola, Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Cédric Klapisch, Woody, Hitchcock, the Wachowskis, Wes Anderson, Lars von Trier and so many others. In common, these guys all were able to mesmerize me with their styles in one or two of their movies, but since it's not really my cup of tea, I didn't expect much of most of their movies to begin with.I was particularly harsh judging Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom", a movie in which I thought he took his idea of style too far, on a plot which I found to be simplistic and even disturbing. But then he came back with his style once again with "The Great Budapest Hotel", but this time with a perfect balance between using his style and creating a great storytelling experience, and I felt forced to recant most of my earlier criticism.And then there's that selective group of directors whose work I like very much, and they all have in common one more thing: I love their styles and I thought I'd never get tired of them. For some of them, this still holds true - Kubrick and, to a certain extent, the Coen Brothers. But here there's a subgroup of my favorite directors, which ended up proving me wrong about their work, as they all eventually did overuse their styles. And this list is quite big, with names most people love - Terry Gilliam, Peter Jackson, Tarantino & Rodriguez, David Fincher, Kevin Smith, Bertolucci, Gus Van Sant...Usually I get tired of their styles when watching one of these guys' latest movies, when they have been overusing it for quite a long time. That's the case for Inglorious Basterds, The Hobbit, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus or Restless.Now Linklater is moving away from the other group, of great directors whose styles never disappointed me, to this subgroup of great directors that overused a style I really like. But it's not actually a case of overusing his style, since Slacker was his first movie. It worked beautifully for me all the three times it was done by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, but specially in Waking Life (my favorite). When he decided to move away from his style, like in Bernie, The School of Rock or Fast Food Nation, the movies were good enough on their own merits, and I never missed his style.So I think it's curious that the movie when I finally said: "Enough with this pseudo-intellectual fast-talk", is actually Linklater's first movie with a wider audience. I probably would have enjoyed watching it back in 1991, but after going through three very intense episodes of the Before... series, plus allowing my mind to be mercilessly violated by complex conjectures on one of the best movies ever made - Waking Life - Slacker seems like an insult to his later work. I guess style does get perfected with time, as the Wes Anderson case should already had shown me.I know reviews are supposed to give an idea to people of what to expect from the movie, and I realize I haven't said much about the movie itself - just my usual rambles with not much focus other than that of my personal experience. But to be fair, this is not the kind of movie the general public is going for, anyways. Only obsessive Cinema lovers will make an effort to watch a college-grade movie of a guy that eventually became highly respectable.If you want to read a good description of Slacker that says everything I could have said, and better than I could have, see goff361's post on the board below, entitled "Simply Terrible".I'm saving Boyhood for last. I just hope a movie so many people seem to have loved doesn't end up being 2 hours of guys discussing how the Smurfs were made blue so kids can get used to the idea of blue people for, of course, when Krishna comes back. By the way, I'm no expert on Hinduism, but I'm pretty sure the blue guy is Vishnu, not Krishna.I guess the appeal on the Before series and on Waking Life was that, although it wasn't explicitly portrayed as stoner-talk, that's what actually allowed them to become such huge successes. In Slacker, it wasn't good stoner-talk with a point, either. The mess weed does on younger people's minds is just everywhere.This movie could actually be used to talk kids out of drugs. But no need to worry - even if they watch this and decide to never smoke a joint, all they need to do is watch Waking Life and they'll be dropping lyssäure as soon as they have the chance.

There is no actual story here, so if you need a movie to have a standard plot to legitimize it, this isn't your movie. This movie is almost entirely made up of dialogue between dozens of different and often bizarre characters, and most of the dialogue is quite quirky and humorous, especially if you live in a college town like I do where so much of this felt familiar.A lot of people are going to hate this movie, and it's easy to understand why, but it's going to depend on your personality and what preconceived notions you have about watching a film, because there is so little structure to Slacker.If you can take this movie on its own terms, it's actually fairly amusing, as it paints a quirky kind of perspective on people and life in a college town. I personally loved it, but it's not for everyone.