Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Sabin
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Sabin »

There are just so many scenes where she's not that good.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by flipp525 »

Sabin wrote:There is no denying that [Patricia Arquette] is getting this Oscar because voters are projecting their own parental anxieties onto her.
What does this mean? What if they just liked the performance?

Also, as often happens when you see someone for the first time and then start seeing them everywhere, I watched The Life of David Gale recently which I'd never seen before, and Marco Perell appears briefly in it as a talk show host.
Last edited by flipp525 on Wed Jan 28, 2015 12:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Sabin »

(Lost what I typed earlier)

Second viewing. I have slightly more appreciation for Marco Perell's unbelievably douchey second husband. While he wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Saved by the Bell, he certainly provides the film with something it will not have again: a very strong arc. From the moment he appears on-screen, we're just waiting for him to leave. I'd go so far to say that he might actually be an effective presence had Linklater played towards his broadness and avoided the more graphic depictions of domestic violence and rather implied them. It would fit more in his MO anyway of childhood defined partially by bullshit authority figures fading in and out of the present. On my second viewing, I was almost grateful to see someone who was not zen to the river of life. Once he leaves the picture, Mason himself starts to come more into focus and the film feels more like an old Richard Linklater film, and mostly a very good one.

What kept me mostly loving Boyhood, a film of many great strengths besides how much it underplays its stunt quality by avoiding all the expected centerpieces of Mason's life, was how every scene is peppered with outstanding observations. Like the precise moment Mason asks Ethan Hawke "What's your job?" at the baseball game, which for the second time was when I was asking myself the same question. While there is a vanilla quality to the conversations at times, Richard Linklater's understanding of human nature is anything but. I agree with Owen Gleiberman's opinion on the film that it doesn't build momentum as it goes along. I'll chalk this partially to the last chapter (possibly penultimate) which begins so outstandingly, with Patricia Arquette's third husband declaring that he's the one who is here taking care of this family and then we cut to him already gone. Mason's last scene with Ethan Hawke I would delete outright simply because nothing that is said is that interesting and fundamentally he's the Weekend Dad and the final moment he shares with Patricia Arquette about money defines who he really is. There's probably five more minutes I would shave as well. It's also a shame that while Patricia Arquette becomes a much stronger actor as the film goes along, her final scenes don't quite land performance-wise. There is no denying that she is getting this Oscar because voters are projecting their own parental anxieties onto her.

There's also no denying that voters are projecting their own lives and sensibilities onto this film. Part of me wishes Richard Linklater got laid in High School just a little less because he's just a little too well-adjusted to be a great dramatist, and so the most idiosyncratic aspect of this film remains its undertaking. Which is to say that the part of Boyhood that gives me the most reservation is likely the aspect that will make Academy voters respond to it. Which given the choice between this and Birdman, I am fine with.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by ITALIANO »

I'm just back from this movie. And I will say something - Richard Linklater is certainly an intelligent guy. Still - how shall I put it - I don't think I've ever known a filmmaker who's so obviously intelligent yet whose work is so... consistently unmemorable. I mean, you can see that he has "ideas" - but the way he develops them is so... flat. Talky and flat.

It's possible that, in the depressing universe of American cinema today, at least - again - he is not stupid, but of course that doesn't mean that he's good. Intelligence can have consequences though - some of them absurd; and for example, even on this board, Boyhood is often compared to - of all movies - The Tree of Life! Needless to say, there is a distance - an intellectual, philosophical, even emotional distance - between these two movies that even just thinking of them in the same context is an insult. The Tree of Life is a masterpiece. Boyhood is... I dont know what Boyhood is, frankly.

Soon, watching it, I was wondering - why did he take TWELVE years to shoot it? Why didn't he just change his actors (as the characters when they grow up) to tell the same story? And then I realized that, well, simply, there's no story - that those much talked-about twelve years ARE the movie's only raison d'etre. And honestly - it's not enough. Not for me at least. Ok, it's pleasant to see the characters growing up in front of your eyes - but so what? Such a concept is useless if it's not supported by brilliant narrative ideas.

I know - this is supposed to be about American everyday life. Well, sorry - it's not exciting to me. The Tree of Life was about American everyday life too, but seen from an artist's point of view - here it's seen from a screenwriter's point of view, and one with a passion for endless dialogues (last year's Before Midnight was a bit better). It IS an interesting movie, I won't deny it - but not artistically: anthropologically. You learn things about America - for example that teenagers are proudly given guns as birthday presents, and taught to shoot. And that the worst, and most repeated, insult in America is "fag" (Boyhood seems almost too anxiously worried to point out that its characters are heterosexual). And they drink alot. Ok, now I know.

The actors are average. None deserves to be Oscar-nominated. The director's ugly daughter isn't much more expressive than Sofia Coppola (so she will win an Oscar in about ten years). Linklater himself WILL be nominated for this one - it is, after all, a so-called "auteur" movie, and he's considered kind-of overdue.

There are pleasant moments in Boyhood, too. It's not a completely wasted experience (and I loved when Patricia Arquette taught at university the work of the great John Bowlby - whom I met many years ago in London through my father. A true genius). But it's a bit like when someone shows you his or her photo album - it's nice at the start, but it can quickly get tiresome.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Sabin »

Boyhood is the story of a boy who grows up to live in a Richard Linklater movie.

Richard Linklater must be the most well-adjusted experimental filmmaker in American history. With total confidence in his subject matter and actors, he just whips up one conceptual masterpiece after another. Most of them don't even seem that way at the time. He's been very quietly on the run of his career: Bernie, Before Midnight, and now Boyhood. I am hoping his next movie, that "spiritual sequel" to Dazed and Confused will be his best. His filmmaking has evolved so much that I cannot wait to see what that looks (and feels!) like.

I feel mildly Scroogish to admit that I didn't totally love everything I was watching, but even in those moments I found myself from a distance observing the idea of the film rather than the movie itself. Most of those moments involved tonal inconsistencies, usually involving the abusive drunk step-father who seems to be auditioning for a Will Ferrell movie, scattered "Very Important" conversations, etc. The Original BJ is right that this film incorporates contemporary signifiers in the most off-handed way. I loved the Harry Potter line. When the film is wordless (or basically wordless), it's spectacular. The movie isn't the best at confrontation both when it incorporates it and when it doesn't. I trace this back to Mason being the prototypical Linklater surrogate: the well-adjusted intelligent attractive young man struggling against authority without breaking a sweat. If there's one thing I take away from Linklater's films it's that this guy got crazy laid in High School. Mason is like Pink in Dazed and Confused and Ethan Hawke in only Before Sunrise. Now that Ethan Hawke is very much Linklater's contemporary he seems just as along for the ride as his son and Hawke's Weekend Dad gets off amazingly easy in the film.

But if I'm not in love with everything in the film, man is there a lot to compensate. If there is one thing I do love in the film it's how he transitions through the years. The film is constantly in the present. He knows what moments to choose and how to pivot in and out of them. Every time we see this kid, he's a little different and his personality grows. This is masterful filmmaking. Also like BJ says, once they leave the abusive step father, his family is just gone. They're never seen again. The film doesn't give you time to feel sad during the film, but rather after. There is a phrase in comic books called "writing for the trade", when you are intentionally writing something that will suffer as single issues but really comes alive months later when six issues are released together for the trade. Boyhood is so fun to talk about because Richard Linklater makes films for your memories.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Mister Tee »

A few other things (boy, it's nice to have a movie you want to talk about):

The Harry Potter citation works not just as cultural reference but as analogy. Potter, too, follows a set of characters over an extended period ending roughly at the close of adolescence. And when the movies came along, they covered almost the exact time period Boyhood does, and we similarly got to watch actors grow older before our eyes.

The reason I said the GTO scene would have been different had the moment referenced been dramatized earlier in the film: if we'd seen the dialogue exchange, and knew that Mason remembered it correctly, it would have created a "boy, Mason senior is a really disappointing dad" (something we were ready to believe early in the film, but maybe changed our minds about later). As is, though, we don't know that for sure; it might have been one of those cases where the parent says something in throwaway to which the child attaches much more meaning than was ever intended. It's just possible that Mason Jr.'s imagination has created the disappointment.

The film apparently is on track for a $1 - 1.1 million weekend at only 34 theatres; this while surely a bit hobbled by the three-hour run time. It's an art house hit, for sure; it'll be fascinating to see how high it can climb.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by The Original BJ »

Mister Tee -- not only did we both compare the movie to The Tree of Life (admittedly, something other reviews have done as well), but we both cited two of the same scenes as favorites (the restaurant encounter and the going-to-college scene).

Some other thoughts:

The movie uses pop cultural signifiers in really interesting ways. Sometimes it's as simple as the music on the soundtrack, which ranges from turn-of-the-millennium stuff near the beginning of the movie to recent hits near its end. But what's perhaps even more compelling is the way some of these songs are incorporated WITHIN the context of scenes. When Linklater's daughter started singing "Oops, I Did it Again" it seemed like a perfect pop cultural time capsule -- that song was EVERYWHERE a little more than a decade ago, but I don't think I've heard it at all since then. Obviously, Linklater just picked a song that was popular at the time that a little girl would be into, but it sure feels like something selected with 20/20 hindsight.

And then there's the depiction of a ritual that so many kids of Mason's age went through -- the midnight Harry Potter book release -- which was practically a rite of passage for many kids I knew, including my younger sisters. (I myself was a little old/uninterested, but the scene still brought back the memories of what they experienced.) I think it's interesting the way the movie brings out the idea that songs and books and other creative works serve as signposts for our lives. So much about how we remember books (and, for many of us here, movies) stems from the memories we have of what was happening in our world when we were exposed to those works. (And, in Mason's case, the works he CREATES similarly mark different times in his life, and what he was feeling then.)

Politics also plays a quiet but significant role in the movie, and I think the film uses the journey from the Bush era to the Obama era as another way to track how world events shape our existence. When Ethan Hawke is talking to his son early in the movie about how Bush led the U.S. into war, I thought, god, that conversation feels so dated. But that's the point -- it IS dated, because that's what Americans were talking about THEN, and many of us just aren't interested in rehashing it anymore now. I also though it was interesting to see so many die-hard Democrats in what most of us think of as solid-red Texas -- obviously, no state is a political monolith, but I admit I was caught a little off-guard by the scene when the kids are posting Obama signs and are greeted by the twangy-accented Texas mom who's such a big Obama supporter. (This element pretty clearly seemed to be Linklater attempting to prove that his own political sympathies weren't foreign in his home state, though, of course, the grizzly tea partier makes an appearance too, in admittedly one of the movie's more over-the-top scenes.)

Culturally, the movie presents characters from a pretty wide spectrum -- Arquette and her intellectually elite academic friends/spouse, the military veteran husband, Hawke's fight-the-man drifter, the gun-toting Christian family, the immigrant workers. So even though this is the story about one family, it feels like it's painting a broader portrait of the different types of people who inhabit America at the moment, the ways in which they support one another through differences (you'd never guess Hawke would click with his second wife and her family, but they all seem to do so quite well) yet clash with each other as well (Arquette and the veteran are just clearly not a match at all).

Little thing, but I loved the moment when Mason's boss gives a toast at his graduation party, a beat which perfectly captures a type of person we all know, who means well but who doesn't quite know their relative role in any given situation.

Arquette's second husband (the professor) was pretty scary, in a manner that seemed unusually realistic to me. Typically these types of characters feel over-the-top -- drunk and violent in rather shrill ways -- but there was something almost lackadaisical about the way he inflicted trauma on his family. And I, too, thought it was haunting that we never found out what happened to the step-siblings.

Didn't the car promise seem like a perfect symbol for all those things that you look forward to as a kid growing up only to find out when you turn sixteen (or eighteen, twenty-one, etc.) it never seems to turn out quite as wonderfully as you had imagined?

And I'm sure there will be still more thoughts to come.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Mister Tee »

I had seen BJ's "why can't I post this?" entry while I was finishing up my own reactions, and opted not to read his till I'd posted mine. Unsurprisingly, we have similar feeling about the film.

I also feel the same as he: that I feel like I only scratched the surface in writing about it, because there are so many finely wrought details that it's hard to keep them all in mind. I like the fact that the elliptical structure leaves us unsure whether the things characters are saying are true (like Mason's 14 year old braggadocio about his sexual stats -- it seemed like he was making them up, but who knows?). It also leaves us in the dark about what happened to certain characters (did they ever see the drunken stepfather's kids again like they wondered?). I also liked the way the next husband was characterized positively: he was an Iraq vet who clearly cared about the people in Iraq, and was even cynical about the reasons behind the war. Yet over time he showed signs of rigidity: getting all bent out of shape about the painted fingernails. It seemed pointed that the back of his shirt in his final scene read "Corrections Dept."; he seemed to feel correcting things was his job, and Patricia Arquette's world was too untame-able for him to ultimately feel comfortable in.

In fact, you could make a case that much of the movie is people with authority trying to impose order: the stepfather with his strict chore schedule, the photography teacher trying to get Mason to stay within bounds, the restaurant owner chewing Mason out (though, pleasingly, it turns out he's a fan of Mason's in the long run). You get the feeling Linklater's clear sympathy is with those who recognize the futility of trying to impose order on a chaotic universe; he's in full agreement with Ethan Hawke saying "We're all just winging it"...and you figure he'd have been right with the roommate at the end, skipping the official function and going out to experience nature.

The film's potential success in Oscar terms probably runs in tandem with its audience crossover possibilities. The opening weekend was outstanding, and the line to get into the next show late this afternoon suggests the crowds are not abating in NY. It FEELS like a movie that should touch people deeply enough that it could expand well beyond Tree of Life level. And if it does that -- especially with the possibility of critics awards in December -- I could see the film getting film/director/screenplay/editing nods, with Hawke and Arquette as potential supporting nominees. Some at other sites are promoting Coltrane for best actor, but that I'd see as a long shot: much of his performance is at child-age, where it's unclear how much is the actor and how much the director's manipulation. By the way: how fortunate is Linklater to have picked a kid who turned out to be a good and interesting actor at 18? Many perfectly good child actors have grown past any acting ability by puberty; Coltrane actually blossoms.

I also think the chances of film/director nods are quite good because this is not positioned as a highly competitive Oscar year. The past two years, especially the Fall schedules, were filled with entries by people we annually see as Oscar hopefuls -- Spielberg, Tarantino, Bigelow, Ang Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson in 2012, Cuaron, Greengrass, Scorsese, the Coens, McQueen, Jonze last year -- and David O. Russell in both. This year, the pickings are slimmer: David Fincher (with a potboiler project), Paul Thomas Anderson...with maybe Bennett Miller, Tim Burton, innaritu and Nolan a notch below. (Alot of people elsewhere are touting Unbroken, and god knows it's been a relentless best-seller, but to me it gives off the same vibe as The Way Back a few years ago) A less crowded competition may give a better shot to both Linklater and Wes Anderson in trying to crack the big categories for the first time.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Mister Tee »

I went into Boyhood warily – both because of my recent experience with films over which the critics have slavered, and because I’ve always reacted far less positively than most to highly praised Richard Linklater films. But I’m happy to say I think Boyhood is quite a special film, and I understand the desire to shower it with praise.

It’s also quite a unique film – not simply because of the unlikely-to-be-copied logistics by which it was made, but because it seems to have been constructed almost instinctively. I can feel a writer’s governing intelligence in some individual scenes or speeches – especially in much of Ethan Hawke’s dialogue – but for the life of me I can’t figure how Linklater (along with his editor, who I assume played some major role) could be sure that the particular events and moments he chose (and the ones he left out, trusting to ellipsis) would cohere dramatically, given the absence of clear buildup-and-payoff. Not to say there aren’t moments that loom menacingly (especially with the second husband), but they and others (like with the bullies in the school bathroom) pass without producing big, long-extended dramatic arcs. (Or even short ones: for example, Hawke’s reneged promise about the GTO could have been set up in an earlier scene rather than just referenced – which would have changed how audiences reacted to the moment.) But I didn’t experience this as a lack, as I often do in movies without much plot; I felt the movie was travelling its own, certain path, and I trusted it to bring me home safely.

Which it did, in a compelling, ultimately moving way – the final reel left me with some of the same feel of vast emotional terrain having been covered as did the closing scenes in The Best of Youth. Patricia Arquette’s restaurant encounter with her former yardman is incredibly touching (emphasized by her utter tongue-tied response to it). And the mother-son exchange over his early photograph is just beautiful, as we see their different perspectives on it: for him, it’s a reminder of immature beginnings he’s striving to leave behind; for her it’s a symbol of the life that’s getting away from her, to which she desperately wants to cling.

Some are likely to compare this to The Tree of Life, because of its youth-in-Texas subject matter, and its unorthodox narrative. But I found this different in two different ways: first, its outside-the-mainstream method, while loosely structured, is still built on dialogue, and miles closer to standard American filmmaking than anything Malick will ever make; and second, Tree of Life, even while set in different terrain from my Queens upbringing, felt very much like my life – the relatively stable family life that thrived in the postwar era. Boyhood, though, deals with a very different, though probably now more typical America: the broken family of single moms, deadbeat dads, loser boyfriends, second families, endless relocation. And I felt like I was being brought inside this new normal, able to see both the ways it differs from my upbringing, and the ways in which it’s largely the same.

Boyhood is actually a somewhat limiting title for the film. It works chronologically, I suppose: the years it covers are Mason’s life from 6 to 18. But the ground it encompasses is far more vast: it’s as much the story of Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, both their marriage and the places they travel after it, and it’s about lots of other things, too. It’s a really pretty wonderful film, one where the nearly three hours go by amazingly fast (though I did think it had some trouble deciding when to end – I wasn’t unhappy it went on as long as it did, but I wondered for a brief time if it had any idea how to wrap things up). Easily the best film so far this year, and a strong candidate for best of this nearly-half-over decade. An American original.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by The Original BJ »

After trying a million different things, I was able to get it to post in two halves.

Every time I tried to copy and paste the whole thing in one posting, it refused to post it, and I got the Forbidden notice.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by The Original BJ »

I happened to enjoy Boyhood a great deal, but I imagine that no matter what one thinks of it, at the very least, you'd have to acknowledge that its ambition just about dwarfs the vast majority of American films currently in the marketplace. The movie's unique production schedule seems to be the chief selling point for the movie, to the extent that it almost seems difficult to start any discussion of the film anywhere else. Simply put, I found it rather breathtaking to plop myself down in a movie theater, and watch, over the course of three hours, the film's characters age year by year right in front of my eyes. By allowing us to witness actual children growing up, the film taps into the poignancy of the passage of time in ways that few movies ever have.

And the manner in which the movie does this is hugely effective, namely the elliptical way it moves through time, leaving key events out of the narrative that a more traditional film would emphasize. Instead, we're left with simple sign posts like our protagonist growing taller, or living in a different house, to guide us through the narrative. And then, from time to time, we realize, oh, I guess those two got married... I guess the family moved... wow, there's another baby now. It seems to take those moments from life we'd view as momentous and present them simply as footnotes in one family's long journey through life. The film reminded me of The Tree of Life both in the way it so beautifully captures the nuances of growing up, and in the way it humbly presents one family's story as but a very small speck in the grand spectrum of time.

The movie doesn't have much narrative propulsion, and yet I was surprised to be so fully engaged in a plot mostly focused on the banalities of everyday life. But Linklater and his actors present us with one beautifully realized scene after another, full of wonderfully honest and real moments. This is the kind of film that understands why a mom would say that the day her child went to college was the worst day of her life, and knows that it's both a hugely touching and outrageously funny moment at the same time. It gets that when you're a kid, you wonder how people will ever be able to find you again once you move. It's a movie that perfectly captures that moment when a dad is comfortable enough to offer his kid a beer, but the kid is old enough now that he doesn't really care to partake in it. And it highlights the ways in which seemingly random encounters with people can change the course of our futures, as in the very touching "You changed my life" restaurant scene. I could go on and on, there are just so many individual moments that present the ways in which actual families connect with each other with far more truth than most of what we see in film these days. And the fact that the teenagers in the movie are actually played by teenagers -- and not adults pushing thirty -- is another tremendous asset, as they look awkward and gangly, the way actual teenagers do, and they behave in the kind of moody, faux-profound ways that most of us did at that age.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by The Original BJ »

I would be surprised if the movie didn't make some kind of Oscar showing. Given Linklater's now pretty regular status as a screenplay nominee, I think the writers at the very least will nominate it. Depending on how well it does at the box office, I imagine Best Picture in an expanded field could be within reach, and perhaps, given the unique nature of the project, and the mammoth amount of time that went into it, I could see Linklater getting a welcome-to-the-club mention under Director. Acting-wise, I liked both Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette a lot, though the former seems to be doing the casual, relaxed thing he's done in the Before Sunrise trilogy, so perhaps this won't be seen as enough of a change-of-pace. But Arquette has a pretty moving showcase of a role, and I think with a push from critics, she might be able to get some Supporting Actress traction.

All in all, I think this is a pretty major movie, one everyone should see. And given the number of people from my real life who have already expressed great enthusiasm for it, I hope this might be something of a break-out beyond the arthouse.

I feel like I only skimmed the surface in talking about this one, too, but I imagine as more people see it, this will be one we will want to discuss, so hopefully I'll have more thoughts to share once others chime in.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by Big Magilla »

I have no idea. The site was down earlier in the day, but that happens.

I'd suggest you try again or post your review on this thread.
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by The Original BJ »

I keep trying to post a review of Boyhood and I keep getting a notice that says "403 - Forbidden." I also can't seem to start a new thread with it.

But...obviously I can post this. Do any of the board moderators know what is going on?
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Re: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Post by mlrg »

MovieWes wrote: I, for one, got goosebumps watching the trailer.
Me too
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