Anticipating Linklater's "Boyhood"

I know! But it isn't absurd to think she might have remembered him bc they had a meaningful interaction.

Todd Solondz's Bernie might've been good.

ll you were x-posting to eric, right? cuz i'm definitely on Team Mom Recognized Waiter (at least by story, if not on sight).

as a teacher myself who also sometimes forgets students I learned it takes a while to develop the public face when a stranger approaches and praises me; Arquette captured that awkwardness.

i'm definitely on Team Mom Recognized Waiter

let's have a softball game

as a teacher myself who also sometimes forgets students I learned it takes a while to develop the public face when a stranger approaches and praises me; Arquette captured that awkwardness.

otm. my mom was a prof and used to laugh about these kinds of public interactions. If anything I think she'd be more apt to remember this guy's story than she would a student she didn't have much personal interaction with.

otherwise the implication would be that arquette was blithely going around pitching night school to everyone she meets, and i don't think that was the intended takeaway

One thing that confused me both times were the exact details of Mason's break-up. I get the general outline--she sleeps with a university lacrosse player--but the prom figures in, and friend of the girlfriend's who gossips, and I didn't quite get how all that figured in. They talk about it while sitting on a bench.

i don't think we're really supposed to care about the specifics of the drama any more than his dad did.

ll you were x-posting to eric, right?

yeah sorry -- i was typing that on my phone after my class let out :)
i grew up with the sort of parents who couldn't go ANYWHERE without strangers (to me) coming up and talking to them, so i identified with the kids in that scenario too. when people dismissed the scene as contrived or cheesy, it didn't seem that way to me at all.

No, I think the thing that kept it from being contrived and cheesy is the seeming ambivalence or puzzlement Arquette greets the moment.

i mean, it was contrived in that out of 12 years of experiences, linklater chose to show us a moment where arquette did something nice and a moment years later where someone thanked her for it. that she didn't recognize him on sight and wasn't expecting the praise is just...believable.

one scene that kind of bugged me was the brief bit of bullying in the bathroom, just cuz there was no real second moment that followed. he just kind of shrugged, and got into sex and photography. never seemed at a loss for friends or anything.

Hadn't given it any thought, but yeah, the bullying scene was odd--detached from everything (except, I suppose, drunk dad's behaviour).

Another odd moment for me was Mason's reaction to his dad selling the car. It seems out of character that he would have been thinking about inheriting that car for years and years--the reaction of a son who's a jock, who lives for cars, and Mason is anything but that person. But I'll put it down to something someone posted upthread: the randomness of life. Sometimes you push a hidden button with someone, and upset them over something that seems to come right out of the blue. Also, dad's promise of the car works as something of a symbolic link between Mason and the absent father he misses.

I saw it as one of the unexpected and thoughtless ways in which parents can be cruel.

yeah it worked for me just as an example that while ethan hawke was obv a dream of a deadbeat dad, mason would still have some resentments

def had some "oh come on! how do you remember that?" "i was five, dad, not two" convos with my dad

man, that song at the family hootenanny

that alone may prevent a second viewing for me

I thought it was a decent Moldy Peaches thing. I did question the daughter's participation--even more than Mason, I would have thought she'd beg off.

That song didn't bother me too much, but I was damn glad that Ethan's "ohh baby boy cryin in the window thinkin of meeee" number was followed by the reveal he was now working in insurance.

i wonder if he was always intended to wind up in squaresville or if they rewatched the song footage and realized there was no other possibility

is that about Morbs?

They talk about him going to school to work in insurance during the camping trip when Mason is like 10? 11? years old

Or maybe earlier? It's mentioned pretty early on.

yeah, wasn't that after the Ode To Neglected Children? Don't think he was in school when he had the roomie

"hey, so i was thinking next year mason could visit me and charlie sexton on the road...that the band's taking off..."

"...uhh...yeah...about that, ethan..."

I should be able to remember from last night where exactly Hawke first mentions that's he taking actuarial courses, but I can't. Maybe the day they play football and go to the Astros game?

bullying scene wasn't weird to me, he wasn't the kind of kid who gets bullied all the time as part of hierarchy reinforcement but he wasn't the kind of kid assholes aren't assholes to. the shot right after, of him leaning against the wall after school w vonnegut under his arm, was just right: he had a shitty, lonely day. but it wasn't The Plot. whole movie was p much like that.

croup otm re the breakup. there were a bunch of elisions like that that made me feel like entire sections of other movies are just totally wasting my time. (no shit.) i was bored thru most of the second half of this movie but in the weeks since i saw it lil shots/lines keep coming to me unexpectedly and i like that they had such space to happen in, that they weren't propelling an Arc or even pointing in the same direction for the character. part of what the gimmick did for the movie was allow for a realistic level of personal selfcontradiction that would have maybe seemed more incoherent had it been different actors contradicting each other instead of literally the same kid.

also loved what others have described upthread, the moments when it would quietly tease you with a more dramatic version of events that doesn't happen, as in the scene w the circular saws or whatever. the scene towards the end w the cell-phones-while-driving was absolutely eerie: a whole alternate terrible universe is born in yr mind and mason is teenagerly oblivious to it. parent's-eye view.

yeah it wasn't a big thing re: bullying just that high school seemed like pretty smooth sailing afterwards, model girlfriend leaving him for a lacrosse player aside

what a difference Ethan Hawke's yapping puppy dog act makes when he's trying to keep his kid and himself entertained instead of Julie Delpy.

well really the big diff is that the kids aren't gonna call bullshit as much

well Mason Jr's silences and uh-huhs make him look more fatuous (see Annie Hall every time Alvy complains/promotes a book/advises).

xxxp ha well yeah i also feel u on the churlish well-fuck-THIS-kid-then feeling of the last few scenes. but then i thought abt it and was like haha i did alright in high school too i guess, despite having a dece handful of scenes like the one in the bathroom. ymmv tho i would that it did not.

there's irony in Linklater's approach to the same actor and schtick this time

i almost was surprised we didn't get at least one scene where hawke had to deal with them all tantrumy, but considering their homelifes i guess weekends with dad were pretty uniformly a relief.

The daughter aggressively whining as Arquette drops her off at her new school--a day or two after she's been beaten by her husband--is unbearably authentic. No, Hawke got none of that.

(I don't know if "authentic" is the right word--seemed more real than a movie.)

Maybe the day they play football and go to the Astros game?

yeah it's this -- it's after "dad, do you have a job?"

there's sort of a fitzcarraldo aspect to this whole thing where on one hand we're watching a fictional account but on the other it does feel like we're seeing what happens when a kid spends a month a year as the star of a richard linklater movie. from what i've read linklater already has his Burden of Dreams ready for the criterion blu-ray

with Mick Jagger originally cast as Mason, Sr.

yeah it wasn't a big thing re: bullying just that high school seemed like pretty smooth sailing afterwards

which ime is what a lot of experiences with bullying are like, esp for someone like Mason. It fits.

another instance of the "alternate universe" thing. sure, some kids are perpetually bullied/crash while texting/impaled by circular saw...but most have a brush with it her or there.

"Your mother....IS A PIECE OF WORK"

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

― ╲╱\/╲/\╱╲╱\/\ (gr8080), Monday, August 18, 2014 9:52 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree

didn't even feel that amateurish and hamfisted to me either

don't really get the complaints about the acting, especially linklater's kid; i thought both she and coltrane sounded like kids. especially at the end when getting 'profound'.

it moved me a lot, most movies don't.

begins to get nominated for awards

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/gotham-nominations-2014-awards-full-list-1201337272/

Fine, fine, I'll start the detrius thread.

since i'm on the cutting edge i just watched this last night. LOVED IT. my thoughts are:

- i liked the debate upthread about using the same cast over a period of 12 years has on the film. some thought it was pointless or had a pretty minimal effect on the final film, but i disagree. i haven't read any "making of boyhood" articles or anything, but i imagine that linklater was open to the idea of letting the story evolve according to real life events. for example, if the guy who played mason had ended up being a real life jock, or a very shy introverted kind of person, or realized that he wanted to be a woman, that would have substantially changed his character in the movie, and the way he would react to things. i can't imagine linklater ignoring the real life actor's personality and making him play the role of "Mason" as he imagined it when he started filming. so yeah, i think the methodology of filming for so long and using the same actors has an enormous influence on the movie. part of the reason the dialogue sounds so amazingly REAL (imo) for so much of the movie might be that linklater had a chance to live and grow up with the actual actors and write things that they would actually say. it's impossible to say what specific differences the methodology made, but it's certain that the way the film came out was different than it would have been if they shot the whole thing in summer 2003 using different actors.

- i loved how there are so many scenes that show the flaws of the characters, like teenage mason's idiotic pseudophilosophic monologues, or how EH is a struggling musician and plays 2 terrible, embarrassing songs in the movie. and i love that the obama campaign scene is so cringeworthy. i'm glad that he included it, because that was totally a thing in 2008! i STILL have friends who refuse to acknowledge that period of time when they thought obama was going to save the world. there aren't many non-documentaries that address that moment.

- someone upthread said 'By the time Ellar Coltrane hits 15, I had lost the connection to his younger self', and i think that's sorta true, not a big deal, and also another result of the filmmaking process. 15 year old me was completely different from 7 year old me, personality wise, everything. using the same actor and letting him grow up reveals those kinds of crazy jumps that really do happen. writing a script and filming all in the same year tends to erase those kinds of jumps, i think, because it's kind of confusing for the audience, or perceived as a flaw in the narrative/character building.

- i didn't like the restaurant owner scene too much either, but only because it was one of the few scenes that felt pre-planned, like a "movie". earlier in the film, when arquette told the gardener he was smart, it seemed predictable that there would be a scene later that resolved that particular (minor) arc. so it was a bummer when that actually happened. i think a more believable way to resolve it, if it had to happen, would be to have the restaurant owner on the screen, demonstrating that he apparently "did well" (although as my gf said, maybe he was fine with being a gardener?), but without any conversation between the two. but eh, it's not really a big deal either way.

- two thumbs up - WAY UP!!

also i suppose it helps that i realize sympathized with mason's character throughout the film. without getting all TMI there were various things that happened that i know a thing or two about, and so the film functioned as a mix of trauma-revisitation, nostalgia, and alternate-reality. (an example of the latter is that part where EW is driving his kids around and they're giving perfunctory responses to his questions and he's like HEY, TALK TO ME FOR REAL, I'M YOUR DAD, QUIT THIS SHIT, which is what i wished would have happened with me and my dad in a car at some point)