Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991).

Richard Linklater’s breakthrough film, Slacker, almost never played Sundance. According to John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes, Competition Director Alberto Garcia “did not particularly like the film.” In fact, Linklater was initially rejected when he submitted Slacker for the 1990 festival, at the time still called the US Film Festival. So, that summer, he self-released the film in his hometown of Austin, Texas, with much success. But the biggest success was yet to come.

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In a post published today on Hulu’s official blog, Kevin Smith reminisces about his 21st birthday, which he spent driving from New Jersey to New York to see Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Inspired by J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review, Smith says, “the promise of a scene centered on a Madonna pap smear of questionable authenticity was bait enough to lure us from the Jersey ‘burbs into the wilds of Manhattan-after-dark.”

17 years later, thanks to Hulu, no one will ever have to drive an hour each way for the Madonna pap smear scene again. Slacker is embedded above.

• Variety says Hellboy 2 “did hellacious business in debuting to an estimated $35.9 million.” This seems to be a compliment. Meanwhile, Meet Dave bombed, and Journey to the Center of the Earth made a very respectable $20 mil on just 854 3D screens.
• Richard Linklater, Mike White and Jack Black will collaborate on a sequel to School of Rock, and it’s got what’s destined to rival Babe 2: Pig in the City for mockable sequel titles: School of Rock 2: America Rocks. Where’s the exclamation point?
  
• Terribly Happy, a Danish crime film, took the top prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend. Man on Wire took the documentary prize, and there was also a “special mention” for Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

I’ve just returned from a screening of 2 Days in Paris, a comedy written, directed, starring and edited by Julie Delpy of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset fame. Delpy has been very vocal about how her involvement in those Richard Linklater films helped her get funding for Paris. But I wonder if Delpy’s candor isn’t doing her new film a disservice. Earlier today, I read a review of Paris in L Magazine (via GreenCine Daily) which seems to exemplify the general critical reaction to the picture. “The movie suffers terribly of course from the inevitable comparisons to Before Sunrise/Sunset,” writes Benjamin Strong “But in all fairness to Delpy, show me a film that wouldn’t.” With that in mind, I came home from the Paris screening and watched several clips of Sunset on YouTube (cough cough the whole movie’s there in eight parts cough cough), and I think the comparison actually made 2 Days in Paris stand out to me as a more original film.

It’s fair to make comparisons. 2 Days in Paris, like Before Sunset, is a snap shot of relationship between a French woman and an American man, which plays out over the course of a temporary stay Paris. Both films even end with images of Delpy dancing. But whereas the last scene of Sunset (in which Delpy’s Celine channels the spirit of Nina Simone while Ethan Hawke’s Jesse looks on, boggled by her beauty and her shaking booty) typifies that film’s idealization of that relationship, Paris has little use for such golden-hued fantasies of romantic love.

Linklater’s film is a verite-style portrait of a relationship at its most magical (and least sustainable); Delpy’s is an almost Brechtian analysis of what happens to a relationship after that magic hour. It’s far from a perfect film, and in fact at times it feels rather schizophrenic. But somehow, in between fits of broad comedy and Godardian self-referentiality (the first shot of the film even offers a wink at Godard’s “girl and a gun”), Delpy manages to pull off a spot-on portrayal of what it feels like to be in an adult relationship on the brink. It’s certainly messier than Linklater’s tightly-orchestrated symphony of long shots, but to me, the fact you can all but see Delpy’s fingerprints on the screen is extremely appealing.

It’s also fascinating to watch Delpy directly allude to Sunset, as she seems to be doing in the final of scene of Paris, but recast the mood and the situation to fit her own point of view. In Sunset, Linklater draws attention to Delpy’s pale, etheral beauty and sylph-like thinness by putting the actress in a gauzy, backless black blouse, and shooting her slinky dance for Jesse in wide-angle. Celine is clearly performing, but with her body perpendicular to Jesse’s, so that we get the sense that he’s almost spying on her in plain sight. This is classic female objectification–there’s even something slightly creepy about the second-to-last shot of the film, when Hawke, right before breaking into laughter, seems to shift his gaze into a leer. The final shots of 2 Days in Paris have an entirely different feel. I guess it would be a spoiler to go into it here in great detail, but suffice it to say that Delpy (seen here on screen clearly slightly heavier and slightly older, but no less beautiful) takes the opportunity to move away from the fantasy and towards the real.

Above: that final shot of Celine dancing in Before Sunset. You can also watch a brief clip from Paris here, courtesy of indieWIRE.

Over at PopMatters, Charles Moss has posted a lengthy consideration of Michael Bay’s Transformers as a “Generation X” phenomenon. An excerpt:

Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief operating officer, realized that most of the boys who played with Transformers in the ‘80s are now adult men. He knew that we would be suckers for it. And we are. We’ve become nostalgia-loving adults who find it comforting to revel in childhood as a sign that we don’t take ourselves as seriously as our parents, the baby boomers, had. It’s not that we have refused to grow up, but like the transforming toys we loved so much, the transformation from childhood to adulthood is one which we want to take our time making, figuring out the right twists and turns, making sure every piece of our lives is in place.

Oddly, though Moss’s piece has much to say about slackers, it’s got nothing to say about Slacker.

Moss credits Kevin Smith with bringing “Generation X out of the fanboy closet with 1994’s Clerks, which started a string of films dealing with 20-something slackers who spent most of their time discussing the finer points of Star Wars or superhero sex,” but he doesn’t mention Richard Linklater. I don’t know about you, but to me it seems more and more like Linklater is the true stand-out director of that pack of early-to-mid 90s Sundance brats, the only one with the ability to speak to tendencies common to an entire generation, and not just the Jersey-based comic-gobbling wing of it (I actually wouldn’t want to knock Kevin Smith specifically–there are numerous other directors who could be cited for nailing one specific aspect of Gen X culture while failing to grasp the bigger picture, from Gregg Araki to Wes Anderson to–but Moss brought it up). …Read more

Paul interviews Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin) after the screening of Smiley Face at SXSW 2007. Hands down, one of the funniest movies of the year. Richard Linklater makes a surprise appearance.