[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

Before Sunrise has always SUCKED. I hated that shit the moment it came out. I hated how people seemed to think it was so deep and amazingly evocative.

haa haaa haaa. i suppose as a ute i saw myself in ethan hawke’s place going bananas over julie delpy, cuz who doesn’t love meeting a french hottie on a train and having sex with her in a park and making a date for a year later? i used to have long distance relationships back then so im familiar with the logistics of transcontinental fucking. and this spoke to that as well.

and yes it is “evocative,” but that’s precisely what’s annoying for me today rather than 23 years ago. 23 years ago i said the same kind of stupid shit the guy says. i used books and records as magic items that pointed towards some ideal world we don’t inhabit on this earth. i had this semi-girlfriend (friend with benefits i guess) who was into cemeteries (oh, goth girls). i used to read poetry like taking my pharmaceuticals, and of course i loved dylan thomas. i would get high on culture and sex and dreams the same way those children in the movie do.

and it’s the fact that’s evocative that’s the problem with it for me now. it’s too fucking evocative. it’s cringeworthy. it’s like the national geographic with humans that they discuss at the beginning, just looking at people go through the motions of their boring lives, but here we see them go through the motions of a teenage date. okay not teenage, college age, same difference from my vantage point now, it all blurs into ridiculousness. except that teenage love is more direct and innocent whereas pseudointellectual college contortions are fake and unbearable.

i don’t ever wanna go back to a college or post-college-age date lolololol. so embarrassing!

just to be contrary now i might try to watch it again from an anthropological perspective. since i can no longer be the horny naive young person smitten with julie delpy anyway.

but there’s something about linklater’s documentary tendencies that’s worth highlighting. slackers, where the camera just moves on and on going through people and looking at pieces of their random everyday lives. or boyhood— did you see boyhood? following a kid growing up? it’s a crazy project. has more dramatic structure than this though. but yeah. his documentary impulse which in the words of one of his characters is “the poetry of everyday lives”.

the poetry of a stereotypical college date? ha ha ha ha. no poetry that i can see anymore except for teh signifiers of a certain age, but the documentary is still there. maybe it’s not poetry but just bowel movements.