In 1991, a young filmmaker named Richard Linklater took his low-budget feature film "Slacker" to the Sundance Film Festival. It wasn't technically his first film (that distinction belongs to 1988's "It's Impossible to Learn to Plow By Reading Books"), but it was the first of his films that anybody had seen, and it became a sleeper hit at the festival. As more and more people saw the film, it began to gather a cult following, due to its unorthodox structure and cast of bizarre, yet somehow relatable, characters. Over the next two decades, "Slacker" would influence countless independent filmmakers (most notably Kevin Smith, who has credited the film as a direct inspiration for 1994's "Clerks"), help define a generation that was in need of a voice, and launch the career of one of the most unique and innovative auteurs in modern American cinema.
Depicting an ordinary day in the life of several seemingly random citizens of Austin, Texas, "Slacker" lacks any sort of coherent plot or narrative structure. Instead, the film takes a "fly on the wall" approach: Linklater pulls away from people in the middle of one conversation and drops in on people in the middle of another. Nobody really seems to be doing much of anything, or at least not anything productive; two crimes are committed, guys are working on their cars, a girl is looking through the volumes in a used book shop, a woman tries to sell a Madonna pap smear. But mostly people are just talking: about politics, personal growth, menstrual cycles, art. Linklater himself offers an intriguing monologue on the nature of dreams, and the mind-boggling possibilities of alternate realities. A JFK assassination enthusiast and UFO conspiracy theorist wax poetic on their chosen obsessions. An anarchist bemoans the fact that he never blew up the Texas State Capitol building. Themes of oppression and restlessness dominate their otherwise unrelated conversations, and yet none of the varied cast of characters seems interested in actually taking action to accomplish anything, thus giving "Slacker" its appropriate title.
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