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Richard Linklater's Slacker is a movie I've been waiting to see for a while, after hearing all manner of buildup over its unusual structure and massive influence on indie film. So while in America I picked up the Criterion DVD blind for $40, took it home and watched.
I was not disappointed.
Slacker takes place over the course of a single day in Linklater's home town of Austin, Texas. Lacking any conventional plot, the film instead drifts from character to character as they go about their lives. The majority of the characters are certified wackos, who spend the movie speaking at length about their personal philosophies and monomanias (ranging from pop culture and conspiracy theory to individual hopes and dreams).
Because Slacker does not feature any easily identifiable structure (indeed, one character remarks "the underlying order is chaos"), the film's strength has to come from the characters and the dialogue. On a personal level, all of the actors manage a decent job at least, coming from Linklater's own casting philosophy that the characters should come from within the actors themselves. As a result, the actors aren't really actors in the strictest sense - rather, they are being their characters. It makes the acting seem much stronger than your average zero-budget feature.
Slacker's "storytelling" style has one drawback, though. With an ordinary movie, you will feel a sort of connection with the characters - like them or hate them, you become interested in their actions within the story. With Slacker, the quickly-changing cast doesn't leave any room for you to get attached to a character before they quickly disappear around a corner. Some of the people's stories may interest you, some may not. On a single run-through, you can expect to find yourself bored with what's going on and waiting for the next interesting person to pop up. To catch everything, you'll have to watch the movie more than once.
One thing I noticed from the very first frame is how well-made Slacker actually is. The budget is often cited as being $23,000, but it looks surprisingly polished. The camera never quite stops moving - even when it focuses on people sitting at a table it still sways gently without drawing much attention. That's when it stops - most of the time, the camera is tracking characters as they walk and talk to each other before it starts tracking a new person. Even the "home-video" segments, taken by characters once or twice throughout the film, don't grate with amateur technique but even call to mind old experimental movies with their perfection of the imperfect.
I had high expectations when I saw Slacker, and it reached them reasonably well. Linklater, an art and literature buff, managed to take influence from the unlikeliest of places and craft them into a compelling tale of "nothing going on". Never before has nothing at all looked like so much.
SLACKER
(Richard Linklater, 1991)
(Richard Linklater, 1991)
Richard Linklater's Slacker is a movie I've been waiting to see for a while, after hearing all manner of buildup over its unusual structure and massive influence on indie film. So while in America I picked up the Criterion DVD blind for $40, took it home and watched.
I was not disappointed.
Slacker takes place over the course of a single day in Linklater's home town of Austin, Texas. Lacking any conventional plot, the film instead drifts from character to character as they go about their lives. The majority of the characters are certified wackos, who spend the movie speaking at length about their personal philosophies and monomanias (ranging from pop culture and conspiracy theory to individual hopes and dreams).
Because Slacker does not feature any easily identifiable structure (indeed, one character remarks "the underlying order is chaos"), the film's strength has to come from the characters and the dialogue. On a personal level, all of the actors manage a decent job at least, coming from Linklater's own casting philosophy that the characters should come from within the actors themselves. As a result, the actors aren't really actors in the strictest sense - rather, they are being their characters. It makes the acting seem much stronger than your average zero-budget feature.
Slacker's "storytelling" style has one drawback, though. With an ordinary movie, you will feel a sort of connection with the characters - like them or hate them, you become interested in their actions within the story. With Slacker, the quickly-changing cast doesn't leave any room for you to get attached to a character before they quickly disappear around a corner. Some of the people's stories may interest you, some may not. On a single run-through, you can expect to find yourself bored with what's going on and waiting for the next interesting person to pop up. To catch everything, you'll have to watch the movie more than once.
One thing I noticed from the very first frame is how well-made Slacker actually is. The budget is often cited as being $23,000, but it looks surprisingly polished. The camera never quite stops moving - even when it focuses on people sitting at a table it still sways gently without drawing much attention. That's when it stops - most of the time, the camera is tracking characters as they walk and talk to each other before it starts tracking a new person. Even the "home-video" segments, taken by characters once or twice throughout the film, don't grate with amateur technique but even call to mind old experimental movies with their perfection of the imperfect.
I had high expectations when I saw Slacker, and it reached them reasonably well. Linklater, an art and literature buff, managed to take influence from the unlikeliest of places and craft them into a compelling tale of "nothing going on". Never before has nothing at all looked like so much.