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Slacker

“Made for $23,000 in his own campus neighbourhood by 27-year-old Richard Linklater, Slacker is the independent success story of the year; a hit in every college town in the US, its title taken up to define a generation by the mainstream media. Starting out with a semblance of a plot involving a young man who runs over his mother. Slacker is actually a series of comic digressions in which we meet a succession of over-educated, under-employed, espresso-driven mostly twentysomethings, hereafter known as slackers. What virtually everyone in this movie likes to do is talk, and Linklater, who starts the ball rolling with his own hilarious rave to a bored taxi driver about alternate parallel realities, drifts through the streets, bars, cafes, clubs and homes of Austin, Texas, capturing almost 100 different ‘characters’. Each spins out some pet idea, obsession, paranoia or philosophy before the movie takes up with the next one. The apparently random transferences of camera attention are all achieved with a modicum of elegance; it comes as no disappointment to learn that all these monomaniacs are working from a script composed of personal contributions from the performers and conversations overheard over a period of six years by Linklater, clearly a connoissuer of looney tunes. Here, amongst other things, we have a sales rap on a Madonna Pap smear and a discourse on the religious significance of the Smurfs.” — Bill Gosden

“Scrappy and shrewdly hilarious… Linklater’s script invests the funny, scary, silly, canny, schizoid, paranoid and provocative raps of these slackers with a fluky poetry… the ultimate effect is spellbinding.” — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 11/7/91