I’m so excited I could just about piss in my pants. Today I got my Special Edition Double-Disc DVD Set of Slacker, which comes in a gorgeous box and includes a 64-page book. Wow. I am blown away just by the packaging. Even the case for the DVDs themselves is stunning. Hell, even the discs themselves are cool, one printed to look like a water meter cover, the other like a storm sewer.
There’s a quote from Godard in the booklet, but I can forgive that.
I had to have a copy of Slacker. I still remember seeing it in the theater back in 1991. Or was it 1992? It was the first time I had ever seen people in a movie who I thought “looked like me,” i.e., like real people my age, my peers in Bloomington.
Plus, it is a kick-ass movie.
I first saw it in 1994 or 1995 and remember thinking that it was terribly disjointed but that I immediately wanted to watch it again – clearly I had missed something. In doing so, I recall noticing how funny the dialogue was and that this appeared to be the only real point of the movie – no discernable cast, no particular location, just the interaction of a continuous string of people that were as lost and boring as me and my friends. Vicarious is the word that comes to mind.
They are in fact your peers in Bloomington. Look for the “smurf guy” who argues, in a bar, that smurfs have Krishna consciousness and (if I recall correctly) therefore presage teh end of the world at the hands of Kali. That’s Seth Spicker, aka Rev. Maxwell Malice, today of SF, but born and bred in the hothouse of Bloomington freakazoids.
Oh yeah! I remember seeing Maxwell Malice talking about Smurfs in the movie when it first came out–“Hey! I know that guy!!” Great.