Boyhood (2014)

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in an air-conditioned movie theatre in Chinatown.

The film was Richard Linklater's Boyhood, and true to the style of the writer-director's earlier generational films (Slacker, 1991 and Dazed and Confused, 1993), it moves slowly, undramatically, closer to the lives of those who keep the world at bay than those who use it as their trampoline

Most remarkable about Boyhood is that it was made over a twelve year period. Throughout this time we see the "boy" grow from a first-year-of-school six-year-old to an eighteen-year-old on his first day of college, one whose "real life" self is as evident to us as the fictional self he has grown to occupy.

Although I have a number of positive things to say about Boyhood, it only became of interest to me around the 145th minute (the film is 170 minutes long), when it appeared that this "real life" boy was as indifferent to the film he had committed to twelve years earlier as I was to sitting there watching him.