C'mon. It doesn't authentically recreate anything. It romanticizes the hell out of one period in the director's life and to a ridiculous degree. It's an uncritical and unabashedly celebration of dudes and bros.Quoting Spinal (view post)
Sometimes romanticizing your material is fine (Radio Days). Other times, it's kinda fucked up (Scarface, Wall Street). Other times, we can't really see it for what it is until somebody else points it out decades later (cf: The difference between Stagecoach and The Naked Spur, or The Godfather and Goodfellas, or High Noon and Taxi Driver*).
Every other coming of age movie I cited -- and I could throw in a few more, like Fast Times, The Sure Thing, Vision Quest, Sid and Nancy, was more honest about its characters and its scenarios than Linklater is with his.
Dude. Bro. Dudebro. That would be a 1,000 word post. I'm not sure I have the energy.
Shorthand:
1) There's a "everybody gets laid!!" montage early on. One shot that, uh, caught my eye is of some random woman hooking up with one of the baseballers. The camera moves in on her chest pretty damn quick, cutting her head off in the frame, to focus on her chest. That in itself is already weirdly porny. We see a pair of male hands move up and over, pop open her blouse, and squeeze her bare breasts. It's more like something out of a tumblr gif than a feature film. That shot wasn't in the movie for any other reason than to titillate the audience. He's reinforcing his characters' alphaness; the woman doesn't enter into it beyond being a pair of tits. There are similar shots that offer up women on the basis of their fuckability, and none of them carry any comment, nuance, or criticism. Because of that, on a basic level, Linklater is assuming that you're 100% cooch loving dudebro.
2) Outside the sole female lead, who literally disappears for an hour after she's introduced, there isn't a female character with more than 2 lines of dialogue. Like, Jesus, even 70s exploitation movies did better than that.
3) I was serious about the bra thing. Did you think that choice was an accident on the part of every female walk-on and bit player? Because they wanted to "authentically recreate the time period?" Or do you think that maaaaaaybe that was driven by the 50 year old male writer/director? (I mean, this in itself is a laughable choice. Did he think nobody would notice? Or did he want them to?)
4) Can't speak for anyone else, but when I was that age, I dated. I had female friends. An extended social circle. We hung out at each other's places. People would come over here or I'd go over there. Yet, in this movie, nobody socializes outside the baseball team except for Jenner's character. Nobody comes over to the house to visit (Do they have a bad rep? Is there a weird smell?). None of these uber jocks knows any women on campus, despite half of them being upperclassmen. The only guy who has a girlfriend is the object of the group's constant derision (the cornpone cowboy roommate dude). Their entire world is insular, purely male, and that's really fucking weird in a coming of age story, especially one about a bunch of alpha-type extroverts.
5) From that angle, man oh man does this film cautiously step around depicting anything that's vaguely homoerotic, even though holy fucking christ half the set-ups could be lead ins for gay porn.
I haven't even mentioned the movie's treatment of race -- or rather, extremely careful non-treatment -- by having nobody notice that there's a token black guy on the team. What are the chances that nobody would mention anything about race in this scenario? In Texas. In 1980.
* And God bless Mr Martin Scorsese.