Dazed and Confused

Another of the movies that I had the chane to record thanks to the Showtime free preview is Dazed and Confused. It's got multiple airings coming up this week, starting tomorrow at 6:00 PM on Showtime Beyond, so as always, I made a point of sitting down to watching it and doing a review here.

It's May 28, 1976 in a suburb of Austin TX. It's the Friday before Memorial Day, but more importantly, it's the last day of school before the summer vacation. Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) is the quarterback and captain of the football team, and is going to be a senior in the fall. Coach is expecting everybody on the team to sign a pledge that they won't get into any trouble over the summer, which specifically means that they shouldn't drink or do pot, which is the real problem as that's all everybody seems interested in.

Well, not quite everything. There's also the various initiation rituals. The upperclass girls have one for the younger girls who are hoping to join the cheerleading squad. That's bad, but worse is what the upperclass boys have for the younger boys who are going to become freshmen the next year. Incoming seniors like O'Bannion (a very young Ben Affleck) make paddles in shop class and use these to paddle the incoming freshmen! And the community for the most part doesn't seem to have much problem with this, with the exception of young Carl, whose mom pulls a shotgun on O'Bannion.

One of Pink's friends, Pickford (Shawn Andrews), has parents who are planning on going away for the weekend, so Pickford is going to get a whole bunch of beer delivered and having a massive kegger at his house. Except that the delivery comes while Pickford's parents are still there, so they figure out what's going on, making Pickford delay delivery and move the party to a public park, which pretty much everybody is going to try to get to that night.

In the meantime, there's a lot of teens hanging out at various spots; attempts to score beer, pot, or sex; and O'Bannion still going around trying to get Carl and his friend Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) to paddle them, although at least Mitch gets to pal around with Pink and his friends. One more character is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey at the beginning of his career); he graduated high school some years back but is still trying to score with the high school girls.

So there's really not a whole lot going on in terms of plot in Dazed and Confused. It's more of a slice of life movie. If you were expecting a plot, then you're definitely not going to like the movie, but if you want an image of a certain place and time, then you'll probably have a better opinion. I graduated high school quite a few years later, and half a continent away two hours north of New York City. So most of what's portrayed in Dazed and Confused was not my experience at all. As such, I won't give it quite the high review that some other people would.

Still, Dazed and Confused is definitely worth a watch, as there are several people at the beginning of their careers who would go on to a fair amount of fame. In addition to the aforementioned Affleck and McConnaughey, there's director Richard Linklater, and actors Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich, and Adam Goldberg. And people of a certain age will love the soundtrack.