Slacker [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Overview

In Richard Linklater's Slacker, a girl tells her boyfriend, "You're just pulling these things from the sh*t you read. You haven't thought it out for yourself. It's like you pasted together these bits and pieces from your authoritative sources. I don't know. I'm beginning to suspect there's nothing in there." Linklater caroms from one character to another in the college community of Austin, TX, moving through an unlinked assortment of people who like to hear themselves talk but don't like to listen very much. The characters include a cab fare (played by Linklater) who expounds to the cab driver about his theory of reality, a robber who ends up getting a tour of Austin from his victim, a man who suspects that one of the Apollo astronauts saw an alien spaceship, and a woman carrying around Madonna's Pap smear in a cloudy container. Linklater's relaxed and ironic tone depicts a collection of post-Reagan lost souls adrift in a sea of shallowness with no direction home. As one character asks a friend, "Do you ever just want to get out of this country?"

Product Details

Release Date:	09/17/2013
UPC:	0715515110419
Original Release:	1991
Rating:	R
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[Color]
Language:	English
Time:	1:40:00
Sales rank:	9,113

Special Features

Restored high-definition digital film transfer, supervised by director Richard Linklater and director of photography Lee Daniel, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD master audio soundtrack; Three audio commentaries, featuring Linklater and members of the cast and crew; It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Linklater's first feature, with commentary by the director; Woodshock (1985), a 16 mm short by Linklater and Daniel; Casting tapes featuring select "auditions"; Footage from the Slacker tenth-anniversary reunion; Early film treatment; Home movies; Ten-minute trailer for a 2005 documentary about the landmark Austin café Les Amis; Deleted scenes and alternate takes; Trailer; ; Plus: a booklet featuring essays by author and filmmaker John Pierson and Sony Pictures Classics copresident Michael Barker; reviews by critics Ron Rosenbaum and Chris Walters; production notes by Linklater; and an introduction to It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books by director Monte Hellman

Editorial Reviews

History may be written by the winners, but in movies like Slacker we learn that life's lovable losers often have a far more engaging story to tell. The spiritual anomie afflicting the generation of the then-29-year-old director Richard Linklater provides the backdrop for this meandering and essentially plot-less tale. These college-aged people in Austin, Texas have the freedom and resources to do just about anything, but they choose instead to do nothing. There is a morbid attractiveness to their subversiveness. In most cases, their non-participation in life is a well thought-out stance: "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy," as one of the slackers informs us. Like others before them (beatniks, hippies, punks), this generation of twenty-somethings need time to sort things out. The movie's titular characters represent America's subconscious; these are the midnight neuroses that we keep bottled up in our waking hours. Comparisons to such filmmakers as Luis Bunuel and Max Ophuls are apt, as Linklater's stream of consciousness direction follows a winding road that leads to no particular place at all. Ironically, this studied attempt to appear unscripted and spontaneous succeeds mainly because it is so carefully plotted. Thankfully, Linklater clearly identifies with his subjects, and celebrates their wackiness without resorting to a bitterly ironic pose that would have distanced us from the characters. The film's 97 minutes -- made for $23,000 -- provided more filmmaking bang for the buck than just about any film of the early 1990s; Slacker's no-budget breakthrough success prefigured other Sundance discoveries such as Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992) and Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994).

All Movie Guide - Dan Jardine