Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Boyhood

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Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 09-07-2014, 02:33 AM:

This movie really threw me under the bus. Wasn't expecting it at all.

Based on a boy's life from age 5 to 18.

The feature drags and speeds by at the same time, just like life. And it might as well have been about me.

The mom's last line completely broke me down and I'm still reeling. One of those movies I'll be thinking about for a long time. A fresh perspective of how no one really knows what this thing called life is and how everyone is just 'winging it'. Soundtrack was pretty good too.

9/10, will leave a lasting impression

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 09-08-2014, 07:36 PM:

I thought was highly overrated (and I'm a Linklater fan) even though we see the kid age over the years, the one thing that stuck with me (and in a negative way) was the corny last bit of dialogue - myself, my friend and the couple sitting to my right burst into laughter ("really?") [eyeroll]

I'd give it a 'C'

I was talking with LA critic Kenneth Turan a month ago and he and I both agreed that the critical slobbering over this film is mindblowing.

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 09-08-2014, 08:39 PM:

For what it's worth, I knew only the basis of the film before going in, I hadn't heard anything positive or negative.

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 09-08-2014, 08:50 PM:

you're kidding? it's the highest rated Rotten Tomatoes film of the year with a 99% freshness with critics and 90 from audiences...

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 09-08-2014, 08:54 PM:

I gotta say, that's impressive. But no, I'm not kidding. Spur of the moment purchase, I had already watched Begin Again and If I Stay that evening, figured I'd round out the evening with another movie.

Mind you, I was out of town, we don't have it in my town so no one was talking about it

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 09-20-2014, 10:05 AM:

Just watched it last night. Liked it. It's Dazed and Confused from a grownup perspective. Using the same actor to play the Liquor Store clerk in both films was a tell (I was suspicious, so looked it up). Definitely a movie that will launch a thousand grad theses.

Posted by Terry Lynn-Stevens (Member # 7349) on 01-25-2015, 10:15 AM:

quote: Jonathan Goeldner
I thought was highly overrated

I finally gave the movie a look on DVD, I have to agree, the movie is a bit overrated. I kept on seeing the Television/Internet spots that said "see the extraordinary film called Boyhood" or whatever it was and I then kept on thinking, what was so extraordinary about the movie.

I also get and understand that the movie was filmed over 12 years, that is great but I don't think it really makes all that much of a difference. The movie was 2hr and 45 minute and that totally sucked.

Patricia Arquette was pretty good and she will likely win the supporting role Oscar for the movie. Not because she was good but because voters are blind and they see a woman who now belongs in television and they think, "wow look what she has done"

Overall, its a very good movie, but Birdman, Imitation Game, American Sniper and Theory of Everything were better.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 01-25-2015, 05:10 PM:

My girlfriend and I were looking for a few movies to rent & watch this weekend. I saw a copy of Boyhood on the rental shelves at Hastings. It seemed like a good choice considering the Oscar buzz around it.

Obviously this movie is not for everyone. Any viewer expecting a conventional movie watching experience driven by high concept plot and Save The Cat template story beats is going to be sorely disappointed and bored out of his mind.

The movie is very much a "slice of life" story following its main character, Mason (played by Ellar Coltrane) and his broken family unit as he goes from elementary school to entering college. There is some conflict and drama in the story, but it doesn't really have the traditional well-defined beginning, middle and end viewers are used to seeing in conventional movies. I can't help but wonder if director Richard Linklater is going to continue arranging new scenes to keep the story going well into Mason's adulthood.

This concept immediately had me thinking of the Up documentary series which followed the lives of 14 people in the UK from the time they were aged 7 in 1964 to current times. A new installment would be released every 7 years. It started with Seven Up and its latest episode was 56 Up.

The difference between Boyhood and the Up series is the Up series is a documentary providing updates every 7 years. Boyhood is a movie with actors playing fictional people with a production schedule divided up for more than a decade.

I admire the commitment of Linklater, his core group of actors and crew people to get on board with this project and keep coming back to it in fits and starts over the years. It's fascinating to see the characters naturally age and transform over the movie's running time. The only thing that comes close to this is binge-watching a TV series on Netflix over several seasons and see its characters age just a little bit. But this is condensed down into a 2 1/2 hour movie. It had to be pretty challenging for everyone involved in the Boyhood production to maintain any kind of continuity with the performances and details of the production.

The downside is the movie had a feel of being something more like an experimental project assembled in the garage on again and off again. It didn't have enough in the way of story threads to give viewers anticipation of where the story was headed. In the end I was just watching Mason get closer and closer to graduation and wondering when the movie was going to finally end. It really did drag in a few spots.

Boyhood is profound in some ways and it had me thinking of what I might do differently if I had my teenage years to do all over again. But it's not a "home run" of a movie. I don't think it really lends itself to repeat viewings either.

My girlfriend and I also watched The Maze Runner and the thriller No Good Deed this weekend. No Good Deed really really sucked. Damn, that movie had some stupid characters driven by very bad writing. The movie was marketed more to black audiences; my girlfriend felt pretty insulted by that. The Maze Runner was more entertaining than I expected.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-05-2015, 07:02 PM:

If this would've been a "normal" production using a bunch of similar looking actors at different ages, a whole bunch of make-up and maybe some post-production magic, I guess nobody would've raved about this movie. It would still not be a bad movie, but it's obviously the way in which this movie was shot, what makes it special.

I did enjoy this movie, although I do think it had some pacing issues now and then. While some aspects are skipped over rather effortlessly, others get too much exposure in my opinion. But I guess it was never the intention of this movie to dive into all the little subplots that evolve troughout the years that pass.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-05-2015, 11:13 PM:

I think the long term production and "method" aging approach to this slice of life story is one of the main attractions, if not the art to this story.

One of my female coworkers rented Boyhood. She's pretty picky about the TV shows and movies she watches or the books she reads. There's a lot she doesn't like all that much and few things she really likes. My coworker loved Boyhood. She thought it was one of the best movies she has seen in a long time.

That made me think about one's own perspective and life experiences taken into context when watching Boyhood. I watched the movie mainly thinking of how I identified with Mason in my years growing up. My coworker is a mother of two kids, a grown son and daughter. Boyhood affected her on a higher level as a parent who, like Patricia Arquette's character, has raised a son and daughter, gone through divorce, job changes, etc. Boyhood just felt very real to her.