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Slacker (The Criterion Collection) (1991)

Brecht Andersch , Rudy Basquez  |  R |  DVD
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)

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Slacker (The Criterion Collection) + Waking Life + Before Sunrise
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Product Details

  • Actors: Brecht Andersch, Rudy Basquez, Bob Boyd, Jean Caffeine, Jerry Delony
  • Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, Special Edition, NTSC
  • Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo)
  • Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
  • Number of discs: 2
  • Rated: R (Restricted)
  • Studio: Criterion Collection
  • DVD Release Date: September 14, 2004
  • Run Time: 100 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B0002DB4ZK
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #58,404 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • Learn more about "Slacker (The Criterion Collection)" on IMDb

Special Features

  • New digital transfer with restored image and sound
  • It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Linklater's first full-length feature, with commentary available on video for the first time
  • Rare casting tapes featuring select "auditions"
  • Footage of the Slacker 10th Anniversary Reunion in Austin, TX in 2001
  • Stills gallery featuring hundreds of rare behind-the-scenes production and publicity photos, and early script versions
  • Home movies, an early film treatment and a 10-minute trailer for a documentary about the landmark cafe used in the film
  • "Woodshock," an early short
  • Booklet featuring reviews, essays,and production notes

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Richard Linklater's debut feature is a comic kaleidoscopic portraitof the quirky characters stuck in a college town (it's Austin, Texas, but it could stand for hundreds of such places), a devilishly clever and endlessly inventive film that overcomes its nothing budget with scene after hilarious scene of short, sharp cinematic shots. Structured something like Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, Slacker is a comic series of character pieces, each lasting a few minutes before the camera picks up and follows someone, perhaps simply an extra in the scene, to the next conversation. Characters spout off theories on everything from JFK and Charles Whitman (we even get an eerie glimpse of the tower he climbed for his killing spree) to Elvis and UFOs, and more (wanna buy a Madonna pap smear?) on our bohemian tour of a condensed day-in-the-life. Linklater lets the characters set the pace but provides a loose, almost imperceptible rhythm to the film as a whole, giving a kind of structure to what seems like a series of improvisations. But the heart of the film is the freewheeling array of obsessed, self-absorbed, or simply lost souls wandering streets and coffee shops ready to talk your ear off about absolutely nothing. Killing time has never been more fun. --Sean Axmaker

Product Description

Richard Linklater's Slacker presents a day in the life of a subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in and around the University of Texas at Austin. Shooting the film on 16mm for a mere $23,000, writer/producer/director Linklater and his close-knit crew of friends eschewed a traditional plot, choosing instead to employ long takes and fluid transitions to create a tapestry of over a hundred characters, each as unique as the last, culminating in an episodic portrait of a distinct vernacular culture and a tribute to bohemian cerebration. Slacker is a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants, and one of the keynote films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Fifteen years ago, during the hot summer of 1989, a brainy Texas movie buff named Richard Linklater scrounged up a bunch of cameras, credit cards and amateur actors and made "Slacker," a kitchen sink love letter to Austin, free time, pretentiousness, paranoia and about a million other things. I saw it when it was released and felt it could've been set in my own college town, halfway on the other side of the country from Texas.

Since then, Linklater has gone on to make a lot of little movies that really strike a chord with audiences ("Dazed and Confused," "School of Rock") while rarely straying far from his cerebral independent roots ("Waking Life," "Before Sunset"). Meanwhile "Slacker" just got the ultimate cineast validation - it's been released as a ritzy Criterion Collection two-disc DVD.

There's no real plot to the movie. A roving camera simply spends a day eavesdropping on more than 100 students, eccentrics, revolutionaries, thieves, artists, partygoers, nutjobs, et al. It drifts from one conversation to the next and all of them sound, well, like the musings of a brainy Texas movie buff. It's aged better than I thought it might -- I especially enjoyed the brief debate between two characters over the election results of then-Pres. George (H.W.) Bush.

It's rough, a little contrived, sometimes monotonous, basically a love-it-or-hate-it affair; and while I understand why it drives some viewers nuts, I'm firmly in the other camp. This is a film crammed with ideas and inspiration and a sense of life - three elements that rarely bump into one another in the same movie.

The double-disc set also includes a in-depth commentary by Linklater (plus tracks with cast and crew); Linklater's glacially-paced first feature; a rollicking super-8 short about the 1985 Woodshock music fest; a cast reunion and enough other extras to render viewers slack for days on end.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Six Degrees of Just Plain Odd July 18, 2002
By A Customer
Format:VHS Tape
I love this flick. It was made in Austin, Texas when I was originally living there, and it not only has about seven people I used to see around town pretty often, but it showcases a lot of the landmarks there, such as the University of Texas and the downtown area. It's a truly weird little flick, made for less than a shoestring, with a really clever premise: the camera sets upon one person, follows him or her a distance, then branches off to showcase someone else for a bit---and never returns to anyone it's previously showcased. At first this really bugged me, till I figured out that it was saying that life, in all its many weird forms, is happening all at once, everywhere, to us all, and that we all truly connect in that six-degrees-of-separation way. The dialogue is often hilarious: a
JFK-assassination "buff" remarks that he never knew about how much Jack Ruby loved his dogs (even taking one along when he went to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald); a girl tries to sell a bit of Madonna's, erm, medical material -- you'll just have to see it to find out what. Richard Linklater makes really great, brilliant, funny, bizarre, non-linear films, the kind we should be seeing a hell of a lot more of from our film industry, if only they could see past monstrous box-office takes or
gi-normous egos. Check it out, for sure. I like to watch it just to remember what Austin, and some of the people I used to know there, looked like -- pretty damn good, as a matter of fact.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The chain smokers, insomniac bible December 22, 1999
Format:Paperback
I regret "loaning" this book to another slacker a few years back, who loaned it to yet another slacker, who drifted to the west coast with it et al...never saw it again. But had I kept it I would've memorized many of the passages (Like the UFO conspiricy rant!) - the book is the story behind the making of the brilliant movie, a story which is every bit as entertaining and thought-provoking as the movie itself! It's unfortuante, and a bit odd that the movie is no longer available at the worlds largest shopping mall, Amazon.com. After all, it WAS a watershed movie. Go figure.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesomely Weird
This may be the ultimate indie movie. Richard Linklater, who has become an awesome director, makes his debut with this film and it's very unique and entertaining. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Kid Dynamite
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite indie film!
No plot. No character development. But there is a message. There is an ideology. Love the flow. After the 3rd watch, I really "got" it. Absolutely love it.
Published 3 months ago by Donavan Avery
4.0 out of 5 stars Slacker
movie was not what i expected, but it was what i ordered. received on time and was not damaged. I just did not like the movie
Published 5 months ago by GOVOLS
2.0 out of 5 stars Not playable in America
There was no mention of REGION in the Amazon page, but when I tried to play it, it would not, looking at the dvd case I saw it is a REGION 2 disc. Read more
Published 5 months ago by G.Z.
5.0 out of 5 stars one of a kind.
ground-breaking, game changing, visionary, Rich did something special back in the era of Raygun. Its (now) a classic that wears it age seamlessly.
Published 8 months ago by Neil G. Giuntoli
3.0 out of 5 stars Painfully Dull People Babbling Nonsense at Great Length.
Richard Linklater burst onto the independent film scene in 1991 with "Slacker", the film that earned him a career in Hollywood. Read more
Published 8 months ago by mirasreviews
5.0 out of 5 stars "You're a SLACKER, McFly, just like your father ... "
Hmm. Was I the only one of the "target audience" -- to presume this phrase refers to the "kindred spirits" this "message in a bottle" was thrown out to (like the people at the... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Crabby McGrouchpants
5.0 out of 5 stars slack
ever been to texas? in Austin the people are over educated to the point of pretentiousness. it is common in the south to over compensate for being called redneck. Read more
Published 11 months ago by C. Luttrell
5.0 out of 5 stars Every action is a positive action, even if it has a negative result.
This is one of those movies that needs to be viewed over a dozen times before you fully grasp what Richard Linklater might have been trying to say with it. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Serum
5.0 out of 5 stars Homage
I have this book and the movie. I would buy both again because I like them.

On one of my many screenings, while my friends snored, I cataloged the characters (this was... Read more
Published 19 months ago by W. Dodson
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