Here's my User Review of Richard Linklater's
Slacker that I wrote a few years ago. Some folks apparently gave unfavorable votes to my review, so it probably isn't a particularly well-written review, but still...
[Show spoiler]My first exposure to Richard Linklater's 1991 film, Slacker, was during my college years, when I saw the iconic movie posters plastered on walls next to sidewalks around Atlanta advertising the arrival of the film to indie theaters in the area. Around that same time, I interned at a microbiology lab a few blocks away from campus in an area of the city that was, to say the least, quite diverse. My outdoor lunch breaks along the steps of that building provided nonstop people-watching opportunities, from business-casual office workers to eccentric record store shoppers to mentally-ill homeless people to any other sort of random personality one can imagine. There were the two grinning guys with dreadlocks and Rastafarian hats who walked down the street on most days greeting every single person with, "Word!" There was a panhandler who told me that he was a retired opera singer who had slept outside the night before and needed breakfast money. There was a middle-aged man who stopped his car in the middle of the road and proposed marriage to the co-worker sitting out on the steps with me, because he liked her shoes. During one eventful lunch break, when I was out on the steps by myself, a long-haired man carrying a lead pipe ambled down the street while repeatedly yelling, "This is how I f**king feel!", and hitting random objects and surfaces with the lead pipe after each repetition of the above sentence. During those glorious early 1990s years, I carried a JanSport backpack over one shoulder as I made my way around campus and to my intern job, endlessly amused, horrified, saddened, inspired, and ultimately grateful for the each and every encounter with random faces along the sidewalks. Such was life in the days when people looked at one another on the sidewalk instead of looking down at their smartphones, and when random encounters along the walk had a natural rhythm to them as each one segued into the next.
I will not go so far as to say that you had to be there to appreciate Richard Linklater's Slacker, but context does go a long way with this particular Criterion title. Slacker was released nationwide two months before Nirvana's 1991 album, Nevermind, hit the airwaves, so the ensuing grunge aesthetic had not yet swept college campuses and high schools. Slacker dropped from a time period a little earlier, when Vanilla Ice, Mariah Carey, Bon Jovi, and Bell Biv DeVoe ruled the Billboard charts while alternative bands like R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Pixies pressed from inside the confines of their overlooked envelope in anticipation of a revolution that was about to break through. The scruffy rough-around-the-edges people that roam the Austin streets in Slacker are not grunge, and are, instead, just an assorted mixture of poor college kids, poorer graduate students, wayward 20-somethings, and even aged downtown residents who still have a unique spark of fascinating urgency.
Slacker is a film that is in love with people in general, and Linklater's camera tracks these wandering souls, jumping from one character to the next with the ease of big city tourist that hops from one bus or subway to another. Three guys, apparently college students, throw objects off a bridge in rebellion against the girl who jilted two of them. This scene may appear odd at first, but it ultimately makes perfect sense to those who remember their years as college students, when unlikely talismans and improvised rituals ruled the day. In the film's most stirring sequence, an elderly man with anarchist sentiments is initially held at gunpoint by a young man and then calmly takes the man for a walk while reminiscing about the Charles Whitman murders and yearning for the lively active protests by the likes of Guy Fawkes. A pretty graduate student lightly bickers with an apparent boyfriend before being greeted at a bookshelf by a JFK conspiracy enthusiast. The "Madonna pap smear" girl whose image appears on the Slacker poster art is, ironically, the most obtrusive and out-of-place character in the chain of scenes. Finally, a clean-cut student who walks quickly down the street with his backpack over one shoulder while politely listening to the musings of a UFO expert reminds me of myself as a bewildered college student all those years ago.
If you are looking for a conventional narrative in this film, I would advise you to search elsewhere. Slacker sweeps from one setting to another the city of Austin to showcase personalities instead of plot points. The film lacks any overall meaning or grand epiphany, although I am inclined to believe that it demonstrates how the way that we greet the people around us and behave around these people can gradually resonate through the day in an indirect sense to affect other people miles away from us whom we have never met. These random encounters have a rhythm to them, just as my own city street wanderings during my college years had a rhythm to them.
For me, Slacker represents an era more than anything else, and I will kindly give the film a 4.5 on a scale of five on account of nostalgic relevance. When it comes to video and audio presentation, one should not expect this Blu-ray to leap over tall buildings or fly past speeding bullets, but I believe that this is an excellent home edition of a crude 16mm film that was scrapped together with only a few thousand dollars, and I also believe that it exceeds the previous DVD presentation by a small notable margin. A handful of supplementary features that were present on the DVD edition have sadly been omitted, namely a picture gallery and an essay, but the vast majority of supplements that remain should please any new prospective fan of this wonderful time capsule of a movie.
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Gotta love the B&N sale! (Also got Rush Hour, but I know that's not part of the 
)
....and there's just so many other titles I know I want. On the other hand; after this election campaign, a film like Jellyfish Eyes might seem rather tame. 
Mah 401K!
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