Anticipating Linklater's "Boyhood"

Amateurist I agree with you pretty much, as noted above.

Oh I saw this, and felt the same way as I felt when watching Waking Life. It's impossible to really enjoy this dialogue-ultra-realism without feeling that you're being talked at instead of talked to. Most scenes and situations left me feeling with a desire to participate, like, converse with the characters, but feeling unengaged by the fact that this is meant to be performance, and there is nothing performative about it, it is a recreation of interactivity, but with interactivity removed. I don't know if I can type this as well as I can explain it verbally :/

as usual, i think my disappointment in the film (even though my expectations were low), and the pretty much unanimous critical praise, caused me to be a little harsh. it was definitely affecting at times, and i don't think i disagree with anything tipsy mothra says, although i admit to not being sure what distinguishes an honest/obvious flaw from a dishonest/nonobvious one. i think sometimes linklater coasts on good intentions, or very nearly, and doesn't apply enough filmmaking skill.

i guess the biggest flaw for me was how, for the last 45 or 60 minutes or so, the film felt less like a concatenation of micro-events than a deliberate attempt to track and take stock of "milestones." by the last few scenes this got rather oppressive, with the constant discussions of what college'll be like, etc. it's quite possible to defend these scenes (and all of the banal conversations that take place in them) in terms of "realism," but that doesn't make the experience of watching them any less torpid.

above all, i guess i thought the film could have stood to be a lot weirder--or just more distinctive. i think the childhood scenes in "tree of life" have some of the same flaws, but the scene where the protagonist sneaks into his neighbor's home, masturbates on her nightgown, then desperately flees with it and tosses it in a stream, had about 10x more energy than nearly anything in linklater's 170-minute movie... :(

in a way boyhood felt like observing childhood from the outside, from a distance even, rather than conveying a good sense of the inner life of its protagonist or his family. maybe that speaks to the limitations of the '70s-style realism that one of you points out above.

then again, maybe i just had it in for this film, and all the critics are right. i wouldn't be surprised if that were true.

the unvarnished acting was kind of interesting in itself, but definitely kept me from feeling like i was actually witnessing personalities taking shape.

the main boy grew into a pretty amazingly good-looking dude, i'll grant that.

i did like the moment when BAM! ethan hawke is suddenly uncool. moustache (not a hipster one, either), shirt tucked into pants, minivan.

re. all the "i remember the early '00s" stuff upthread, this film basically documents a period where i was to a greater or lesser extent detached from pop culture so i had few if any of those moments of recognition. this was the first time i had seen anything from a lady gaga video! and i've still never read nor watched anything harry potter. this is far from a criticism but maybe it goes a little way toward explaining why this left me mostly cold?

i'm talking to myself i guess, sorry all :(

i loved this film but it is pretty flawed. i think linklater was maybe so overwhelmed by the scope of the film or maybe he just thought that the concept itself was notable in itself that he couldnt/decided he didnt have to really do much work on the scripting/characters (id be interested to see how much of the screen time has dialogue, as it felt quite minimal). a lot of the plotting was rudimentary, its like a bullet point script of a coming of age movie, i would have liked there to be some more fleshing out. the latino restaurant guy coming up at the end was just bizarre and unnecessary (as well as kind of insulting), two drunks in a row might have been fine had we gotten to learn a bit more about their characters (and it also seemed like a bit of dad-bashing going on), the ending should have been cut when he arrives at uni, i didnt need to see the hiking romance stuff. but despite all that, the film did succeed in making me think that 'fuck, life is short'. and theres lots of lovely little observations and moments, like tolerating others views such as the ethan hawke's new in laws, and just seeing the care between them. it made a change from seeing father/son relationships that lack communication. also just seeing the acceptance of people changing and this not necessarily being a bad thing - i watched dazed n confused after this and it reminded me that RL is just really compassionate to his characters, which is something i really like about him. but the films main asset was simply documenting the passage of time, and that in itself was almost enough.

alternatively, the film also made me think that RL is still (just?) an indie filmmaker at heart... i wonder if the ambition here was too much for him to handle, but this is an indie epic, so i guess i can cut it some slack for being about little moments rather than the bigger picture perhaps.

Its a film that avoided drama - don't think what he replaced that with was that compelling (and not for nearly three hours) but that the attempt to do so was commendable.

But yes it is striking that the one moment me and the friend I went to see with remarked upon the most was the 20 mins of the falling out off 2nd drunk husband and Arquette => the most conventional of the piece.

By coincidence I saw a film about 'boyhood' that is nearly as long at the BFI last night. Hsien's A Time to Live and the Time to Die. Roughly similar times period, but just miles, miles better in nearly every department.

"Its a film that avoided drama - don't think what he replaced that with was that compelling (and not for nearly three hours) but that the attempt to do so was commendable."

thats pretty otm.

i saw that hsien movie at the bfi too. im still thinking about it but find it hard to say why exactly. it felt much less 'scrappier' than boyhood (much more thought behind it).

mark cousins was recommending jeff preiss' 'stop' which sounds very similar to boyhood too:
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2012/films/jeff-preiss

The last, most gruesome death, will stay with me for a long time. Just how he takes it further than you were expecting to.

Boyhood was made over a long period - both are unconventional in different ways (and w/additional cultural differences), the Hsien portrayed the growing in far more engaging ways, i.e. I do expect boys in films to get into trouble with other boys, which doesn't really happen - indeed Linklater specifically tells you as much in the scene where two boys get up his face in school, a line he will not develop because it appears to be too conventional. Linklater will be boring in other ways that don't justify the running time.

In Boyhood the adults are much more of a problem. In the Hsien I loved how you do things besides playing and fighting: you will cook and take care of the youngest and eldest - because that will be needed where there are no care services, where the weak and frail have nowhere to go. But still...correspondences are inevitable where you still need the space to 'make yourself': experiment with a new look, find a girl, pass an exam. I like how all that played out much more in the Hsien. In the Linklater there is never a scene as wrenching than the one where Ah-hsiao has to choose between taking part in a gang fight or whether to stay w/his dying mother. The later scene where Ah-hsiao hands over the letter to the girl and her reaction was funnier and more touching than anything going on between Sheena and Mason - of course its cultural differences informing the scenes but Linklater lamely chose to follow a 'Before..' pattern.

I liked it a lot, but I wouldn't sing its praises (and probably wouldn't run out to see it again). It was a... nice experience.
My favorite moments were the things left unsaid - Ethan Hawke jumping from hot redhead at the bowling alley to baby and minivan w/ different woman, "are we ever going to see them again" and never another mention of the step-siblings, etc..

W/ Linklater I'm never sure how much we're supposed to sympathize with the dumb things his characters say (p. much everything teenaged Mason says about the world, or any of the conspiracy theorists/etc. of other films), but I always appreciate his basic kindness - the churchgoing step-grandparents who've completely accepted Mason and his sister and there's never a hint of young liberal Mason rebelling against going to church that one day.

The first stepfather was the biggest misstep in the film - he came off with a creepey 'he's going to be an evil step-dad' vibe from the first moment.

xpost - the last scene in time to live is very gruesome, but also kind of odd and angering (though it made up for it when the doctor showed his judgement of the kids). hsien does like underplaying drama too though... the diff in boyhood is that where you might expect some sort of cause and effect ripples, it was absent. hsien also packed in a lot more political/family detail (at times i think everyone was just talking to each other in reminisces), but i see BH as a deliberate reaction to coming of age movies (like dazed and confused even, which didnt ignore tensions between characters), it just played it a little too neutral. its ordinary could look a bit mannered by the end of it (and the happy romantic ending also killed its previous stubbornness in refusing certain conventions).

in terms of LONG sprawling american teen movies, boyhood made me appreciate margaret more.

Hsien's A Time to Live and the Time to Die

sorry to be pedantic, but the family name is Hou, and his given name is Hsiao-Hsien. so it should be Hou's Time to Live and a Time to Die. that's a devastating film.

btw the Chinese title translates to "some memories from childhood" or more idiomatically "childhood memories." which is a heck of a lot better (and more modst) of a title than the biblical reference that Edward Yang suggested and that ended up as the English title.

modst = modest

but yeah remembering the hou film kinds of puts any interest in reconsidering the linklater to rest. the films aren't in the same league... as formal achievements, as emotional experiences.

speaking of boyhood, how long was she supposed to have been married to husband no. 2 (jerkoff alcoholic professor)?

I haven't seen the Hou film. Boyhood isn't as good as Pather Panchali, The 400 Blows, or Naked Childhood, either. It's an achievement, though, I think, and I'm not so eager to brush it aside.

Yes I agree that was unfair, it was just weirdly coincidental to see these within the space of a week.

Seeing Hou's (take your point on the name amt) follow-up to that @BFI. In fact I've always wanted to see all these early Taiwanese new wave films (having only seen a couple before) and find many are to be screened in the next two weeks!!!

Yeah I was talking with a friend of mine about this movie yesterday and he said he was a bit underwhelmed by it for similar reasons like amateurist said. When the kid became a teen, it got boring as he felt he wasn't that interesting. There was no freaking out on drugs/alcohol moments. Maybe that was too obvious, maybe it was down to the fact he had 2 step-dads that were fuck-ups or maybe it was the kids unusually chill temprament, I dunno.

For me the overall experience of this film outweighed any particular flaws -- I felt almost like I had taken some kind of a time-lapse/voyeurism drug. I also liked the big-heartedness of the film, e.g. as some observed above the way the bible-n-guns grandparents were also very loving and accepting toward a kind of misfit kid who wasn't even their own blood. The worst thing was probably the bit with the mexican gardner who went back to school solely based on what angelic white lady told him. I also thought the film was a little unfair to dads and male authority figures. The men of the film seemed very rigidly divided into two types -- controlling authoritarians who needed alcohol to smooth over the pain of holding it together and who had violent tendencies, and loose, liberal types who were full of good intentions but not really responsible or consistent. I mean I guess the dad does eventually turn into a kind of happy balance of the two, just too late for Mason. But anyway it was believable from the character's point of view that male authority figures in his life would be divided along those lines. Overall I liked the complexities of how Mason turned out, and the ambiguity around what he might be destined for - whether he was a "serious artist" or an artsy kid who was going to fuck around a lot.

i expected to find this movie hugely moving no matter what, just because at the start of the movie the kid is only a little older than my son is right now, so the idea of following a kid from that age to 18...forget it. but it started out with the production values and acting/plotting of a Lifetime original movie and even as i warmed up to the characters and got pulled into the story it still just seemed so substandard in so many ways other than the obvious ways in which it's ambitious and exceptional. felt like there were more laughs in the second half as you got to know the characters, though. i liked it overall, but it took me a while to get past how amateurish and hamfisted it felt.

It definitely started out feeling a bit like Every Divorce Movie Ever. I had my doubts in the first 15 mins or so, but as the characters got more fleshed out I warmed to the a lot. There were a lot of nice observations too, like the fact that after leaving a drunk and violent stepdad, the adolescent daughter is mostly just pissed that she has to go to a different school. I thought there was a lot if subtle stuff about the resilience of kids in the real world, as opposed to the overly mythologized view of "trauma"

The daughter was credibly unbearable in that scene.

Kids are amazingly resilient. I've had many students who by grade 6 are attending their sixth or seventh school. Sometimes more--I remember a girl who, no exaggeration, was on her ninth or tenth school, with, not surprisingly, a rather hellish homelife to match (which I didn't fully learn about till just before she once again left for another school). But on the days she attended, she did her best.

i liked it overall, but it took me a while to get past how amateurish and hamfisted it felt.

the overall experience of this film outweighed any particular flaws

^^co-sign both of these

Saw it on Friday and was generally underwhelmed too. I actually wish it was even less eventful, because the dramatic moments (ie drunk stepdad) felt really cheezy, while the nothing moments felt more real and interesting. I personally got more enjoyment out of the middle stretch that had less drama. A lot of the problems came from trying to strike a balance between the overarching concept of just following along a boy's life without trying to "tell a story" (don't know how to phrase this) and the practicality of having to cut in at certain moments in the life, which are obviously going to be more dramatic/meaningful moments. An awkward compromise between dramatic storytelling and omniscient observing.

Ethan Hawke was fantastic. I felt bad for Patricia Arquette since she didn't really have as much room to stretch out in her character, I wish they had given her more warm moments with her kids. I could relate to the passivity of Mason Jr.'s character.

An awkward compromise between dramatic storytelling and omniscient observing.

I don't know if this was Linklater's intention at all, but I saw the film as being about the narrative that everyone imposes on their own life.

i expected to find this movie hugely moving no matter what, just because at the start of the movie the kid is only a little older than my son is right now, so the idea of following a kid from that age to 18...

Yeah me too. I did find some of it very true-to-life (kids fighting scenes, the sort-of wannabe profundity of teenage Mason), but never really got moved in the way I thought I would. OTOH, broke into tears while watching the original Muppet Movie on Saturday (at the Castro theater) with my boys.

There was definitely something interesting going on with all those moments of tension -- the board doesn't break in the kid's face, the texting while driving doesn't cause an accident, the second stepdad gets a little menacing but not violent, otoh the first stepdad does get violent. I felt like there was something there maybe about randomness/chaos theory, the way each moment has the potential to lead to multiple outcomes. Most dangerous moments don't lead to harm, a few do.

I also thought the kid's passivity was not only relatable but made sense as a response to his life -- he was someone who had learned to go with the flow because so much was out of his hands.

the overall experience of this film outweighed any particular flaws

i guess i had the opposite reaction, my general boredom outweighed the mildly charming or moving moments

i mean there's no way that i actively disliked most of this movie, it's too good-natured and the actors too affable for that. but given all the accolades i think it's understandable that i expected a lot more. or... actually... i didn't expect a lot more, necessarily. i got more or less what i actually expected. but the critics really seem to be reviewing some other, much more achieved, film.

the last few music cues were pretty overbearing, i thought

in general i thought that the last 45(?) minutes betrayed the film's concept, at least what i understand to be its concept, in that the dialogue was constantly circling around questions of life's meaning... and of the changes that were taking place and were about to take place in mason's life. it felt like a very self-conscious, and very conventional (and tedious!) coming-of-age film. something a little more random, stranger, and/or less forthcoming would have been more interesting.

i dunno, i guess my general feeling is that good intentions only get you so far, and this film was running mostly on good intentions. :(

and honestly i've been kind of revising my opinion of linklater's films lately and this one doesn't help matters. the only one i really like anymore is slacker, and maybe i'll keep the torch burning for before sunrise. but i'm scared to revisit it.

I liked Arquette a lot, in part because the disappearance of intimate moments with the kids in the middle stretch were a result of the movie's shift in pod to Mason, so we see her through his eyes as a woman who by the time of her second marriage is good at her job, confident, and an excellent host. That's why her bitter confession in the last 15 minutes had more power for me. For about an hour we've thought she'd found fulfillment beyond her children.

*shift in pov

i think that's really otm and also what made my heart break for my many mom friends

Yeah, I'm a sucker for "Is That All There Is" moments.

me too

hopefully she'll spend the rest of her life breaking out the booze and having a ball

My wife and I had differing reactions to that moment, she was like "this is sad and tragic, she didn't find a companion and wound up alone in spite of her best efforts" I was more like "this is how she feels atm because her kids are leaving but she still has healthy life ahead of her, and we all die alone anyway." Neither seems "wrong."

tough but fair, salud

Hold up. You told your wife "we all die alone anyway"?!

lol yeah, it's no darker than the stuff she says

jeez Eric i thought you liked the Addams family

the first drunk dad was fine bc believe it or not over the course of 12 years a kid will often have to deal with one or two straight up villains in their lives and sometimes (against the notions of a lot of quiet, nothing-happens cinema), excitement (the bad kind) happens. also i don't understand the urges people have to making mason's story more indicative of what's "normal". sure, keep the era and cultural cues around him normalized for common experiences (i don't really like that either) but there's no reason for that to bleed into his individual story, when individual stories never actually reflect ultimate, lowest common denominator normalcy and it'd be creepy if linklater was going for such universality

also youth trauma is not "mythologized" get that shit out of this thread

Sorry I think "mythologized" is not really the right word for what I'm talking about. More like making certain "traumas" central to the childhood narrative, as though all people are shaped primarily by the relative presence or absence of "trauma" in their childhoods, as though the defining categories of person are "person whose parents divorced" and "person whose parents did not divorce" or "person whose parent hit them" and "person whose parent did not hit them."

I went into this movie with excitement, which I've never had with a Linklater film. And even with shared childhood experiences, drunks and abuse, for some reason I wasn't moved by much. I don't know why. It was a nice movie.

What is Boyhood?

There are nods to Linklater’s previous films dropped in for fun (David Blackwell reprises his role as the liquor store clerk who sold Wiley Wiggins’ Mitch a sixer in Dazed and Confused), but it’s the feeling that Boyhood functions as part-autobiography that’s most intriguing. Linklater was born in Houston and raised in a lower-middle-class environment by a single mom (who was surely the model for Arquette’s Olivia), and the economic constraints of the family’s living situation that we see in the film are depicted in a way that seems to come from first-hand experience. Beyond that, Linklater has remarked that specific scenes—such as when Mason Jr. digs up a bird that he buried a few days earlier to see how it’s decomposing—are recollections from his own childhood. Mason Jr.’s development as a photographer, however, is distinct from Linklater’s trajectory as a high-school baseball prodigy: if the film were strict autobiography, Ellar Coltrane’s character would have evolved into a jock who goes to college on a sports scholarship.

http://cinema-scope.com/features/boyhood/