I thought that the movie Slacker was surprisingly enjoyable. It was one of those movies that has an unexplainable appeal, where you like it but you’re not really sure why. There was no plot, very little character development, and the acting was bad… but I liked it anyway. I think Richard Linklater did a good job with directing this movie, the scenes flowed surprisingly well despite the fact that one scene had nothing to do with the next. I also thought the humor in the film was refreshing. It was a welcome break from the situational humor that is mass-produced these days, and managed to show how life (and people) can be funny sometimes without trying to be. I like how the audience was given the perspective of looking down on the people in the town. I think this, along with how the film jumped between unrelated scenes and characters, was an attempt to show how many different types of people interact to form a community. The movie did this by presenting a bunch of independently weird people who made up a basically normal town. It was hard for me to pick up a common theme in the movie because a real story is never given, but I did get the sense that the movie attempted to find similarities between all these different people and group them together as one- as “slackers.” I think the one similarity that these people and maybe “slackers” in general possess is the fact that they don’t take responsibility for their lives. It seemed like all these people were waiting around for life to come to them, and were angry because it hadn’t. It was like they viewed society as their enemy and blamed it for their own worthlessness. Although funny at times, in the end it was sort of depressing to see these people kidding themselves and wasting their lives. ...
