Post by Dracula on May 1, 2022 11:41:14 GMT -5
Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood(4/19/2022)
One of the funny ironies in life is that often the people who are considered to be “the voice of a generation” are people who don’t even belong to that generation. For example, Bob Dylan is not actually a baby boomer: he was born in 1941, that makes him part of The Silent Generation. Similarly, Eminem is not a millennial. He was born in 1972, that’s Generation X. Then, to get to the point at hand, there’s Richard Linklater who sure reads as being one the defining cinematic voices of Generation X and yet he was born in 1960 which does make him a young baby boomer. This was never really a secret: one of his most famous movies, Dazed and Confused, is about what it meant to be a teenager in 1976 and if you did the math that does technically make it a movie about baby boomers, but it was made in the early 90s and starred up and coming Gen X talent so it read as a Gen X movie. His new movie, which has been dumped on Netflix without much fanfare, is much clearer reminder that the dude who damn near invented the “slacker” label for a generation was actually a child of the 60s as it’s a movie all about what it was like to be a child in the summer of 1969 in the Houston suburbs and in a way that’s blatantly autobiographical.
The film is animated using something like the rotoscoping style he used for his films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly but otherwise doesn’t really have that much in common with either of those films. One could instead think of it as something of a prequel to Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some in its autobiographical nature, but those were comedic ensemble hangout movies set over limited timeframes. This plays out much more like one of those celebrity memoirs where the author takes ages to get to the actual meat of their life because they get way way way too caught up in telling stories about what their childhood was like in incredible detail. The film’s ostensible gimmick is that it has a fantasy subplot where the central kid imagines himself being recruited by NASA to pilot a lunar lander, and I suspect that at one point this was supposed to be a bigger part of the film than it ended up being in the final product because this ultimately doesn’t really amount to much and you can tell this didn’t end up being the part of the film that Linklaters heart was in. Instead its in these endless nostalgic stories about his youth, and don’t get me wrong some of these stories do end up being somewhat interesting observations in their way and Linklater does have a knack for finding little specific details that make them come to life a little.
However, in the end this movie kind of frustrated me, many will watch it and kind of think they’re just replicating the experience of having a talkative grandfather who thinks you care a whole lot more about his recollections of “the good old days” than you actually do. I may well have had more patience for all of this if the childhood Linklater was describing was a bit less… over-exposed in popular culture. Movies and TV shows about what it was like to grow up in the suburbs in the 60s are kind of a dime-a-dozen whether it’s “The Wonder Years” or “Oliver Beene” or The Sandlot or Stand By Me or any number of other examples… maybe give another generation a shot at this. Hell, Linklater kind of already did that by making his Boyhood project into something like the first millennial nostalgia movie almost by accident and he almost certainly put a lot of his own memories of childhood into that as well in a less on-the-nose way and throughout his career he’s found similar ways to channel his experiences without just diving into the nostalgia pool like this. Still, as a fan of the guy and his work I can’t be too mad at this. As I said some of these stories do resonate and I also like the way the film handled the main character’s actual experience watching the moon landing and how it becomes something of an anti-climax for him (even if it kind of clashes with the fantasy gimmick). It fits well with a running theme in Linklater’s recent work about how most people don’t really experience history as vividly as they like to believe they do. So, there are moments of good to be found here but I can’t get behind the overall project which just feels a bit too self-indulgent for its own good.
**1/2 out of Five
One of the funny ironies in life is that often the people who are considered to be “the voice of a generation” are people who don’t even belong to that generation. For example, Bob Dylan is not actually a baby boomer: he was born in 1941, that makes him part of The Silent Generation. Similarly, Eminem is not a millennial. He was born in 1972, that’s Generation X. Then, to get to the point at hand, there’s Richard Linklater who sure reads as being one the defining cinematic voices of Generation X and yet he was born in 1960 which does make him a young baby boomer. This was never really a secret: one of his most famous movies, Dazed and Confused, is about what it meant to be a teenager in 1976 and if you did the math that does technically make it a movie about baby boomers, but it was made in the early 90s and starred up and coming Gen X talent so it read as a Gen X movie. His new movie, which has been dumped on Netflix without much fanfare, is much clearer reminder that the dude who damn near invented the “slacker” label for a generation was actually a child of the 60s as it’s a movie all about what it was like to be a child in the summer of 1969 in the Houston suburbs and in a way that’s blatantly autobiographical.
The film is animated using something like the rotoscoping style he used for his films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly but otherwise doesn’t really have that much in common with either of those films. One could instead think of it as something of a prequel to Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some in its autobiographical nature, but those were comedic ensemble hangout movies set over limited timeframes. This plays out much more like one of those celebrity memoirs where the author takes ages to get to the actual meat of their life because they get way way way too caught up in telling stories about what their childhood was like in incredible detail. The film’s ostensible gimmick is that it has a fantasy subplot where the central kid imagines himself being recruited by NASA to pilot a lunar lander, and I suspect that at one point this was supposed to be a bigger part of the film than it ended up being in the final product because this ultimately doesn’t really amount to much and you can tell this didn’t end up being the part of the film that Linklaters heart was in. Instead its in these endless nostalgic stories about his youth, and don’t get me wrong some of these stories do end up being somewhat interesting observations in their way and Linklater does have a knack for finding little specific details that make them come to life a little.
However, in the end this movie kind of frustrated me, many will watch it and kind of think they’re just replicating the experience of having a talkative grandfather who thinks you care a whole lot more about his recollections of “the good old days” than you actually do. I may well have had more patience for all of this if the childhood Linklater was describing was a bit less… over-exposed in popular culture. Movies and TV shows about what it was like to grow up in the suburbs in the 60s are kind of a dime-a-dozen whether it’s “The Wonder Years” or “Oliver Beene” or The Sandlot or Stand By Me or any number of other examples… maybe give another generation a shot at this. Hell, Linklater kind of already did that by making his Boyhood project into something like the first millennial nostalgia movie almost by accident and he almost certainly put a lot of his own memories of childhood into that as well in a less on-the-nose way and throughout his career he’s found similar ways to channel his experiences without just diving into the nostalgia pool like this. Still, as a fan of the guy and his work I can’t be too mad at this. As I said some of these stories do resonate and I also like the way the film handled the main character’s actual experience watching the moon landing and how it becomes something of an anti-climax for him (even if it kind of clashes with the fantasy gimmick). It fits well with a running theme in Linklater’s recent work about how most people don’t really experience history as vividly as they like to believe they do. So, there are moments of good to be found here but I can’t get behind the overall project which just feels a bit too self-indulgent for its own good.
**1/2 out of Five
