My wife dragged it home, watched it without me, then tried to get me to spend a few hours alone watching it.
Nope. If you wanted me to see it, you would have bothered to ask me beforehand. Back it went, unwatched by me. I had no interest.
The movie connected with me beyond the “12 years gimmick”. Yes, it has no plot, but that’s not the point of it. Life is a series of vignettes (as the mother explicitly says at one point), and most people’s lives don’t have some great meaning or purpose. It’s up to them to find some purpose in it, and that’s what Boyhood was to me as a movie.
For some people, that’s not why they go to movies (which is just fine). You probably won’t like it much if that’s you.
A really interesting gimmick would be to not have all the male characters be complete shitheads.
It was probably my favorite movie from last year, but not my favorite from even the last two years. Although I do respect the Linklater’s vision and the risks he took*. I’m very glad I saw it - I may go back to it again sometime. But I don’t think it will ever be put in the all time great movie lists.
*Do you realize he filmed it over a period of twelve years?!
You really believe that? It was all done with CGI.
I expect that in 12 years we will be hit with a bunch of copycat movies.
I thought it was brilliant. All timer, I dunno. But an amazing movie, amazingly crafted.
garygnu writes:
> Have you seen the Before Sunrise series? Same kind of thing. Endless yammering
> about nothing.
Yes, and that’s one of the things that I like about it. Almost 17 years ago I wrote a film review of the film The Last Days of Disco in which I created a set of filmmakers which I (and probably nobody else in existence) think of as a coherent group. (It was for a website, but the review is no longer online.) The filmmakers are Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Nicole Holocener, Noah Baumbach, or Whit Stillman, and I mentally refer to them as “the children of Woody Allen” (which probably sounds weirder now that it did back then). They are all Americans who are a generation or so younger than Allen. They generally have small budgets for their films. They began making movies in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s. They each frequently set their films in the same social circles in the same regions, although these social circles and regions are unique to each director. Their characters are bright, articulate people who endlessly analyze their relationships and themselves. Indeed, they often seem to talk their problems to death. The dialogue is the action. Not only do I like the fact that there is so much talk, but I like the fact that these filmmakers have decided to concentrate on a single milieu.
no. take away the gimmick and it is a mediocre film.
Would you put Gus Van Sant in that category too?
Gus Van Sant is sort of at the edge of this category. His films tend to be less set in a single milieu, less talky, less low-budget. He doesn’t quite fit into this group.
This is my exact review. I mentioned the decline in his acting to my wife around 2hrs inl
Many of those kinds of films are good. I don’t mind having the conversations be the point. What most have, including the “Before” series, is bright, articulate characters saying interesting things about interesting subjects. Boyhood has dim jerks saying next to nothing about dull subjects.
If you’re going for intellectual stimulation in lieu of an entertaining story, you’d better have some actual stimulation.
I think the famous 12 year shoot ended up muddling any vision or point the filmmakers might have had originally. Unless their point was that life, like the movie, is boring and pointless. In that case they fucking nailed it.
It was ok. I’d recommend it but don’t go into it thinking it’s going to be the greatest thing you ever watched.
A genre of similar films to the “children of Woody Allen” one that I proposed is mumblecore (whose Wikipedia entry even mentions Allen and Linklater):
In Boyhood, just as in most mumblecore, nobody dies. People have romantic difficulties, but they get over them and go on with their lives. They often use non-actors. Filming is in real locations, not on sound stages. There are no clever camera movements. There’s no CGI, no explosions, and no car chases.
Each of the “children of Wood Allen” filmmakers that I talked about (and, I suspect, most of the mumblecore filmmakers too) have a milieu that they know well that they have chosen to set their films in. The Manhattan-artists-and-intellectuals milieu that many of them use is overexposed, I think, so the one that Linklater uses is interesting. I call it “Texas college town.” This is an interesting contrast to the depiction of Texas as full of violent plotters. There are great films which picture Texas in that fashion, like Blood Simple, but I think that there are other milieus in that state which should be shown, like the Texas college town. (I suppose it helps that I spent 1974-1977 in Austin attending and working at the university.)
The Texas college town milieu is overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white. It is also fairly liberal, although it intersects with a more conservative non-Hispanic white culture (as when Mason’s new step-grandfather presents him with a rifle on their first meeting and when he gets hassled by one of the people whose lawn he puts an Obama yard sign on). The Celine and Jesse trilogy by Linklater also fits in the milieu in a way. It’s somebody from that background who moves away eventually. In Before Sunrise, Jesse is traveling around Europe on vacation. In Before Sunset, he is living in New York now that he has published a novel and doing a book tour in Paris. In Before Midnight, he is living in Paris with his French girlfriend and vacationing in Greece. (The Celine and Jesse scene in Waking Life is apparently an alternate history version of their life in which they do meet again in Vienna six months after the first film and decide to move in together in Austin.)
“Live up to the hype” is an impossible thing.
I think it is a small masterpiece, and it’s certainly among my favorite movies.
I completely disagree with people who complain the vignettes don’t compose a whole; it is a movie about growing up and it works by showing moments that echo in a young man’s identity. I found it intensely relatable, and many of the moments and conversations were incredibly similar to things from my own life.
Saying it wouldn’t work “without the gimmick” strikes me as a nonsense criticism, because the “gimmick” isn’t a hat layed on top of a story. It’s a fundamental part of what the movie is.
Complaints that he starts as a cute kid and grows into an awkward and insufferable teenager are completely accurate. And will strikes me as much more meaningful when I find some teenagers that aren’t insufferable.