Dazed and Confused
Criterion, $39.95
In these still nascent years of DVDs, getting the Criterion Collection treatment is tantamount to having the Library of Congress short-list your film into its preservationist bunker. Criterion’s extensive, two-disc archiving of Slacker in 2004 represented yet more ammo for Austin’s Richard Linklater as a singular cinephile, and now similar conservation of the director’s follow-up makes its case for Dazed and Confused as a buzz for the ages. As Linklater touches on in a lively commentary track, by 1993, “teen” flicks were dead, and though his deft weave of time, place, and people is the antithesis of Sixteen Candles, the writer-director’s debut studio pitch for a Seventies version of American Graffiti coughed up $6 million from Universal. Attached to the project was wrestler-turned-producer James Jacks, who, in a 45-minute documentary, makes crystal clear it was “our film,” not Linklater’s, had push come to fist. The slo-mo hazing of incoming high school freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) at the hands of seniors, set to Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” elicits an uneasy chuckle from Linklater. “That was me making the movie – being initiated into how you get a film made with someone else’s money at a studio level. I felt I was the one being paddled and running for my life.” Casting director Don Phillips countered this with his immortal coming-of-age credit, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which UT junior Matthew McConaughey got wind of one night in a downtown bar where Phillips was drinking. The pair’s “good old boys” all-nighter crowned Linklater’s ensemble of then no-names, including Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, Renée Zellweger, Milla Jovovich, Nicky Katt, Jason London, and a handful of other notables, who spent a summer in Austin reliving May 28, 1976, the last day of school. An extra, Kahane Corn, now a producer for The Daily Show, apparently shot more behind-the-scenes footage than Linklater rolled film, so two hours’ worth of paraphernalia, such as cast auditions and prop master Robert Janecka’s paddles and bongs, multiplies the irrepressible charm of Dazed and Confused. A recent “Flashback Edition” of the DVD has 15 minutes of deleted scenes (“DVD Watch,” Screens, December 10, 2004) expanded on by 10 here. Three decades divide Linklater’s “autobiographical greatest hits” and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, but there remain small Southern towns where a righteous beer bust trumps conformity every blessed night.
Also Out Now
The 400 Blows (Criterion, $29.95): Still Truffaut’s first, 1959, still his most personal and affecting, snowballing all the magic and intrigue of youth into a cautionary memoir of crime and punishment. Incorrigible.
Viridiana (Criterion, $29.95): Buñuel’s debauched desecration of the Last Supper plays more linear and literal than most of his oeuvre without omitting another icy blonde, Mexican Silvia Pinal. Nun on the run.
This article appears in May 26 • 2006.
