Tag: Dazed and Confused

Top 5 High School Movies

Originally published at Cinema Sugar.

1. Brick

If you found high school to be a dark, inscrutable enigma with a rigidly enforced social-class structure and impenetrable lingo, you’ll deeply appreciate Rian Johnson’s lean and masterful debut feature that renders adolescence as gritty film noir. A young, sphinx-like Joseph Gordon-Levitt investigates his ex-girlfriend’s mysterious disappearance like a teen Dashiell Hammett detective, navigating double-crosses and life-or-death stakes that feel right at home in the high drama of high school.

2. October Sky

Chris Cooper and Laura Dern would be enough for a solid cast, but even at 17 years old Gyllenhaal brings the charisma and authenticity emblematic of his now long and impressive career. (Still, the secret star: composer Mark Isham’s devastating heart-punch of a theme.) The movie is about family and friendship and science and America, but ultimately it’s about a teenager with a dream. “This one’s gonna go for miles…”

3. 10 Things I Hate About You

Heath Ledger beaming with rascally charm (and pulling off an epic lip-dub years before they were cool). Julia Styles taking no prisoners. Joseph Gordon-Levitt aw-shucks-ing his way into our hearts. Sorry Clueless: this is the best ’90s Shakespeare film adaptation and it’s not close.

4. Dazed and Confused

Tag your high-school self: were you kinda skeevy like Wooderson, mama-bear protective like Jodi, effortlessly cool like Pink, pseudo-intellectual like Tony, a live-wire bully like Darla or O’Bannion, victimized like Mitch? Dazed lives on because it’s all of us, and that’s alright, alright, alright.

5. Booksmart

This directorial debut from Olivia Wilde was charming as hell. In conjunction with the natural chemistry between Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as straight-laced overachievers out for one crazy night before high school ends, Wilde’s script brings the film to depths of character, understanding, and humor that are rare in debut features and especially in movies about teens.

September 6, 2022 Add Comment

Everybody Wants Some!!

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With its likable cast, meandering dialogue, and lived-in plotless feel, Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused. It’s the middle sibling between that film and Linklater’s Before series, all of which seem to take place in the same film universe where everyone’s a peripatetic philosopher and life happens in the ordinary moments between the usual milestones.

I say the cast is likable, and they are, but the kind of guys and social life depicted in the film—college baseball players in 1980s Texas—are also what I tried to avoid during my adolescence. I played in team sports (mostly soccer) up through high school, and enjoyed the camaraderie and the opportunity to play in a team setting. But the macho posturing, sexual banter, and competitive saber-rattling common in that milieu made me uncomfortable and kept me from bonding with most of my teammates.

Those same things are prominent in Everybody Wants Some!!, but with the barriers of time, maturity, and the fourth wall I felt a strange affection for these guys that I didn’t feel for their real-life counterparts. Maybe because Linklater cranks the Bro-ishness right up to the limits of its charm, mercifully saving it from spilling over into being unpleasant. Or maybe it’s due to the lack of malice in their pranks, taunts, and hazing rituals. This isn’t a team of O’Bannons, the paddle-wielding sadist from Dazed and Confused. They clearly enjoy being around each other and find value in their shared experience on campus and on the baseball field.

Despite sharing the laid-back, chatty vibe of Dazed, a significant difference between the two films is the gender balance, or lack thereof. In Dazed the girls were weaved well into the film’s panoramic story. Every Everybody female, however, save Beverly, is either a potential sex partner or barely regarded at all. Perhaps that’s at it should be in this case, given how sex-obsessed these guys are. Like the one dude who gives lip service to the Equal Rights Amendment while trying to pick up a girl, it would be inauthentic to make these guys more politically enlightened than they really would have been.

Authenticity being a key virtue of Linklater films, it’s why, despite the quibbles, I loved hanging out in this world. I suspect repeated viewings will confirm this, as is true with most Linklater films.

July 25, 2016 Add Comment