Alas, Yorick Warns You Away from Bad Movies

Recently the mail dude dropped the latest Netflix offering in our mail box. It was a 1991 movie called "Slacker." It is supposedly a cult classic, and introduced the word "slacker" to the language, in the sense of the young people in the early 1990s "characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition."

Now, those are people I can relate to, so I sat down to watch it with some expectation that it might be a good movie.

Here is a plot summary: somebody (with one or two exceptions, a young person) delivers a soliloquy to somebody else while they walk around until he/she/they pass somebody else who is talking, and the camera sticks with them. All shot on a hot and sunny day near the campus of the University of Texas, in Austin, some time around 1990. (The walk-and-talk thing reminded me of West Wing, except West Wing had good dialogue and actors.)

There is no danger of a spoiler here, because to spoil implies that a movie has a plot twist or development, or indeed even a PLOT, to give away.

Now, I don't mind watching an aimless movie once in a while, and I am quite happy to watch a movie with essentially zero action (the most action I saw was a group of brats kicking a Coke machine to get a brown fizzy drink for free) and lots and lots of talking. Heck, I even liked the chatfest movie "Coffee and Cigarettes."

But I couldn't get into this for what I think are two reasons but may in fact be flip sides of the same coin - bad dialogue and bad acting.

These twenty-something slackers spoke in a way that is completely alien to how REAL people speak, in completely formed paragraphs. They didn't sound like they were speaking, they sounded like they were RECITING.

And almost immediately I could tell this movie used a lot of people who are not really actors. They certainly could have delivered the lines better, but even getting Clive Owen and Meryl Streep into this would have still left them with a clunky dialogue.

The cuts from one scene to another were pretty rapid. At first, I thought it was a shame because we moved onto the next characters before I could generate any feel for the character. But as the movie went on, I was GLAD for the cuts because by then I didn't WANT to get any closer to these clowns.

In one scene, a boom mike briefly dropped into the shot. That doesn't bother me much, the movie looks like it was all done in single takes.

But again, the dialogue and situations were absurd. One old goat comes home to see a skinny young dude in his house. Skinny young dude (SYD) reaches into the back of his shorts and pulls out a gun. Old goat (OG) says "you don't need that" and reaches out and takes it away from him. OG points out a photo from the early twentieth century on his wall and proceeds to lecture SYD about how the assassination of President McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz was a political act and how we could use a hundred people like Czolgosz now. SYD listens respectfully to the lecture, stays for dinner with OG and OG's daughter, and eventually returns to the car where his two partners in crime berate him for failing to return with a television.

OG also says he was unfortunately off campus the day in 1966 when Charles Whitman got up in the University of Texas' tower and killed 14 people. I was fervently wishing Whitman had killed OG so we wouldn't have had to endure that conversation.

That was not the worst, lamest, or most poorly acted scene.

The FUNNIEST thing I saw was a bit of an accident only funny because of the timing in watching it. It was a "Ron Paul Libertarian for President" sign on the side of a truck.

I see references on the tubes we affectionately know as The Internets that mention "Slacker" in the same sentence as "sex, lies and videotapes" and "Clerks." DO NOT BE FOOLED. Yes, all were independent movies made at a time when such things were less common and got less exposure than today. But the other two are orders of magnitude BETTER than "Slacker."

"Slacker" is to "sex, lies and videotape" and "Clerks" as Biff Pocoroba is to Johnny Bench. Both were major league catchers, but Bench set the standard for slugging and defense among modern catchers, while Biff merely had a catchy name.

If this is on your Netflix queue, change it now. You should thank me.