• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Boyhood

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

AgentPete

Capo Famiglia
Guardian
Full Member
Joined
May 19, 2014
Location
London UK
LitBits
0
United-Nations
You have to wonder, sometimes, at the cultural divide between the New World and the Old. I was left pondering this, for rather too long, at last night’s preview of Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s much heralded fictional account of the life of a young boy from age six to eighteen. The twist is that the film was shot for a few days every year during that same period, i.e. you’re seeing people grow old before your very eyes.

This may be a radically original cinematic experience for many audiences, but as an concept, it’s not exactly new. French film maker François Truffaut did exactly same thing across five movies, using the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud starting at the age of twelve until thirty. And the British documentary series entitled Up followed the lives of fourteen British children from 1964, when they were seven - and as far as I know it’s still going.

So the “high concept” is not, in point of fact, as wildly original as some of the publicity would have you believe.

In fact, the odd mixture of factual ageing (watching Patricia Arquette grow old and plump before our eyes is disturbingly voyeuristic) and fictional melodrama is rather jarring. This is cinéma vérité in the same way that Big Brother is reality television. The people are real(ish)- but the situations are highly contrived.

But what about the story itself?

I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to separate the “real life” aspect from the underlying plot. These are, after all, working actors, and even though they are ageing in front of our eyes, they are still performing. So how good is the story and the performance?

After two solid hours, I left the cinema. It was just too long, too slow, too schlocky and I simply didn’t care about the fate of any of them. The situations were clichéd, and the dialogue not much better.

This is already a successful film: but it is succeeding on the basis of its much-vaunted high-concept, not on the bass of being a good story well-told.

And I don’t mind that. I can appreciate a great marketing campaign. Heaven knows, we need them in the creative industries at the moment.

Simon Cowell, that great latter-day Barnum, sums up my feelings about Boyhood perfectly when he says: “Create the hype, but don't ever believe it.”
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
  • The World Has Missed You
         May 2021… COVID lockdown restrictions had eased, so Mrs Treaclechops and I headed to the I ...
Back
Top