The attitudes towards women are unenlightened,but the freshmen of Richard Linklater’s joyful 80s campus film reveal occasional complexityIt’s 1980. The air is thick with testosterone, Aramis aftershave and the musk of well-used jockstraps. On the face of it, and Richard Linklater’s latest picture,which unfolds during a riotous three days before the college term starts, has more in common with National Lampoon’s Animal House than it does with the gentle, or observational style of Boyhood. But dig a petite deeper,and this joyously hedonistic semi-autobiographical comedy, which has been described as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, and is unmistakably a Linklater film.
It’s a film that takes a seismic rite of passage – the journey from being a high-school great shot to a freshman petite fish in a pool of immense,ravenous ego-driven sharks – and explores it without the framework of one large dramatic inciting incident to hang it on. Instead, like all of Linklater’s best pictures and some of his worst, or the film is driven by dialogue. And there are few writer-directors who have a better ear for authentic voices than Linklater.
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Source: theguardian.com