Written and directed by Richard Linklater. Cinematography by Lee Daniel. Starring: Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, Jan Hockey, Stephan Hockey, and about 90 other slackers. Rated: R -- language, slackery. Back to screening room
A few movies that influenced the themes and structure of Slacker: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950), The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974), Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976), Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974).
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Slacker (1991)
The movie's serendipitous structure mirrors the free-associative imaginations of its many characters. Most of them are in their 20s, at that awkward stage just after college where they're not quite sure what to do with themselves. So they kill time in limbo, sitting around talking and thinking and drinking and smoking and theorizing and dreaming. "I may live badly," says one of the scraggly, stringy haired denizens of this Texas college-town, "but at least I don't have to work to do it."Whenever one of them encounters another, there are the usual stammers and awkward pauses, and then somebody asks: "Hey, well, what have you been doing?" The answer, invariably, is something like: "Not much," or "Just lollygaggin' around," or "Been gettin' lots of sleep." And speaking of sleep: Slacker has the fluid structure of a dream -- inspired by Luis Buñuel's surrealist The Phantom of Liberty. It begins with a dream-image that seems like something out of a Wim Wenders movie: A man asleep, his head leaning against a bus window as the sun comes up, the world outside passing by like a dreamscape. That man, the one who sets the movie in motion, is played by writer-director Linklater. Once he awakens and gets off the bus, he climbs into a taxi and starts the picture spinning. "Man, I just had the weirdest dream..." he tells the uninterested cabbie. "There was nothin' goin' on, just staring out of windows..." And then he got this idea. "You know in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and they do that little dance at the crossroads and they think about going in all those directions and they end up going in that one direction?" he sputters."All those other directions, just because they thought of them, became separate realities. I mean, they just went on from there and lived the rest of their lives... you know, entirely different movies, but we'll never see it because we're kind of trapped in this one reality restriction type of thing." (Although Slacker was made years before somebody with way too much time on his hands discovered the "connection" between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz, it was probably one of these guys who stumbled onto it. Hey, and come to think of it, the main character in Linklater's next movie, Dazed and Confused, is named Pink -- after the band... Conspiracy or coincidence?) 
Slacker is like a hundred little movies strung together. It floats freely between realities, giving us
glimpses into the cracks between the ones we usually see on screen. People in this movie
do all the things we normally do, but characters in movies never seem to have time for:
lay around, read the paper, hang out, have inane conversations, go for walks, pass the
time of day.
That Wizard of Oz-type crossroads comes into play shortly after Linklater's character disembarks from his taxi and witnesses an apparent accident: A station wagon runs over an old lady with a bag of groceries at an intersection. But at this point, just when it seems something is about to "happen," instead of closing in on the action, Linklater's camera slowly recedes. We eavesdrop from an ever-increasing distance as the bus guy, a jogger and a passing motorist -- all confused -- stop to help, while other cars zip by on the main thoroughfare. The set-up emphasizes how each of these lives is following its own set of vectors, intersecting or ricocheting off of others for only a moment before caroming off in some other direction.Finally, when the camera is about half a block down the street, the hit-and-run car pulls into the frame below and we follow the driver into his apartment, where he enacts a series of private rituals. Turns out, he's just run over his mother. That's the closest the movie gets to a "dramatic incident," and it's something that actually happened to somebody who lived in Linklater's apartment building, which is also where this scene was shot. Linklater has said he was always intrigued by what this fellow did when he returned to the apartment and just waited for the police to find him.Those moments -- of waiting, daydreaming, vegging out, hypothesizing and generally mulling things over -- are what make up Slacker. The movie could be described as a series of comic digressions upon digressions, sort of like Nicholson Baker's brilliantly and infuriatingly funny, footnote-riddled novel, The Mezzanine. For those of us whose daydreaming brains are in synch with Linklater's, Slacker is a source of endless fascination. And even if you're not particularly interested in one character, you know it'll be only a few moments before another comes along to distract you. As one of them says: "I've got band practice in, like... five hours. So, I thought I'd be moseying along..."
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