2 Best Movies to Watch by Charles Gunning

Staff & contributors

The walk-and-talk roots of the Before Trilogy are traceable to this low-budget cult movie from writer-director Richard Linklater, which came five years before our first introduction to Celine and Jesse. Rather than follow a single, winding conversation, though, Slacker hops from character to character every few minutes, and we never meet them again. In fact, we rarely even learn their names, which makes the credits a particular pleasure to watch as it identifies cast members with wry monikers like “Dostoyevsky wannabe,” “Ultimate loser,” and “Scooby Doo philosopher.”

Shot in Linklater’s adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, the movie captures the city’s uniquely alternative vibe — or, as one character succinctly puts it, “This town has always had its share of crazies.” Conversations range from the spaced-out to the flat-out paranoid, a fair amount of the movie’s ragtag band being partial to conspiracy theories, from the well-worn (JFK's death) or the more bizarre (the real meaning behind The Smurfs). With its freewheeling approach to narrative, Slacker shares the lovable weirdness of its characters, as attested to by its enduring status as a cult classic.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Athina Rachel Tsangari, Charles Gunning, D. Montgomery, Kim Krizan, Mark James, Richard Linklater, Robert Jacks

Director: Richard Linklater

Waking Life is composed exclusively of a series of conversations involving the main character, with him sometimes participating and sometimes just as a spectator. The discussions revolve around issues such as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy or the meaning of life. The title refers to a quote from Jorge Santayana: "sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.", and the whole movie wanders around the state of a lucid dream, emphasized by the rotoscoping technique in which it was filmed. Waking Life is not just a movie worth watching, it is a movie worth watching a thousand times, because you will always notice something that you have previously missed out.

Genre: Animation, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Adam Goldberg, Alex Jones, Bill Wise, Caveh Zahedi, Charles Gunning, Ethan Hawke, Glover Gill, Jason Liebrecht, Jeanine Attaway, John Christensen, Julie Delpy, Kim Krizan, Lorelei Linklater, Louis Black, Mona Lee Fultz, Nicky Katt, Peter Atherton, Richard Linklater, Steve Brudniak, Steve Fitch, Steven Prince, Steven Soderbergh, Timothy "Speed" Levitch, Trevor Jack Brooks, Wiley Wiggins

Director: Richard Linklater

Rating: R