Slacker
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“Once I Said Yes to That Film, It Changed Everything”: DP Lee Daniel on His Pre-Slacker Austin Days
Austin in the ‘80s was a college town dressed up as a state capitol, attracting a steady stream of students, dreamers, and dropouts hanging out on the edge (literally and metaphorically) of the University of Texas campus, where Lee Daniel and Rick Linklater screened foreign flicks and postmodern masterpieces in a DIY venue above a coffee shop. Daniel and Linklater brought revival-house sophistication to a community of misfits and film fanatics when they formed Austin Media Arts (now the Austin Film Society) in 1985. The pair lived down the street from their repertory cinema in a West Campus residence that […]
by Barbara Purcell on Mar 1, 2022 -
Chronicle of a Dream Foretold: BAMcinemaFest 2015
“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy,” comments one of the tenuously overlapping characters in Richard Linklater’s 1991 game-changer Slacker. The word itself, fairly recent at the time of production, is a moniker the speaker fully embraces. The branding may sound tactless, if not downright pejorative, but it’s not at all: It implies enough empathy and humanity to seek out options to offset destructive disinterest in matters tangible, ethical, or both. In the creative sphere, the shift in course can lead to an untried M.O. and the models it might generate — if the stars are properly aligned, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 16, 2015 -
Testing the Bechdel Test
One of the clever recent innovations at the subscription streaming service Fandor is the ability to filter films using the Bechdel Test. Created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel Test applies three criteria to judge the quality of female representation in a motion picture: 1) it has to have at least two [named] women in it; 2) who talk to each other; 3) about something besides a man. In a new video essay, “Beyond Bechdel: Testing Feminism in Film,” Lee interrogates the Bechdel Test using films from the Fandor library, asking whether the test is a meaningful criteria when considering […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 9, 2014 -
Slacker — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Richard Linklater’s seminal indie feature was released 20 years ago this summer. In celebration, 24 Austin-based filmmakers have crafted Slacker 2011, a collage/montage/homage, which premiered on August 31 at the Austin Film Society. For our part, we’re posting Nelson Kim’s essay on the film, which originally ran at Hammer To Nail on January 5, 2009. Buy the Criterion edition on DVD, or watch it at Amazon Instant.) A young man (the then-31-year-old writer, director, and producer) gets off a bus in Austin, hails a cab, and tells the driver about his theory that every choice we make in life creates […]
by Nelson Kim on Sep 1, 2011
