Kritiken

Linklater so beautifully choreographs each character's movements through the night and into the dawn, from the gang of freshmen to Pink and his buddies to the battalion of girls that range from brainy (Marissa Ribisi's Cynthia, Michelle Burke's Jodi) to artsy (Milla Jovovich's Michelle) to bitchy (Parker Posey's gloriously cruel Darla), that the film's strong, multilayered emotional core transcends even the astoundingly detailed look of the film.

Rewatching a film like Dazed and Confused eighteen years after its release means being lucky enough to have scored two tabs of nostalgia stuck together. For Richard Linklater's second feature is just as much about the 1990s as it is about the '70s—a fact that might have been lost on us at the time it hit theaters in 1993, but which seems oh so clear from today's retrospective vantage point. Aside from Hippy Porn (1993), it's the only viable contender for the Easy Rider (1969) of my generation.

Here the collar is wide, but the heart is true. Like all Linklater movies, DAZED AND CONFUSED is in no hurry to get anywhere, because it's all right there. This generous patience pays off; every character is worth spending time with, or they wouldn't be in the movie, right?

Dazed and Confused is not a movie about how things were; Dazed and Confused is a movie about how things are remembered. This film doesn't illustrate what it was actually like to be in semi¬rural Texas in 1976, but I'm sure it evokes how that time and place must retrospectively feel to any¬one who was actually there. Like so many of Richard Linklater's movies, Dazed and Confused is about how memory operates (and what memories mean).

Linklater's greatest strength is that he understands the unspoken power of the best rock and roll, and his most extraordinary feat is the way he uses the music to perfectly express the complicated emotions of his characters.

The right car, the right song, the right way of pulling into a parking lot. This little groove, this swerve into the movie (and into 1976), felt absolutely right to me. It spoke of effortlessness, nonchalance, relaxation—but it also carried that crucial overtone of aggression that seemed to color everything in those days.

Prevailing wisdom to the contrary, it seems that if you throw more money at no-budget independents, the work that emerges is not necessarily going to be bigger and better; it may simply look more like everything else in the homogeneous mainstream.