Ray Pride

Richard Linklater's exhilarating, wildly entertaining 1993 youth-culture memory piece of self-discovery through teenage rituals is less geographically specific than the paranoiac Austin, Texas, of his earlier "Slacker," yet more culturally detailed, capturing 1976 America with loving, ethnographic precision. Linklater's small-town, blue-collar verisimilitude is invested in a plotless flow of events on the last day of school, with two-dozen characters overlapping in their cruising, hazing, flirting, name-calling, drinking and pot-smoking. While Linklater's loose, unemphatic visual style and concentration on the inarticulate expressiveness of his characters suggests a younger version of Robert Altman, his generosity and sweetness of spirit makes him more of a stoner Jean Renoir. While it dovetails neatly with the ongoing seventies revival, the film never falls to the precious nostalgia of films like "Diner." There's a keen link between Linklater's two features: his own surrogate, the imp-faced Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), a freshman whose initiation starts on this night, is the right age to have stumbled through "Slacker," but the link is never forced. For my money, "Dazed and Confused" is the best movie about American teenagers, period. Watch for the brilliant, frightening final shot: keep your eyes up on the road ahead. 97m.

"Dazed and Confused" plays Friday and Saturday midnight shows at the Music Box.

(2003-08-13)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
(Im Juli) A small, "Amelie"-like treat (which was produced around the same time as Jeunet's globe-straddling hit), Fatih Akin's "Im Juli" is a champion border-crosser, tossing "Run Lola Run"'s Moritz Bleibtreau into the heart of southwestern Europe in pursuit of fate.
(2003-08-05)

Short Runs
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L.A. confidence
I never thought I'd live to see the day when thrills in a studio movie would come from sheer competence
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Tip of the Week
Sam Green and Bill Siegel's "The Weather Underground" is an impressively sturdy documentary about a difficult-to-master slice of American history, a sweet rebuke to the narcissism-as-entertainment wing of contemporary documentary practice
(2003-07-30)

The Oh No show
(2003-07-30)

Short Runs
(2003-07-30)

Tip of the Week
(2003-07-23)

Leaving Navy Pier
(2003-07-23)

Extras, extras
(2003-07-23)

Short Runs
(2003-07-23)

Tip of the Week
(2003-07-16)

Short Runs
(2003-07-16)

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