Anticipating Linklater's "Boyhood"

have not seen this, but of course will ASAP.

i did sorta find myself wishing, halfway through, that maybe gus van sant or terrence malick were directing, maybe just because the direction is - understandably, maybe necessarily - sort of a workmanlike, through parts of the film.

i suppose this could be a be seen as a positive? I mean, we already have the Tree of Life, right? though i agree i'd probably be way more excited for this with a different director--one perhaps more attuned to the ineffable strangeness of being a child--than a naturalist like linklater.

that said, i look forward to experiencing this on whatever terms it lays down.

So, for everyone's future convenience, I will take it as read that this one technical change in approach is of such vast import that it has created not just a different, somewhat more believable and therefore affecting piece of storytelling, but has moved this film into a wholly new sphere of artistic possibility, able to say things that could not have been said, to elicit emotions that films have never before elicited.

― Aimless, Tuesday, June 17, 2014 9:23 AM (11 hours ago)

point i was making is that the "gimmick" has (at least potential) artistic value in itself. not as a means to something else, but in a process-as-end sense. sure, you could tell the story some other way, but as schlump points out, the story told needn't be our only or even our primary focus when evaluating film as art.

But, as you are absolutely clear that I was totally off-base, would you mind saying what you think was gained by using the same actor over 12 years of shooting that had no connection to what I imagined would be gained through that approach?

I DON'T KNOW BECAUSE, LIKE YOU, I HAVEN"T SEEN THE MOVIE

jesus, what the fuck is this argument about?

saw it last night and loved it

and it's not just the kid that ages in the film but other family members too. which makes it even more of a beautiful premise imo

Aimless no aspect of any film is the only aspect, is the thing. Saying ah but if everything else about it is no good it won't be any good is not very insightful

Also the decision to approach this one particular aspect in a very unusual way may impact your response to it in ways as yet unanticipated by you :o

This goes for any decision in any movie

yup

what the fuck is this argument about?

Me:

You can develop the story year by year if you want to and there's no penalty to pay in suspension of disbelief.

schlump:

that isn't true at all

stop

done

:D

This kid looks more like Lukas Haas than James Dean to me.

Ellar’s boyhood bore little resemblance to Mason’s — his strikingly free-range adolescence was more of a millennial update on the Austin slacker archetype familiar from Linklater’s other movies — but young Ellar didn’t always distinguish between the set and the world. Only after seeing the movie did he realize that he’d watched one particularly exciting Astros game, complete with a serendipitous home run, not with his own dad but with Ethan Hawke. He also began to see how deeper currents in his own life were reflected in Mason’s — especially his own parents’ divorce and tensions with a stepfather. “I don’t know how much I talked to Rick about that, but I’m sure he saw it,” says Coltrane.

“I was very angsty from a very young age,” he adds. “The way people start acting when they’re 15, I started being at 8.” Hawke remembers one of his first meetings with Coltrane: “He told me that Waking Life” — Linklater’s animated, plotless, metaphysical fantasia — “was his favorite movie. There’s not a lot of 7-year-olds that have seen Waking Life.”

http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/ellar-coltrane-on-his-12-year-movie-role.html

Only after seeing the movie did he realize that he’d watched one particularly exciting Astros game, complete with a serendipitous home run, not with his own dad but with Ethan Hawke.

dat's nuts!

you'd think there'd be a disparity in the scent at least

I was glad we got that scene, but what's unique about Boyhood is that it skips a lot of the scenes you might expect to find in a coming-of-age story like this one. It's more interested in a good conversation than a first kiss.

That’s the peculiar genius of the movie, and the cumulative effect of it is that by not hitting the “TV moments,” when the movie ends, you almost feel like you’ve seen every moment of that kid’s life. You intuit all the big ones. Someone made the comment that in almost all of my scenes, I’m driving — but that’s what you usually do with your dad! When you spend time with your dad, he’s either at work, asleep, or driving you somewhere.

really on point i think

boy, the critics really are ecstatic over this. i feel like linklater is getting a bit overrated these days and that's going to haunt his reputation in a few years. i say that as a fan. maybe it's just that before midnight didn't stir me in any way; it felt kind of hollow and forgettable. but i could have been in a bad mood when i saw it. but it retroactively (?) soured the whole trilogy a bit, for me anyway.

i worry too that all the hyperbole (?) over "boyhood" is going to ruin it for me. but who knows? i'm still looking forward to it.

does this at all resemble the boyhood section of tree of life. because that was rather wonderful. does this film try for the same lyricism? or is it more (deliberately) mundane?

funny that i have been reading about this film even before it got started -- when it was just the proverbial twinkle in linklater's eye.

i definitely remember him talking about it around the time of "waking life"

Supposedly comes out this weekend, but I don't see showtimes in San Francisco...?

Even the trailer had me tearing up, so I'm pretty sure I'll dig this.

i admit i'm more excited about seeing dawn of the planet of the apes

Why choose?

i'm not choosing, i'm just a bit surprised at myself.

Before Midnight was so fake that it made MGM look like Cassavetes.

i assume you refer to the MGM that made "22 jump street" :)

Random Harvest starring Melissa Leo and Jonah Hill

but yeah, i found it fake, but i could have been looking at it from the most unflattering angle.

i remember hating richard brody's review when i read it (before having seen the film). it's still stupid and self-regarding in the usual brody way, but i think it was built on an accurate observation that he inflated into a rather misguided attack on "naturalism" (funny from a defender of mumblecore!). the observation being that the muted stylistic approach of the last two "before" films is treated as a guarantor of realism when it isn't really any such thing. the first film is rather more obviously and expressively stylized, and i'd argue that linklater is probably aware of the stylization of the latter two films as well. yet there's still something in brody's basic reaction to the film....

anyway.

(random harvest is a powerful film BTW)

re mumblecore: i see a few critics fawning over joe swanberg's films (smart people like dan sallitt and "smart-set" people like brody) and i want to take a gun to my head. wtf. i 'd rather watch almost any TV drama than a joe swanberg film. i'd watch a marathon of "taxi brooklyn" to avoid seeing another swanberg film.

Have seen two or three Swanberg films, he's OK, at least some of the time.

I agree RL's been overrated of late, but the only 3 films of his I've really liked in the last dozen years are A Scanner Darkly, Me and Orson Welles, and Fast Food Nation.

Holly Willis FC piece on Boyhood:

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/richard-linklater-boyhood

Release dates across the U.S. (scroll down a little):

http://thefilmstage.com/news/find-out-when-and-where-you-can-see-richard-linklaters-boyhood/

Thank you! Going to see it on Saturday...

The thing this reminded me most of all was Marclay's The Clock - films about time passing, and where the content constantly alerts you to the film's actual duration (ie "Oh he's fifteen now, must be about twenty minutes to go").

Film is too long, and the last third is by far the weakest.

Hardly gone to the cinema in the last month - World Cup and all that.

Making up for it, hopefully should see nearly three hours of this and nearly five hours of Norte - The End of History to compensate.

Agreed it was too long. And would directors please stop casting their kids in major roles? The sister's horrendous acting really sticks out. Maybe it was just too overhyped, or the reviewers are falling in love with their own "they grow up so fast" schtick, but I was bored to death, and I love his movies.

Kudos to Patricia Arquette for going zaftig, though--you could hear the anorexic New York audience gasp in horror when she first came on screen

saw this last night, it was singular and great. so much minutiae, so much to watch and look at. emotionally overwhelming in virtually every way.
i could have watched 3 more hours tbh.

i haven't seen the film, but i HAVE read the thread (lol), and i'm probably alone in enjoying the little dustup above about the utility of having the same actor throughout.

lorelai linklater a real highlight of this, the most vibrant part of the first half of the film. so many good lines w/the asshole stepdad.

she kinda disappeared in the second part but you are otm about her humor in the beginning
the blue cup made my heart sink so hard. i knew what was coming.

Lol'd heartily at the scene where she was singing "Ooops I did it again" while beating her little brother up.

(Potentially interesting retromanic thesis on how/if at all the use of songs marks the different years. Generally the tech is more evocative of a particular year)

The songs totally marked the passage of time -- no question about that!

Loved the movie! Some bits seemed unnecessary (condescending plumber "arc" in particular), but so many powerful moments. Lorelei Linklater was great, and pitch-perfect as a sullen teenager. So heartbreaking that you never see their step-siblings again.

The movie really captured the way that kids are completely powerless (and usually mostly-clueless) to the circumstances of their adults in their lives. But also how resilient they are to all of the chaos. Tragic and hopeful at the same time.

the last third is by far the weakest.

Sure, in that life's final third is by far the weakest.

Admittedly, tho, the longer it went the more frustrating it got -- but that played at least in part as a reflection of the now post-pubescent Mason ascribing tentative significance to his own existence, compared to the more fragmented, sensory nature of the earliest years.

Like Tree of Life, it's made by an adult who no matter what he feels about boyhood has mixed opinions about manhood.

Like Tree of Life, it's made by an adult who no matter what he feels about boyhood has mixed opinions about manhood.

― You are exactly why people root for the apes (Eric H.), Tuesday, July 22, 2014 3:54 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just saw the movie last night and I think I might've 'watched' it in a very different light than what has been discussed so far here.

One of my favorite bookends in this movie was the contrast between the ~9 year old Mason having his long hair shorn off at the behest of stepdad 1 and the teenaged Mason blowing off stepdad 2 when he gives Mason shit about the earrings and nail polish. Basically this isn't a particularly queer movie but I am pretty into anything that celebrates resistance to the intergenerational enforcement of masculinity.

Also I was amused at how by the end of the movie Mason had more or less grown up into a rambling, contemplative, slightly out-there Richard Linklater character whose musings in the desert wouldn't have been out of place in Waking Life.

There was some great parts in this...but there was so many cringe inducing moments that made me feel like I was watching an episode of some WB sitcom monstrosity.

The scene where the Latin American comes to the table to "thank" Patricia Arquette for telling him he was "smart enough" and that he should go to college was some truly vile and condescending nonsense.

The third part of the film and the scenes between Mason and his gf was full of horrible acting and felt like I was watching a One Tree Hill/Dawson's Creek B-side.

I could go on but there were many moments that were either just straight up corny and cliche riddled at best or condescending and completely unaware at worst....

It wasn't a bad film by any means but the hype is not justified.

Also, for all of the talk about innovation...I also found it aesthetically very boring and bland.

Yeah the thing with the plumber-then-restaurant-manager was kinda garbage.

But I unreservedly love Teen Feelings as a genre and I have no objections to any of the girlfriend stuff.

For as many plot elements as there are that feel like they were transposed from a much inferior movie, Linklater has a way of presenting them in ways that seem surprising and observational and of-the-moment. Like someone said upthread (I think), the restaurant scene ought to be a Hallmark moment, but Patricia Arquette seems so unmoved by the man's testimonial that you're not even sure she remembers the incident at all. The drunken stepfather does stock villainous things, but then some of his asides emphasize the self-destructive angle, which I wasn't expecting since thru the eyes of a child, he's just being straight up terrifying.

That all said, Tree of Life hit me deeper for sidestepping plot almost entirely.

I want to see it again, def. I watched Reality Bites on the weekend & his Boyhood dad feels a bit like grown up Troy when I think back on it :)

It had a "lightness" but there was always the looming threat of something traumatic on the horizon. Refreshing that it never really went there.

a few other thoughts:

- my wife and i thought a lot about ethan hawke's transformation -- selling the cool car, getting a minivan, marrying a square-ish girl from a texan christian family, not scoffing too much at the bible and church, growing the moustache. with the rest of the alcoholic husbands throughout the movie, we thought that maybe hawke was once and alcoholic too and maybe in the background was doing work to get sober and starting a new christian life was part of that. there seemed to be a lot of focus on people pouring drinks at mason's graduation party and we noticed hawke's character was drinking water so we were convinced of this. but then that scene when he is talking to mason at the music club about mason's ex-girlfriend he is casually enjoying a beer, so that was it for our theory i guess. we were wrong. still that transformation was very interesting to watch.

- like others i really hated the restaurant scene with the mexican guy. as an hispanic i was just weirded out seeing this guy thank this white woman and her white family for changing his life based on one totally obvious piece of advice ("go to school"!!!) that would occur to most people thinking about striving for success. it was the one sour moment for me in the film and i thought it was totally unnecessary. then my wife pointed out that there was something incongruous about that advice, about how yea the mom went through night school and worked hard for a career but at the same time she seemed unsatisfied and restless throughout her life and never quite found stability or satisfaction.

- i thought it was a little strange that mason drove by himself to his first year at college -- that seems so far outside the norm for most college kids and their families but i guess it really wasn't far off for mason's character and his mom's character. sam and mason seemed very independent throughout the film and their mom seemed mostly hands off (e.g. it was the stepfather that was pissed that mason would come home later, not the mom, she didn't care much about him getting high or drinking).

- anyways i thought the first day at college thing was done so perfectly. like this is such a huge thing to get to college on your first day and realize "i can do whatever the fuck i want." sure, i can eat some pot brownies and skip this orientation thing to go hiking with these people i just met, that sounds great. i didn't have quite a cool experience as mason on my first day at college but i totally identified with that sense of freedom and i thought linklater did a good job conveying that freedom and openness.

yeah I also had an almost movie-like skip orientation moment. It was literally me, my roommate, and my roommate's cool friend (who I wound up close friends with) about to start an orientation sack race, looking at each other, and saying "Let's get the fuck out of here." Unfortunately it declined from there and consisted mostly of us trying and failing to get into frat parties.

marcos on at least ten different marks

they should have called this "boring white people over time"

id def of seen it sooner if that was the title

they should have called this "boring white people over time"

― chaki (kurt schwitterz), Friday, August 7, 2015 11:27 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love how that title works on two levels

i finally saw hoop dreams and can report that boyhood is basically like a white hoop dreams, though lamer.

Just rewatched Hoop Dreams last week. (I was thinking of showing it to my grade 6 class--once I got up to the fifth or sixth thing I was going to need to mute, I abandoned the idea.)

I can see the comparison. Love both films.

Arthur's mom getting her nursing certification = Mason's mom going back to school. Films very much about motherhood, too (and fatherhood, though not as much).

the wrong one won the oscar.

Yes, Hoop Dreams was robbed of the Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar 20-odd years ago.

lol

lol, that should have read AN oscar

I just watched this for the first time the other day and loved it. It so vividly captures how childhood is a prison. Wish the acting was better all around - Ellar is OK, Lorelai is very good, main adult players are all great, but a lot of the kids & people who appear in a scene or two are rough. Loved all the loose ends - the leering restaurant manager, the step-kids, the second stepdad appearing in only three scenes - and the elision of the everyday over big, obvious moments. I like Linklater but I'm not the biggest fan, I find him kind of dull or "simple" for lack of a better word, and whatever bugs or disappoints me about him is all in that last scene and the final lines of the movie, which he wrote back in 2002. But good lord I'm glad Terrence Malick had nothing to do with this. I remember reading about it in ~2004 and being convinced that someone crucial would die before completion. I wasn't seeing movies so much when it finally came out in 2014 and now it's been four years and I've only just gotten around to it. Easily Linklater's best. Don't know why people love Dazed and Confused so much.

The plumber reappearing after all those years was the only completely ridiculous and unbelievably stupid and tone deaf moment of the movie. Felt like a commercial for DeVry University.

I think ultimately the best thing about this is how much of an ambitious undertaking it was and how mild and ordinary the result was.

Never been a Linklater superfan, but find myself appreciating him more with age.

https://www.metacritic.com/browse/movies/score/metascore/all/filtered

The Top 5 rated films of all time:

Citizen Kane
Godfather
Rear Window
Casablanca
Boyhood

Science!

I don't know if this was ever posted on ILX--don't see anything on this thread, and nothing comes up when I search the filmmaker's name. I'd never seen it till it turned up on my FB wall today. Looks like he beat Boyhood by about 15 years (and I know there are the Brown sisters, who got their photograph taken every year for four decades).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfqpqiTMUEg