Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45978 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-07-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 102 minutes

Amazon.com
You remember high school? Really remember? If you think you do, watch this film: it'll all really come racing back. After changing the world with the generation-defining Slacker, director Richard Linklater turned his free-range vérité sensibility on the 1970s. As before, his all-seeing camera meanders across a landscape studded with goofy pop culture references and poignant glimpses of human nature. Only this time around, he's spreading a thick layer of nostalgia over the lens (and across the soundtrack). It's as if Fast Times at Ridgemont High was directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The story deals with a group of friends on the last day of high school, 1976. Good-natured football star Randall "Pink" Floyd navigates effortlessly between the warring worlds of jocks, stoners, wannabes, and rockers with girlfriend and new-freshman buddy in tow. Surprisingly, it's not a coming-of-age movie, but a film that dares ask the eternal, overwhelming, adolescent question, "What happens next?" It's a little too honest to be a light comedy (representative quote: "If I ever say these were the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself."). But it's also way too much fun (remember souped-up Corvettes and bicentennial madness?) to be just another existential-essay-on-celluloid. --Grant Balfour

From The New Yorker
A relaxed, uplifting new movie from Richard Linklater, who directed "Slacker." It's the last day of school, summer 1976, and a bunch of seniors are pondering their futures and getting ready to thrash their juniors. We learn of Pink (Jason London), for instance, who wants to play college football and smoke pot. But the movie has no particular hero or heroine; Linklater is too democratic for that, and his camera glides around offering moments of heroism, or bliss, to all the characters in turn. There isn't much plot, but what there is gets resolved at an all-night party; you keep expecting the film to move on, but it just hangs around and enjoys itself. This is a great time-capsule film-Alice Cooper and Thin Lizzy on the soundtrack, womb-shaped plastic chairs, and the flap of flared jeans-but it's far more than that. With his endless gags and crisp, glowing images, Linklater has come up with a dramatization of good will. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker