SLACKER MOVIE FREE

Plenty of Asian cinema sticks to the archetypal themes of that continent's life: Work, family, poverty, war, duty, spiritual contemplation and so on. Cross the sea to Asia, though, and things get interesting. You see the problem: Europe came up with slackers long before they got to Austin, Texas, and the whole damn place is still crawling with them. (I'm not entirely kidding.) If we confine our search to foreign-language cinema, the main question becomes where to set our limits: Jean-Paul Belmondo's nihilistic thug in 'Breathless'? The roles in 'Going Places' and 'Get Out Your Handkerchiefs' that made Gérard Depardieu famous in the '70s? All the disaffected young people found in Godard's '2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,' Rivette's 'Céline and Julie Go Boating,' Bertolucci's 'The Dreamers,' Philippe Garrel's 'Regular Lovers' (a film I mention any chance I get) and any of dozens of other movies? Sherlock Holmes, viewed through the right prism, is both a slacker and a classic case of a high-functioning autism disorder. Why start with film, then? Isn't Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov a slacker gone sour? Richard Carstone, the doomed heir of Dickens' 'Bleak House,' is a slacker of the first order. Some years ago in the New York Times, Angeline Goreau explained it this way: 'The flâneur, according to Le Robert, is an artist of impressions, circumnavigating the city as whim dictates, giving himself (or herself) over to the 'spectacle of the moment.'' I.e., a slacker.

For one thing, isn't the slacker archetype just an Americanized version of the 19th-century European bohemian, and even more specifically the Parisian flâneur? Wikipedia claims that French word has no English equivalent, to which I say nuh-uh. (No and yes, I think.) But if you start asking about international slacker cinema, things get ridiculous really fast. One of a kind.You can find various lists of the greatest 'slacker movies' with a little searching, ranging from undisputed classics of the genre - like Kevin Smith's 'Clerks,' or, well, 'Slacker' - to learned discussions about whether Cheech & Chong's 'Up in Smoke' or 'Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle' actually count. Seemingly improvised, but in fact fully scripted and tightly if unconventionally structured, this is about people you know but rarely get to see in the movies.

SLACKER MOVIE FREE

Inevitably, the crazies stand out, but the heart of the film is in its collection of likeable drifters who just go along with the madness, hoping to get in free to a rock gig or thinking about doing something artistic. No one ever reappears, but a portrait of the community is eventually filled in via kind of cinematic pomtillist dots, concentrating on footloose youths, more concerned with hanging out than getting on. Then the cops are briefly the focus, then a young man walking from a coffee shop to his home, then a loon ranting about conspiracy theories, then some people whose flatmate has left, then a guy who wants to move into the empty room, and so on, with each character passing on to the next in a relay which straggles throughout the city. Opening with a young man (director Linklater) taking a taxi ride from the bus station in Austin, Texas, and rabbiting on about alternate realities, the film then latches on to a young man who calmly waits to be arrested after running down his mother in front of their house - the police summoned by Linklater. A film that sharply divided audiences into two distinct groups: those who hailed it as a ground-breaking masterpiece, a perfect snapshot of a lost generation and those who fell asleep, frustrated not only by its lack of anything approaching a plot but also by its refusal to let any of its myriad characters appear on screen for more than five minutes.

Slacker movie