Boyhood

[03]

let me provide a cliffs notes: it sucks

[Jeremy Blackman]

first impressions seem a lil negative

Well, for what it's worth, 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 96 reviews.

[Mel]

[jenkins]

my idea is to do zen breathing exercises before i see the movie. imma get emotionally centered and be ready for the power of now™

[Tictacbk]

Man I had read/heard nothing but extremely positive reviews until I cam here. Thank you for tempering my expectations.

[Cloudy]

Been watching the Satyajit Ray trilogy....finding a lot of connections.

[Ravi]

I'm ten years older than both kids in the film (who, in reality are only about 3 months apart), so I could vividly relate to a lot of what they went through while being able to empathize with the characters played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, though I'm not a parent. Older viewers would probably relate more strongly to their characters, and I'm sure my own take on the film will change if I see it years from now.

MILD SPOILERS





As exciting as it was to see Mason change from a kid to a college student, it was particularly poignant to see Arquette and Hawke throughout the film. Hawke starts out as a father who only sees the kids on weekends and isn't particularly responsible. Arquette is doing her best but repeats major mistakes in the kind of men she marries. Hawke's transformation into a more responsible father took a long time, and if he was like that from the beginning perhaps he and Arquette could have made it work. But sometimes the timing is wrong like that. It looks like he finally found some peace and settlement in his life that Arquette has been working towards, but hasn't quite found at the end of the film.

There are some awkward and contrived moments here and there, but overall it was a wonderful film. And if I'm making the film sound like a downer, it isn't. There are some absolutely hilarious moments.

I just wish it were something different, something more creative than it turned out to be. If you took away the real life aging aspect Boyhood wouldn't be that special. Nothing it shows is very confrontational...not that a movie has to be to be good but...it was just all very expected.

It didn't have a revolutionary outlook, but what it did it did extremely well. The dialogue was terrific, and it captured well how people and relationships change over time. The real-life aging aspect is important to the film. If you take something important out of ANY film it's going to suffer.

Been watching the Satyajit Ray trilogy....finding a lot of connections.

I saw shades of the Apu Trilogy, the Antoine Doinel films, This Boy's Life, and even The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

[jenkins]

^you've described it as both a generic childhood, and as stemming directly from linklater living in austin

sounds like a normal person to me

i feel generic all the time. i wonder what i add to the world, for sure. sometimes i don't feel like i add anything and that's such a bummer state. then anyway i continue to live, i live here in los angeles and i'm trying my best, which feelings of personal best become different while i learn about myself and i learn about world things

during this too, i have that question about whether i scintillate enough. can anyone even see my scintillations? other people are better than me, others are badder than me, and i can't impact any of them. born to grow and grown to die. that's me

the universal as specific, the stupid human challenges of meaning and importance

put together into a single cohesive movie shot over a stretch of time with a non-actor

[03]

i like your point, jenkins, it made me reconsider how i feel about the film.
but honestly, i really didn't enjoy it very much. not to echo wilder too much but it just felt like a very generic film whose only significant quality was the way they shot it. i would have liked much more from it.

[jenkins]

well you prefer the specific as universal. understandable

[03]

The idea that by being deliberately vague we're allowed to project whatever we want onto Mason strikes me as a cop-out.

that is exactly what i was trying to say, thank you.

[Drenk]

Ghostboy wrote something very good about the movie. I'll see the movie next week. I'll be surprised if I don't like it.

http://film.thetalkhouse.com/talks/david-lowery-aint-them-bodies-saints-talks-richard-linklaters-boyhood/

[MacGuffin]

Richard Linklater Confirms 'Boyhood' Is Coming To The Criterion Collection With Special Features
Source: Playlist

"Boyhood," "Boyhood," "Boyhood," "Boyhood," "Boyhood." The chatter about the Richard Linklater indie has been omnipresent in the last two weeks, but for good reason: if you somehow haven't heard, it's really something else. At almost 3 hours, "Boyhood" is a film shot over twelve years documenting a divorced family as seen through the eyes of a young boy (Ellar Coltrane). You might have quipped to yourself when you saw Linklater visiting at Industrial Light & Magic this past week on Twitter, that the ambitious director could have saved himself a little time by just going the 'Benjamin Button' route of special effects. But there's no CGI here. "Boyhood" is the real deal. We watch a boy of six years old grow into a man around the age of eighteen right before your eyes over the span of a 164-minute movie.

Beyond a gimmick or a stunt as some people could ostensibly describe it, "Boyhood" is much more than that; time is really a character in the movie alongside Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Lorelei Linklater and the movie is a loving and affectionate tribute to family, but also the passage of time, memory, growth and well, life and all that it entails.

The incessant chatter over the last few weeks has posed the question often: is this beautiful, big, epic film going to come to the Criterion Collection that has a healthy and already-established relationship with IFC Films? Linklater's answer up until now has been "hopefully," but in a interview published today at Mashable, the filmmaker was definitive.

Asked if "Boyhood" was coming to the boutique DVD Label Linklater said, "Yeah, we've got a ton of behind the scenes stuff. We made this in the era where everyone has a digital camera so we unearthed an interview from year one with Ellar, Lorelei, Patricia and myself; Patricia interviewed me in 2002. I hadn't seen this since we shot it, Ellar had forgotten quite a bit of it but he got to see himself as a wide-eyed six year old. For people who like the movie, I think there will be a lot of cool little treasures."

Linklater said they shot interviews throughout the twelve-year production, but didn't have a timetable for its release. The director is clearly a fan of the label (and hell, if you're anything remotely resembling a true-blue cinephile, who isn't?). "Bless Criterion, without them where would we be?," he said. "And it's magical the stuff they dig up. The 'Persona' Blu-ray had this making of a Bergman film. It was fascinating. It's incredible to see what it's like to hang out on the set of 'Persona.'" Indeed. Glad to hear the news is confirmed. That's one many will treasure, even in spite of a Coldplay song.

[wilder]

'Potterhood'

[Just Withnail]

'Potterhood'

Reminds me of this Manohla Dargis' quote from her review of the last Potter film, which basically reviews Boyhood as well:

"It's been unexpectedly moving growing older with these characters and actors perhaps simply because it's invariably poignant watching children become adults."