Arriving a full decade after Slacker<\/em> added a new term to the cultural lexicon and heralded Linklater as a filmmaker to watch, Waking Life<\/em> and Tape<\/em> do a good job of encapsulating his career up to that point. From Slacker<\/em>, Waking Life<\/em> picks up its discursive structure and branching narrative. From 1993\u2019s Dazed and Confused<\/em>, the film recasts Wiley Wiggins as its audience surrogate (who\u2019s never even given a name). Waking Life<\/em> also borrows Celine and Jesse from 1995\u2019s Before Sunrise<\/em>, putting them in bed for a scene flatly contradicted by Before Sunset<\/em> three years later, as well as its peripatetic plot driven by talkative characters given to philosophical musings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for Tape<\/em>, it shares with 1996\u2019s SubUrbia<\/em> its origin as a stage play (something Tape<\/em> doesn\u2019t try to hide in any way) and characters obsessed with authenticity. There are also parallels between Jon, the hot young director back in his hometown for a film festival who meets up with an old high school friend, and the friend-turned-rock star in SubUrbia<\/em> who\u2019s passing through while on tour. The odd one out, then, is 1998\u2019s The Newton Boys<\/em>, which was Linklater\u2019s first studio film and his most expensive one to date. In the wake of its failure to light up the box office, Linklater quickly regrouped, filming Waking Life<\/em> in and around his home base of Austin in the summer of 1999 for a fraction of what The Newton Boys<\/em> cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is like my little window to the world, and every minute\u2019s a different show.\u201d So says the guy who picks Wiggins up at the train station in a boat car and subtly prepares him (and the viewer) for the surreal turn his life (and the film) is about to take. With its myriad animation styles, ranging from expressionistic to painterly and realistic to symbolic, Waking Life<\/em> initially presents itself as a series of discrete monologues on the subjects of philosophy, science, language, and sociology, with Wiggins as a passive listener\/observer, before expanding its scope to incorporate conversations and scenes his character isn\u2019t privy to. Things get a little headier after he wakes up for a second time, does some channel surfing, and one of the talking heads mentions lucid dreaming, leading Wiggins to believe there may be a reason why his reality is suddenly so curiously malleable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In contrast, Tape<\/em> has a consistently scuzzy, lo-res aesthetic, with harsh lighting accentuating the anonymity of Room 19 at the Motor Palace, where Vince (Ethan Hawke) sets the stage for Jon (Robert Sean Leonard) by making it appear he\u2019s downed twice as many beers as he has and greeting him at the door in a T-shirt and boxers. \u201cI swear to God, man, you get stranger every year,\u201d Jon says, and in the decade since they graduated from high school they\u2019ve definitely taken different paths in life. While Jon has made his way in the world, only returning home because one of his films is showing there, Vince has been content to drift along, plying the same trade he did in high school (dealing drugs) and indulging in the \u201cviolent tendencies\u201d Jon chides him about. This is all preamble, however, for the main event, as their shared history with a former classmate (now the local assistant district attorney) comes out and Vince prods Jon into a confession with serious repercussions for their already-tenuous friendship. This becomes especially acute after Vince reveals he\u2019s recorded their entire conversation on audiotape and, oh yes, the subject of their most damning exchanges is on her way over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the basic setup of Stephen Belber\u2019s drama, which Hawke and Leonard deliver on, but Tape<\/em> really gets in gear with the arrival of Uma Thurman as Amy, who\u2019s all smiles when Vince answers the door and whose demeanor visibly changes when she finds out Jon is also there. (Vince is definitely the type of guy who likes to spring surprises on people.) Similarly, the camerawork matches the energy of the room, with Linklater and director of photography Maryse Alberti indulging in ostentatious camera angles when Jon is bouncing off the walls early on and employing whip-pans when the back-and-forth gets heated. Not impossible to pull off if you\u2019re shooting on film, but much easier with the lightweight cameras they were using.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since the one-two punch of Waking Life<\/em> and Tape<\/em>, Linklater has continued to flex his creative muscles in different ways. In fact, it was not long after that he embarked on the twelve-year project that became Boyhood<\/em>, in the midst of which he twice picked up the story of Celine and Jesse (in 2004 and 2013), turned out a second animated feature (2006\u2019s A Scanner Darkly<\/em>, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, who\u2019s name-checked by Linklater\u2019s pinball player in Waking Life<\/em>), and found critical and commercial success with the crowd-pleasing School of Rock<\/em>, a hit unlike any he\u2019d had before. \u201cThings have been tough lately for dreamers,\u201d says one of the figures in Waking Life<\/em>. \u201cThey say dreaming\u2019s dead and no one does it anymore.\u201d Well, as dreamers go, Linklater seems to be managing just fine. Twenty years ago, Richard Linklater released two very different experimental films, two weeks apart. A look back at what those films told us about his work \u2013 then and now: <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":17251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1428,1399],"tags":[1429,1422],"class_list":["post-17248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happy-birthday","category-looking-back","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22161,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17248\/revisions\/22161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/tape-1024x578.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"