What a treat: Reverse Shot, an independently published film journal has posted a whole issue (or symposium, as they call it) about one of my favorite filmmakers: Richard Linklater.
(Discovered via Indiewire Insider)
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how much I was looking forward to seeing Before Sunset, Linklater’s latest film. I rushed to see the film on opening night but for some reason I never blogged about it. I’ll just say for now that I wasn’t disappointed at all, quite the opposite, and I will quote journalists from Reverse Shot with whom I very much agree:
Before Sunset manages the neat trick of being an anti-date movie (it’s all about getting old, folks) wholly suffused with an honest romanticism sorely lacking in contemporary cinema. A bittersweet mixture of love and mortality, each smile or laugh it earns from the audience is hard won.
By Jeff Reichert.
Though it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sight of these star-crossed lovers face to face again begets sparks, I’m not sure there’s a film in the last decade which serves up such an astonishingly electric display of that over-employed term referring to a rarely realized feat: chemistry. Delpy and Hawke slide into their respective roles with such grace it’s as if they’d never fully cast off their Jesse/C�line integuments. That they also receive co-writing credits this time around, may have something to do with the fact that they’ve never played more magnetically than through these skins, mapping the vicissitudes of these lives, conversing in such a strangely paradoxical manner marked by a precisely tuned state of nervous ease.
[…]
Maybe some of this adulation is reactive residue. Maybe some of it has to due with the simple fact that I’m so tired of hearing about Quentin Tarantino’s infallible genius, his soulless opus’s one and two, that I’m eager to divert attention to what some might call « the anti-Bill ». But if any one American work had the chance to sneak out from beneath the shadow of Uma’s formidable juggernauts and instill some sense of raw spirit this inevitably blockbustered-to-bits summer, Before Sunset is the film. Linklater and a couple of actor-friends have utterly outdone themselves here, realizing the nascent maturation signaled surprisingly by last year’s School of Rock, in all its sublime majesty.
By Matt Plouffe.
