Dazed & Confused

Buy This Item Dazed & Confused by Universal Studios  Available from Amazon  $9.98  on 9-23-2008     You remember high school? <I>Really</I> remember? If you think you do, watch this film: it'll all really come racing back. After changing the world with the generation-defining <I>Slacker</I>, director Richard Linklater turned his free-range vérité sensibility on the 1970s. As before, his all-seeing camera meanders across a landscape studded with goofy pop culture references and poignant glimpses of human nature. Only this time around, he's spreading a thick layer of nostalgia over the lens (and across the soundtrack). It's as if <I>Fast Times at Ridgemont High</I> was directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The story deals with a group of friends on the last day of high school, 1976. Good-natured football star Randall "Pink" Floyd navigates effortlessly between the warring worlds of jocks, stoners, wannabes, and rockers with girlfriend and new-freshman buddy in tow. Surprisingly, it's not a coming-of-age movie, but a film that dares ask the eternal, overwhelming, adolescent question, "What happens next?" It's a little too honest to be a light comedy (representative quote: "If I ever say these were the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself."). But it's also way too much fun (remember souped-up Corvettes and bicentennial madness?) to be just another existential-essay-on-celluloid. <I>--Grant Balfour</I> Reader Reviews This movie perfectly captures sort of a lost era in the US. It is the post hippy/pre-gen x'er era in which young people are trying to figure out a purpose for life. I would consider it the 1970's version of 'American Graffiti.' It's easily one of the ten best comedies about high schoolers and is very funny in some scenes, yet very poignant in others.

Dazed & Confused Available from Amazon Price: $9.98 Updated on 9-23-2008.

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