you cool man?

I just finished watching Dazed and Confused again and I know I've blogged about it before but it's really the best movie ever. I'm all for beautiful and artistic movies that would probably go down in cinema history but I can't think of many movies like this gem which are filled with so much ~soul~.

2013 marks the twentieth anniversary of Dazed and Confused and Esquire has some pretty interesting pieces about the film and the general nostalgia- be it about youth or the seventies in general. I especially love this part:

It's a film about the confounding mixture of longing and regret that the memory of youth always has. All the kids in Dazed and Confused want nothing but to be out of high school. All the people watching Dazed and Confused want nothing more than to be back in high school. Everybody wants the times they're going to have or the times they once had. There's no solution to that ache. Maybe McConaughey's character, the one who refuses to grow up, gets it right: "You gotta just keep livin, man. L-I-V-I-N.

My favourite part of Dazed and Confused is about how simple it is. Everybody's hanging around with everybody and cliques seamlessly blend into each other. That's exactly how I remembered school. Everybody was somebody else's friend and the concept of clique-ishness which is pretty much done to death in every other movie/TV show didn't really exist.

The drama is so low-key in Dazed. I don’t remember teenage being that dramatic. I remember just trying to go with the flow, socialize, fit in and be cool. The stakes were really low. To get Aerosmith tickets or not? That’s a big thing. It was really rare when the star-crossed lovers from the opposite side of the tracks and the girl gets pregnant and there’s a car crash and somebody dies. That didn’t really happen much. But riding around and trying to look for something to do with the music cranked up, now that happened a lot!

 Beautifully summed up by Richard Linklater. What really gets me is the fact that Dazed is about driving around a small town late at night which is probably the most boring thing ever (I don't have any experience with that but I do know the feeling of having nothing to do late at night and walking around) but it makes you want to call your buds and grab a few beers and do exactly that. It captures the most mundane things with amazing clarity and it gets the smallest things and the end result is this strange vibe of a combination of weed and beer and suburbs and bell bottoms and boredom.

All of Linklater's movies are heavily dependent on dialogue and that's what I love. Every single character fits in with the whole story so beautifully with dialogues that just... blend in so nicely. I

I just want to listen to Sweet Emotion all summer long now.