I haven’t seen this film in years and, it’s a fine line, but I see regular folks everyday who sound more like the bad actors you’re describing than any character Ed Norton or Al Pacino has ever played. I’ll take rough amateurs with a worthwhile director over the slick emoting we’ve come to accept as great acting. He had no budget and was trying to capture a rhythm so maybe you could cut him some…slack:)
I have watched this film like 5 or 6 times and I have never seen anything wrong with the acting at all, I find it perfectly believable, absolutely wonderful film.
haha I guess that’s the thing, I don’t cut any slack with it comes to films or music. I don’t feel that someone who makes a $7,000 movie should get a pass if it’s only mediocre, ya know? I look at the movie first and THEN I look at how it was made, not the other way around. If you TRY to capture a certain rhythm and you fail, then you’ve FAILED. Personally, I just think this is one of those films where people seem to be more enthralled with the story of how it was made and that feeling taints the movie when they watch it, it makes it seem better than what it is. And I’m not trying to speak for everyone on here, it’s just the feeling I’ve got when speaking with a few others.
I guess another question would be, did you know about the film before you watched it? If so, how much did you hear about it? Me, I knew nothing about it other than A.) Richard Linklater did it and B.) Criterion put it out. Those two things compelled me to blind buy it. So maybe that’s one thing to consider in my post, that I had absolutely NO knowledge about this film prior to popping it in my DVD player. So I had a completely clear, unbiased viewing of the film. And I was not impressed.
And out of a cast of 90 or however many characters there were, I think there were SOME people who were natural in did okay. But as soon as a relaxed, believable person appeared on screen, it would be ruined by the next in a split second. And I’ve met people who are similar to the characters in the movie but they acted natural! None of the acting came across as natural to me, they were either trying too hard or they just simply didn’t have a whole lot of talent.
And the part about Madonna’s pap smear? What could’ve been gold was totally ruined by a cringe worthy performance. I might need to start posting some clips here so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Well, some people try too hard in real life and are considered obnoxious. I am not saying some of the acting may not be substandard, that tends to be a problem a lot of indies have, and it is a problem. What I meant by the rhythm was the camera movement conveying the loose connection between all of us. I think people are more enthralled with how the film moves than with any particular piece of dialog. If it’s dialogue driven it’s not the intrinsic meaning or value of the dialog as much as the juxtaposition of some dialogue with other dialogue.
As for how it was made, while I’m sure there are some people who care but I’m not one of them. I have no interest in El Mariachi because, no matter how much blood that fool sold, I don’t care about silly action scenes. Either way, I think you’ve sold me on picking this baby up while the sale lasts.
Eh, i thought the acting was fine , it felt natural/dry as opposed to cinematic and emotive to me, and that seemed like what the film needed and what linklater was going for.
I do not have a whole lot to say about this film (the film talks enough for itself). I think it is very good at defining a group of media enthused, intellectual and intellectual wanabe Gen Xers (people that call themselves losers; they think with irony) that were not given a real portrayal before this film (the success of the film is prob to blame for the horrid Reality Bites and for the horrid Jeanne Garlofago in general) , much more successful in defining its characters than Dazed and Confused and the talk is much more engaging than the sappy Before Sunrise and Set films.
This film captures different types of conversation, but mainly of either the completely engaged (couples) or unengaged (being accosted by a man in a Batman shirt). Some of the conversation is memorable (I could remember line for line the Madonna scene from 15 years ago), some is sad (the diner scene woman) for instance but all of it feels real and true to life (“You dont just go to the lake you have to prepare for it.” ). The actors are not memorable at all (some are terrible) but what they say often is. The film lacks the wit (and the Stilman) or Whit Stilman but unlike with Stilman’s small ensembles the characters here never get tiresome, to Linklater’s enormous credit, he lets characters say interesting things and moves on to different characters, no one is given the time to be boring.
Wonderful film one of the best of the 1990s
Grade A+
Eh, I need to see this film again – it’s been a looooong time. I remember it being a typical Linklater film (I saw it after I had seen a few of Linklater’s films already) with his usual rambling, existential dialogue … but I’ll give it another shot. Not too excited about it though.
I think it is his one really good film, everybody gets one
There’s something about Linklater that rubs me up the wrong way; his character’s existential ramblings get pretty tedious after you’ve seen more than one of his films — especially when that smug bastard Ethan Hawke is handed a starring role.
Waking Life is a pretty interesting work, but his other films are expendable.
SLACKER was notable in its day because:
1). it was the director’s first major effort
2). the phenomenon of “the slacker”— young adults who don’t pursue the “American dream”—- was very much in the news culturally at the time of this picture’s release… seen as a social “problem” du jour .
3). It was filmed in Austin, and was the very first big film that introduced Austin as a popular “indie” film location. You could almost say that SXSW owes its inception to SLACKER .
Ryan: you need a bad acting immunization shot. Watch Paul Morrissey’s Heat, Flesh, and Trash. Then you’ll never have a problem with a movie like Slacker again.
In answer to the challenge of what I knew about Slacker before seeing it, I knew nothing; I hadn’t even connected Linklater’s name to the other works he had done. I watched it, loved it, and then upon further research found out how cheaply it was made and what else the guy did. It wasn’t technically my introduction to Linklater since I had seen other films by him before, but it was the movie that made me realize the directorial style I didn’t realize I was seeing in other movies by him.
And I thought the acting was fine. I did not actually know that it was an issue for anybody.
—PolarisDiB
bad acting in Trash?
Acting is a chemistry thing between the viewer and the actor, imo.
Also, probably one’s perception is relevant to one’s experience of the situation in the film.
If Ryan experiences the acting as bad, I’m not sure what anyone else can do about it in a film of this type.
A characterization is another story e.g. Oldman’s
portrayal in Leon.
Perhaps Oldman plays the role well, but the characterization doesn’t work.
Heat, Flesh, and Trash, huh? Hmm, maybe I’ll check it out. There’s not much more I can say about this film I suppose, I appreciate the opinions everyone has shared. I guess it’s just one of those things that comes down to opinion. I honestly wish he would remake it, but cast much better actors. And I’m not talking about name actors, unknown folks who can actually do the job well. Until then, I’ll just read the script for it
Yes. After watching Heat, Flesh, and Trash, if your reaction is anywhere near to mine, you begin to appreciate the way anyone can still make their point and develop and interesting cinema while breaking every single production value possible, including this “acting” thing that is so important.
It changes the idea of production value from “monetary worth” to “hegemony”. However Morrissey still manages to improve his films technically with each subsequent one. It’s weird.
—PolarisDiB
Morrissey is among my favorites.
His vampire and Frankenstein flicks are genre busters. Even his last film Spike of Bensonhurst is a great piece of work.
I’ven’t seen anything but the three I mentioned. They are certainly on my to-do list, and have been for a little while.
—PolarisDiB
His Dracula is a masterpiece. Maybe the best opening shot in any any Dracula movie.
Also love Frankenstein (not as good as Dracula but love Udo’s way of saying MAIL Zam-bee) and the Little Joe Trilogy (Flesh is responsible for my awkward bandana phase)
Have not seen any of his post Warhol films. How is Mixed Blood?
feels like a Toback film (or maybe Toback feels like him), very improvised, pretty good not a favorite by any means
would love to use him in the Cup, doubt people would vote for him tho
“doubt people would vote for him tho”
But with all the Nudity, drugs, vampires, organ lust and beer bottles… how could he fail?
-It changes the idea of production value . . .-
Well, acting is difficult to discuss objectively, but, broadly speaking, I think people tend to associate familiar (conventional) styles of acting with “good acting” and unfamiliar styles with “bad acting.” “Production value” is not so much about buying “good,” it’s buying what’s familiar to the audience.
With that in mind, what the performances in Slacker seem to me to be capturing is not the essence of characters (the hypothesis behind most method and post-method acting), but the extent to which even casual public personas are highly performative (a concept borne out by much of the posting here, by the way).
I don’t like Slacker very much either but, being a fan of trash and b-movies, I’m used to find bad acting a plus to the camp side of some films. I just have a personal taste issue with linklater himself. I don’t think I can recall ever being “pleased” with any of his films and, somehow, I’ve seen them all. Although Dazed And Confused is interesting, I find him irritatingly sententious as an author and in Slacker it comes out unbearable for me. But again, let me stress, it’s always a matter of personal taste.
Matt, you have some interesting points. Let me pose this question then (which may be a debate for another thread entirely)
How important is acting to you in a film?
This one is hard for me to give a definitive answer on. I feel like I have a very balanced taste for film, I love trashy cheesy b-movies as much as I love a “serious” movie with extreme depth and layers. So depending on the film, I can overlook the acting if there is a lot more going for or if the rest of it is at least entertaining. And it depends on the story as well, it seems that the more and more the film gravitates towards moving pictures as opposed to dialogue, the more it can be forgiven. For instance, Gymkata is one of my favorite movies because it is hilariously bad. The terrible acting ADDS to the film because the rest of it is so over the top, ridiculous, and just craptastic. So I am able to APPRECIATE bad acting when it adds to the entertainment of the film (which makes me ponder the question, if the “bad” acting makes the film more entertaining, should it really be called “bad”?)
Let me use another example that is closer (in production size) to Slacker (although a different genre). I really dug The Signal, which was a low budget horror film made in Atlanta for around $50,000. The acting was pretty great across the board but there were a few times when it was very spotty. It didn’t bother me though because the movie is not driven primarily by dialogue and has a lot of other things going for it. It was moody, creepy, and focused on tension in many parts and had some decent action going for it when it was necessary.
The thing with Slacker is, the terrible acting does not add entertainment value, it does the opposite. It takes away from the film because it is pretty much ALL dialogue. In that movie, ALL you have are the “characters” which means ALL you have are the people playing them. That’s it! Writing a dialogue-heavy script is a gift and a curse. It’s a gift because obviously, you can save money on the budget for your film which increases the chances of it actually being made. It’s a curse because, as I’ve mentioned, your actors carry all of the weight and if they aren’t able to do that, your film will sink with it. And that’s what I think happened here. If I’m going to spend 90 minutes with a film that is only going to show me 1.) characters and 2.) dialogue, I have to AT LEAST believe the people are real, that they’re not playing a part or memorizing lines from a script. And I LOVE films that are mainly dialogue driven! I absolutely loved Interview and I honestly, really think Scenes from a Marriage is the best thing Ingmar Bergman ever did. That’s why I was looking forward to Slacker so much, because it was supposed to be this dialogue heavy film.
Again, just to restate, I normally don’t hold acting as the #1 thing about a movie (that would definitely be the script for me, if your script sucks, I probably won’t like your movie). But for a film like this, I have to believe the people I’m seeing on screen and frankly, they were reading lines, they weren’t being natural and true. So…how important is acting to you in a film?
The “actors” were all amateurs, people Linklater recruited. What are you looking for in a no-budget indie where the premise of a narrative jumping from person to person is the most important element? They’re ordinary people and they “act” like ordinary people. Their purpose is to propel the thread onto the next scene. This isn’t Shakespeare.
I’ve never bothered to check, but I’m sure at least some of the dialogue was improvised. Maybe all of it, for all I know. What if YOU got all your friends to be in your movie? Are you gonna go through 68 takes with them just to get the line reading you want? You’d never finish your film if you did that. I’d be surprised if Linklater did more than three takes for any dialogue scene.This is like complaining about the set design in Ulmer’s DETOUR. “I didn’t BELIEVE he was hitchhiking through Arizona.”
Acting is important to me, Ryan, but at the same time it’s only an element of the film, so it doesn’t have any special status for me. You’re talking about Slacker mostly in terms of the dialogue, but to me the performances have as much to do with the walking as the talking, and for me this physical aspects of the performances—posture, gait, gestures, etc.—are a really interesting as a counterpoint to the dialogue. I sort of see the film along the lines of what Linklater’s character is describing to the cab driver early in the film—
a series of fragmented “realities”—little bubbles of “reality” that occasional collide with each other and interact (or not) in interesting ways (one way of the looking at the film is as a theory of post-modern communication . . . which is something that Linklater returns to in many of his later films).
Here’s a sequence near the end of the film
Notice how it’s built upon the trajectories of movement and counter-movement (a figure moving one way meets a figure moving a different way), and how various media are set working withing these movements—the woman walking outside is framed alongside the tv set, then she’s handed the cassette by the older man, who the cameras then follows as he records his thoughts (presumable prompted by the chance encounter with the woman) on another cassette (which, presumably, he’ll later hand out to someone else), he then passes the guy the the PA mounted on his car so he can disseminate his “message,” then he gets recorded by the kids with cameras in another car . . .
To get back to the question of acting, I suppose I would argue that to do what the film is attempting to do requires unconventional performances because of the unconventional structure of the film, which doesn’t really allow for the accrual of experiential detail that we would normally associate with a conventionally “good” performance. It’s easier, I think, to mask eccentricites when you’re working in, say, horror, because the genre conventions tend to ellide the gaps between our expectations and our experience of the particular film.
I just wanted to give one more shout out for Flesh, Trash and Heat. Outstanding films.
@Vic Pardo: All I want out of a no-budget indie is believable characters, that’s really it. I know it’s not Shakespeare and I’m not expecting it to be. I’m just not a fan of stilted, awkward line readings that takes me out of the film. It kind of pulls the curtain away like in the Wizard of Oz, so to speak. Instead of being immersed in what the character is saying, all I can see is “hey, they must be friends of the director who wanted to be in a movie”. As I’ve said in previous posts, I don’t cut any slack for a movie just because of how cheaply it’s made. I shouldn’t have to. I don’t cut any slack for bands whose CD sounds like shit, even if I’m told they only had 2 days to record it. And I don’t cut any slack on big budget movies either if the script or acting sucks, which is why I think Transformers is a big piece of shit. I’m an equal opportunity kind of guy, across the board.
Are you gonna go through 68 takes with them just to get the line reading you want?
YES! I would, I’ve done that before on some shoots I’ve done! Even if it takes twice as long to film, I don’t care. David Fincher does a million takes on his films and many other directors do too. If you do not have the budget or time to do as many takes as required in order to get the BEST possible performance then maybe you aren’t ready to make your film yet. And I think that’s part of the problem with a lot of “indie” features I see, the directors seem to think “I wanna make a movie!” instead of “I wanna make the BEST movie I possibly can!” and it shows.
Ryan,
something like less than 15% of independent films started are finished. As a filmmaker you know how much work goes into a film and sometimes the pure anxiety of trying to make it good gets in the way of even getting it done, which is more important. Linklater wasn’t being lazy with Slacker (despite the title) as he worked on it carefully over time and even had to apply for several state film office grants in order to finish it. The fact that the movie even exists is, in fact, an accomplishment, and I know it seems ridiculous to cut it slack for that in light of the thousands of other movies that exist, but as a personal film worked hard on while most of the time wondering if you’ll even get a chance to finish, no, Linklater could not be Fincher and demand a thousand takes of his actors, who he picked as non-actors specifically to embrace the slacker subculture of overeducated, underemployed 20 somethings wandering the landscape trying to stave off boredom. Hell, the neo-realists did it, and the resulting acting is the same. Despite the dialog-driven nature of the movie, it is not a performative movie. Its method resides in its observation of mentality, not character, which is represented by spacial relationships and movement, not realism.
Now I do agree that every director should try to make the best movie they can, which each film they make. I also believe that Slacker is at least near the best movie Linklater could have done with what he had. Anyone can dream of the independence of mind connected with infinite resources to pull it off, but the filmmakers who really prove their worth are those that manage to find resources to do their art within their everyday lives, such as with his friends and peers in making a movie ultimately formed around his friends and peers.
—PolarisDiB
Are you gonna go through 68 takes with them just to get the line reading you want?
YES! I would, I’ve done that before on some shoots I’ve done!
if you’re over 20 takes for performance you may have miscast your movie or you may not be skilled at getting good work from your actor/s. continuing to hammer them in the direction of your line reading doesn’t mean you’re a visionary.
Ryan Estabrooks
I wanted to talk about Slacker for a bit and express my opinion about it. The reason is because I seem to be the only person on this site who did not like this film very much.
Let me start off by saying that I liked the script for the movie itself. The dialogue was good and the way the characters interacted and segwayed into others were great. The biggest problem I have with this film is the acting. I have to say, it’s probably the biggest collection of terrible acting in any movie I’ve ever seen in my life. I felt like I was watching some high school play made up of students who weren’t even in the drama class. Every delivery of every line made me cringe…seriously. And I’m usually one who can overlook acting problems, lighting problems, etc. if the script is good and other things are going for it. The problem with this movie is that since it is all dialogue driven, the acting is crucial! You’re not watching set pieces, there aren’t car chases, it’s all dialogue which means it’s going to rest pretty much 100% on your actors to make it believable. These people weren’t believable at all, you could pretty much see right through it. They were friends or people Richard knew and that’s pretty much all I could see onscreen.
I am also a big fan of Richard’s. Dazed and Confused is a classic, I even thought his latest film, Me & Orson Welles was fantastic! Hell, I would even put Fast Food Nation ranked waaaaay above Slacker. I just felt like I was watching a band play for 90 minutes who had never played an instrument before.
It seems that when people talk about their admiration for this film, they seem to mention things that surround the movie or talk about how the movie was made, but not the ACTUAL movie itself. Is it cool that it was shot in Austin? Yeah, that’s great. Does it capture a time and place faithfully? Sure, I’ll give it that. Does it looks like a bunch of friends with a movie camera had a lot of fun together? Yeah, it does. But that doesn’t make the actual movie itself good in my opinion. Buckets of charm do not overshadow a poorly executed film for me. Another user on this site mentioned they liked the acting because none of the people came off as pretentious. Personally, I would rather watch a douchebag actor who has amazing acting skills than a really nice guy who I’d like to hang out with in real life who is terrible at the craft.
Am I glad it was made? Sure, because it was a stepping stone for Richard Linklater. But I still think it’s a terrible movie and I never want to watch it again. I could never recommend this to anyone. Surely I’m not the only one who thinks this…