Re: Linklater
Pierrot65@aol.com
Mon, 22 Feb 1999 22:56:34 -0500 (EST)
Once again, all I can do is follow in Camille's capable shoes and say yes etc.
to that whole thing. I also didn't like suBurbia because it was not a
Linklater film -- it was an Eric Bogosian play and he just ... you know, he's
one of those relic guys, the ones left over from the transition period between
free love and disco, which left my group quite a job of cleaning up the joint.
Ha ha, I bet you thought I was slamming both hippies and the bunch portrayed
in Dazed & Confused, but what I really ... okay, maybe. The point is that the
movie was, as Camille said (and as I called Ernest), self-important, "Dawson-
y" in its overarticulation (or "-liteness"). Its art was entirely too self-
evident (as opposed to Pynchon, whose postmodern tendencies are clever,
chaotic, and well-rounded, deepening the meaning of all his works). Whoever
said they had only not seen Before Sunrise: I think Camille told you to wait
til it came on cable. Umm...don't wait. Go get it. It's really, really
beautiful. The characters are gloriously tired of the world's typical badness,
attractively worn down and apathetic, and not in the tired way you would
expect. Sure it's another of those "walking-and-talking" non-epics where
nothing really happens. But I would bet you anything you sit there rapt
through the whole thing. And if you don't walk through life in love with the
very French Julie Delpy, you are not really living :)
Something I'd like to open up is: don't you wish Salinger would have tackled,
in book-length form, romance? I mean the boy/girl kind, the Before Sunrise
kind. I get the feeling from his work and what I know of the period that
serious lit at the time didn't take L-O-V-E very seriously. Maybe he wasn't
interested in it, maybe he was too embarassed to tackle the subject, maybe he
went into reclusion before he could pump one out (I mean a big, Catcher-sized
exploration of it, b/c obviously "Franny" the story is not about that)...I
don't know. That's something I would like to see. (Especially when you see the
tenderness he is capable of, from Esme through Seymour's remembrance of
Charlotte's dress). Maybe Joyce Maynard was standing behind him and bitching
and nagging him to death ... or not.
rick