As one story, it would easily top this list and any list of best romances in film history. Each is spaced and shot nine years apart, creating a truly original, daring saga - and it may just be the most honest look at love to have ever graced the screen. It follows two people, played by the same actors, across decades. The Before Trilogy is both one story and three films. But with dialogue this authentic, actors who are perfectly cast, and a wandering camera that manages to stitch it all together, Dazed remains one of Linklater's best movies - and one of the most iconic independent films of the 1990s. As a film made in the '90s about the '70s, there are several elements that haven't aged well (see McConaughey's oft-quoted line about high school girls, for instance). And, yes, potheads may think this is purely a stoner film, but everyone feels like they own a piece of this movie.įrom jocks to nerds, cheerleaders to shy kids, Dazed captures the universality of being a young person on the cusp of truly entering the world, whether you're actualized or not. What makes Dazed and Confused a permanent fixture in the zeitgeist is its kaleidoscopic look at the end of high school, never just focusing on any one clique, but, instead, daring to try and capture them all. Riding a wave of bong water through video rental stores in the 1990s, Dazed and Confused is a quintessential cult classic that introduced us to many soon-to-be-famous actors ( Ben Affleck, Mathew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Cole Hauser, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Joey Lauren Adams, and more). This should have been a rousing emotional film along the lines of Eat Pray Love, yet Where'd You Go, Bernadette? instead comes off thin and twee.Īs EW's review of the film rightly states, this is Linklater's less-than-successful attempt at Wes Anderson-style whimsy, and though loyal to the source material, "its faithfulness sometimes feels like its downfall, too - a film of such determined quirk that it never quite gels as a human story." The result is arguably the worst mainstream effort of Linklater's career. He is a great director of actors with a keen ear for dialogue, but when he has to keep the engine of the plot moving, Linklater seems bored and it shows. His natural and unfussy visual aesthetic comes off flat and uninteresting here. This is a plot driven film - a wealthy woman goes on an adventure to find herself and reconnect with her creative passions - that never takes off, in part because Linklater is the wrong director for this material. Far better - and far lighter - movies exist in this genre: see Kevin Smith's '90s output, Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, or Doug Liman's Swingers, to name just a few.Ī best-selling novel, an A-list cast ( Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Laurence Fishburne, Kristen Wiig), and a talented director should have been a slam dunk. All the actors here ( Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey, Steve Zahn, and Nicky Katt) act their hearts out, but the end result is forgettable. It is almost as if he doesn't want to spend much time with them, and, in turn, neither do we. Nearly all of Linklater's movies have a reluctant hopefulness with a layer of nostalgia at their core, but his direction here never fully taps into the dismay of these characters. This is a dark and disturbing script that, circa 1996, would have been better handled by Darren Aronofsky ( Requiem for a Dream) or David Fincher ( Fight Club). The cynicism of the source material (a play by Eric Bogosian) is a bad fit for Linklater's laid-back aesthetic. A classic 1990s sub-genre - kids hanging out and complaining about life - SubUrbia is an also-ran in a stacked field of movies about lost young-adults.
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