Dazed and Confused
Written & Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring: An ensemble of actors - a lot of whom later became stars.
Usually when a filmmaker has recurring themes in their filmography, I personally love it - whether it's the Scorsese's gangster trilogy, Woody Allen's entire filmography, Wong Kar Wai's films, David Fincher's films, GVM's films, Hong Sang-soo and I'm sure many more. Having watched this film after watching Boyhood and Before Trilogy - it felt so good to see the 'Seize the moment' theme being enforced here throughout the film. This film at an idea level itself is about seizing the moment, it's a bunch of teenages goofing around on the last day of high school. The DP was saying that they considered shooting the entire film in cars and the film would be the duration of the entire album that they play as temp music. Music is used in this film to establish the setting - this reminded me of the childhood scenes in Boyhood - filmmakers usually use music to control how the audience should feel towards a particular scene, but Richard Linklater uses music to show us the character's perspective, their state of mind and the milieu.
I observed a few recurring aspects in Richard Linklater's films - we have a lot of politically incorrect stuff happening on a light note, which tells us to take life and ourselves not so seriously. We see men giving advice to younger men on how to get laid. We see a lot of opinions on pop-culture. I'm trying to recollect and breakdown all of this, because the dialogue in his films is banal and yet so mysteriously engaging. I think it's because he makes it seem like we won't see much conflict by grounding the world initially and then he puts in enough conflict to keep us hooked. Quentin Tarantino quoted this to be one of his favorite films, I'm sure he was influenced by this style of writing dialogue.
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