Awright awright awright...

Last Tuesday I talked about a product of the 1970s Five Easy Pieces (yes, I realized the title is spelled out not '5'...). The style, look, attitude of the actors and the setting all were a part of the era, and a portent of the decade that was to come.

Now I'm going to talk about a 1993 attempt at visiting the 1970s: Dazed and Confused.

The poster looks promising. There's going to be some weird times and occluded realities. Maybe a coming-of-age story? An American Graffiti for the 1970s? It's got all the right music after all: Aerosmith, Bad Company, The Sweet, Lynrd Skynrd and others. Massive flare pants and colorful shirts.

Everybody is an asshole.

A group of seniors lead by Ben Affleck's character wait for a skinny freshman kid to finish his baseball game so they can take turns paddling his ass. The camera follows them down to the point where he willingly stands still against a car to get it over with. But the camera doesn't show any of the beating. It shies away, we get the implied beating from the kid's expression. I don't get it. Why's that funny? Or if it was pathos Richard Linklater was aiming for why is the incident brushed off so lightly?

O'Bannion (Afleck) is a bully, he's mean, yet he's not very good at being truly sadistic. More like a suppressed homoerotic urge to go after the tender hind quarters of the younger males in his tribe, and even there I'm giving the director more credit than he deserves.

Dazed and Confused? I was.

I took an immediate dislike for just about every character in this movie, which is quite a feat. Watching DAC was like visiting Hell without Virgil at your side. Only wailing, moaning 'I'm BORED!' coupled with an hour of actors literally standing near each other asking 'what's going on?' and walking away from each other.

To prove it's set in the 1970s Richard Linklater does indeed punch up the action 'American Graffiti' style with a few great tunes from the era (Sweet Emotion, etc). The songs just drift in and go away.

Kids drink beer. Kids get high. Kids are mean and rude to every one and everything they see. And they're not even that good at being assholes either, their outlaw behavior only goes so far.