Instant Entertainment: Coming Of Age With Linklater Edition
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<p>Today we dip into more summer movie fun, this time Richard Linklater style, with some coming of age movies... heavy on the slack.</p>
Dazed and Confused is one of those movies that you can watch over and over and it never gets old. "Party at the moontower!" aged so much better than "You complete me," "You had me at hello," and "Show me the money!" Not to drag Jerry Maguire into this, it's just that movie had a lot of catch phrases that seemed like they're last forever. When you aren't too busy L-I-V-I-N, revisit the students of Lee High School in Austin, Texas circa 1976 on Amazon Instant for $2.99.
Slacker also takes place in Austin, Texas, but is lacking in the whole "plot" thing (no party at the moontower, no Aerosmith tickets, etc). The film follows some 20-something bohemians around the city, and when it came out in 1990, Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars, saying Linklater "wants to show us a certain strata of campus life at the present time." Catch them on Netflix Instant.The characters include "Linklater as a talkative taxi passenger, a UFO buff who insists the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a JFK conspiracy theorist, an elderly anarchist who befriends a man trying to burgle his house, a serial television set collector and a woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear. The woman selling the pap smear appears on the movie poster, and was played by Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Taylor."