Slacker [Paperback]

Richard Linklater (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 1992

I'm living in this world. I'm what, a slacker? A "twentysomething"? I'm in the margins. I'm not building a wall but making a brick. Okay, here I am, a tired inheritor of the Me generation, floating from school to street to bookstore to movie theater with a certain uncertainty. I'm in that white space where consumer terror meets irony and pessimism, where Scooby Doo and Dr. Faustus hold equal sway over the mind, where the Butthole Surfers provide the background volume, where we choose what is not obvious over what is easy. It goes on...like TV channel-cruising, no plot, no tragic flaws, no resolution, just mastering the moment, pushing forward, full of sound and fury, full of life signifying everything on any given day...

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An orgy of wacko yammering."--Washington Post

"A generous panoply of magical thinking and cracked metaphysics."--Entertainment Weekly

"A fugue of exuberant ineffectuality, an exploration of the slim possibilities of life before death and after college."--Boston Phoenix

Product Details

• Paperback: 154 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1St Edition edition (July 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312077971
• ISBN-13: 978-0312077976
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,081,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A kitchen-sink love letter to Austin, free time, paranoia..., September 26, 2004

By 

Clare Quilty (a little pad in hawaii) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slacker (The Criterion Collection) (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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Six Degrees of Just Plain Odd, July 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Slacker [VHS] (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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The chain smokers, insomniac bible, December 22, 1999

By 

alex jager - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slacker (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.