Boyhood

To me, this film has a totally believable plotline with characters which seem totally real, dealing with the kinds of situations that come up in divorced single Mom scenarios in trying to raise to kids to have access to a normal life but fail repeatedly because of the poor choices they make with men. I thought the actual Father character was great in that he always tried to stay in his kids' lives, no matter what, once he came back from Alaska. He was supportive and interested and did the best he could. To me, "the Mom" basically had no life of her own. It was always about trying to obtain a better and more secure life for her kids and then having to start over again from scratch. This took about 22 years of her life (oldest daughter) and finally she was back to square one for the 4th time, living in an apartment with her Mom and in middle age, with both kids out of the nest at last. Her kids were largely "latch key" and resilient and mature. Way too many single Moms do not have kids which can basically raise themselves. Even more single Moms do not have the ability to finish college and go on to graduate school and manage to get into academia. In her case, it was likely as an adjunct in community colleges, which is lowly paid and without benefits. So the film glosses over the finer details and you have to fill in those details yourself. I still think this is a very worthwhile film to see and I also think it is great advertising for Sul Ross State University in Alpine, TX by Big Bend NP and for the NPS to increase visitors to that far away part of Texas, which so few people ever get to see. This film really put those places in the map! So to me, that was a great ending in and of itself. I highly recommend this film to young women who should not feel selfish to want to spend their twenties doing something for themselves and delay motherhood until after they've completed their education and established their career. I do think the film should have gone more into Texas, the state which does virtually nothing to help single parents accomplish anything positive for changing their kids' lives, lifting them out of poverty, due to the lack of social programs, like childcare, head start, healthcare. The Mom character might have not been so quick to marry again, had she had other options for her children. When these kids were children, fictional characters, I know, TEXAS did not even have S-CHIP because of who was Governor of TX during the '90s for 8 years prior to 2000 so how did that Mom and her mother manage access to healthcare, trying to raise these kids in TX? So it would have been nicer to show how tough it really was for a single Mom to somehow return to college, meet healthcare expenses, and show why she might have been in such a rush to marry, the first guy-- a college professor, as a desperate economic survival need, but as a trade off, be blind to what had caused his first wife to flee her marriage, and leave her own kids to be trapped in such a hostile environment, with no way to protect them from such a man. The film moves onward, never showing what happened to the two kids this step-Mom had no legal right or way to protect or save, when she too fled this physically abusive husband #2, taking only her own two children, and later in the film, you learn even less about husband #3, whose departure was likely was left on the cutting room floor out of necessity. Any single Mom's life is going to be filled with challenges, but in Texas, even more so, and that was left out of the film.

I was went into this with a little trepidation, partly having to do with expectations and partly because, at 166 minutes long, it might be a daunting watch. Thankfully, none of that adversely affected my enjoyment of what I feel to be (in retrospect) the best film of 2014. While what Richard Linklater did might not be completely unprecedented (re: the UP documentary series, which I've only heard of but not seen), I do believe this is the first fiction film to use the same group of actors over a long period of time for the purpose of showing how they grow and change. There is almost no point in discussing a story or plot, because there isn't one in the strictest sense. What you have amounts to a series of vignettes which capture a series of moments in the life of a person, in this case Mason (Ellar Coltrane). It was fascinating to watch him grow up and experience life before my very eyes. Early on, he experiences the pain of his mother divorcing, twice, and both times to alcoholics. He's an awkward child, and gets picked on. He fights with his sister. I could go on, but I feel like I'd be robbing potential viewers of some of the spontaneity of seeing this unfold for the first time. Still, despite the improvisational nature of the film, nothing is haphazardly put together. While the first half to two-thirds of the film is more of a collage of experiences, Linklater does attempt to wrap things up by offering some philosophical insight into the life these characters have lived, and by extension, the audience. There are two scenes in particular which I believe sum up whatever message can be gleaned from this film. Both of them take place after Mason's graduation. The first is with his father as he visits a friend who now plays in a band in a bar. The second is with his mother as he is about to leave the house for college. You'll know them when you see them, and while nothing particularly profound is said it still seemed very honest and realistic. In fact, this entire film felt real in a way I haven't felt watching something in a long time, completely free of any pretension. This film runs the gamut of emotions that can be felt, and captures what it must feel like to grow up as a child of divorce. On a more technical side, most of the acting was pretty good. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette were excellent, though, and both gave awards-worthy performances. Ellar Coltrane as Mason wasn't bad, but wasn't superb either. I guess you could say he was rather naturalistic in his approach, but he didn't really blow me away. Sadly, Lorelei Linklater (the director's daughter) was probably the biggest sore spot in the cast, but fortunately she takes more of a back seat in the later years. She wasn't cringe-worthy, but certainly not up to the standards of the rest of the cast. As far as cinematography was concerned, I thought it was very efficient and didn't call attention to itself, instead letting the performances stand out. I also liked the soundtrack, save one cut ('Crank That (Soulja Boy)'). And beyond the great performances, it was nice to take a trip down memory lane as each vignette had some small discussion or reference which placed it in time and made it that much more relatable. Overall, I can't praise this film more highly. Is it perfect? No, but what film is? What makes this one great was its devotion to character, and a raw and honest view of life that showed a lot of heart. So, even if you don't normally watch indie films I highly recommend that you give this a try. The time will fly by.

Arrived early, loved the movie, price was right. I have already loaned to a friend who also enjoyed it.

Is the film really about boyhood? Yes, partly, because there’s a boy in it, at least early on. But the boy has a sister, so it’s about girlhood too, which is to say childhood for both of them. But we watch them grow out of childhood through a sort of time-lapse photography, so it’s also about teenhood leading into early adulthood. And these children are not orphans, so the film also touches on parents and parenting, or what passes for the process in the strain and struggle of the parents in confusing circumstances.But beyond these things, these stages and challenges of life, it’s about the enigma of time and human reflection on it, on the elusive quality of its passing and its power to alter people and perspectives. Whatever time is, it’s deeply bound up with space or place. Einstein was the first to notice this, to understand the enigma of time and comprehend how it operates. Both time and space are the same, he said, or two sides of the same coin, and this is so because the coin does not stand still. It moves in space, in our case at a speed of about 68,000 mph as the earth slingshots around our local star, the sun. Which means no place can ever be the same, never in the same spot in time and space, which in turn means that you and everything must age. Stop motion, stop time. But this is impossible. Instead, we continue to vault ahead into the future because the universe is expanding, carrying us and everything else along with it. Even our sun is ageing and one day will die, all its powerhouse hydrogen spent, an event set to occur roughly five billion years from now.These things aren’t mentioned or described in the film, but we see their results. The boy must become the teenager who becomes the man. We fly like an arrow into the future, spiralling ahead as we cling to our star via gravity.The boy is Mason. We first meet him when he is about six years old. He lies in the grass on a sunny day staring up at the sky. What does he see? Blue vastness. What else? A grey-white patchwork of clouds. What does he see in the clouds? Shapes and designs, objects and faces. How does he see? Via energy wavelengths called photons emitted from the sun. We know them as light. The boy’s brain uses the light to model the world. Are those clouds really there? They seem to be. He sees them. They’re part of a world he was born into and knows. Why this one? Who can say? Nobody knows, including the boy. So he looks up in wonder the way children do. Why me? is the thought. Why this place, this life? Why now? What does it all mean, if it means anything? He thinks this way and we know it because we see the wonder of it in his eyes. He’s trying to figure things out. It’s in his nature to observe and wonder. He will grow up to be a quiet, introspective person.Children retain this capacity for awe. They are fresh, pure, new. All looks wondrous, quite fantastic. They’re here to learn the names of things and the concepts behind some of them. They will discover and grow. And they won’t be jaded or cynical or depressed until many years later when the world has worn them down and out, when they’ve lost their capacity to wonder or care about the point of it. Childhood is the time of freedom, a time of abandon when everything is possible, when the whole world seems made for you. The shock comes later when you discover this isn’t true and you were wrong. You were king and this was your kingdom but now this world is gone, replaced by quotidian reality. You want to go back, perhaps, but you can’t, as the arrow of time flies in one direction only, forever forward into the future. You are stuck with the reality that everything is stuck with: you must age and die. It’s built into the structure of the universe. Even our galaxy can’t go on forever.Twelve years pass in the life of Mason and those around him, a dozen years condensed into a film lasting less than three hours. At age six he plays with sister Samantha, aged eight. He also plays video games and colours shapes in his colouring book. His mother is Olivia, a rather fraught and put-upon single mum. Dad (Mason, Sr.) is around intermittently. He drives a sleek old GTO, plays guitar and keyboards, sings in a makeshift band, works once in a while, drinks and parties, brings the kids toys and presents when he visits. They love him for the presents, but also because he’s fun and funny. When he’s around he’s a hands-on dad, wrestling and rolling in the grass with them, running and playing hide-and-seek like a kid who is yet to grow up.We don’t know if this was part of the problem with Olivia — her husband’s flakiness and immaturity. But it’s clear she wants little to do with him now. Samantha wasn’t planned. She was born when both Olivia and Mason, Sr. were 23. A shotgun wedding followed, then came Mason, Jr. In Dad’s absence other men now materialise around Olivia. This happens because she’s attractive, still sexy at age 31. The boyfriends come round, and two of them end up becoming husbands during the 12-year span of the film. But they turn out to be poor choices, one an abusive alcoholic, the other an authoritarian jerk. Both eventually are jettisoned.If Olivia struggles emotionally (through three marriages and the dissolution of each), she also struggles materially and professionally — materially to hold down jobs and make ends meet, professionally to get a higher education to fulfil her dream of teaching at university. At times, or most times, she’s overwhelmed, cooking and caring for the kids, worrying for their safety, working to pay the rent, suffering from loneliness and coping with the loneliness by dealing with the demands her boyfriends bring.The family also move a lot, the social lives of the children disrupted. Just when they’ve made friends at school in one locale, they’re uprooted and lose those friends, only to repeat the process in the next place. The chaos takes its toll. The children are less grounded, more rootless than most. Olivia tries. She’s a loving mother who reads to her kids in bed at night and worries that they watch too much TV and play too many video games. She wants them to be bright and educated, to aspire and achieve in life. But it’s all so difficult and we see the wear and tear on her through the condensed timeframe of the film.Mason does his homework and does well enough in school but he’s a dreamy kid, often adrift in worlds of his own. He has fewer friends than others, perhaps because he’s solitary and different. He’s learning to think for himself, so his comments and answers to others are not thoughtless and trite. His honesty can therefore be disarming. Others don’t know what to make of him, this person who doesn’t rely on platitudes to get by.By high school his avocation has become photography. This makes total sense, as he has always been a keen and patient observer, a silent witness to events unfolding around him. He likes the distance this brings, this view from the periphery of things. He sees more clearly than others.Drink and drugs appear when he’s a teenager, 16 going on 17. But he’s wise and prudent, barely indulging, having seen and lived with the effect drink had on one of his stepfathers. Girls and his attraction to them present a different problem. How to handle both? How to proceed? A teenager wants what the hormones in his body tell him to obtain, but how to mentally process these feelings when there’s no personal experience of them to go by? A time fraught and difficult, clumsy and awkward. There are no confident teenagers. Those who seem so only pretend, afraid of being caught out.A pretty girl named Sheena becomes Mason’s steady during his senior year. He loves her. Or so he feels. They make a sweet couple. But graduation is coming and college calling, separate colleges that will separate them. They’re young and the commitment to love can be fleeting. Other opportunities arise and Sheena takes one of them, pairing off with an athlete instead of an aesthete like Mason, an athletic member of the lacrosse team. Mason can’t believe it — a jock! Sheena becomes a cliché, acts in the standard way every other high-school girl will, seduced by the alpha male sportsman. He thought she was different, more intelligent than the others, so now he must live with his faulty judgement and disappointment.The last arc of the story takes him to university at age 18. He arrives on campus and meets his new roommate in the dorm, a long-haired free-spirit named Dalton. Dalton loves hiking, nature, freedom and his beautiful hippie girlfriend Barb. They’re inseparable and seem in love with life. Barb’s roommate is Nicole. Mason meets Nicole straight away, likes her smile and demeanour. All four take off together for Big Bend National Park, a gorgeous stretch of rustic country along the Big Bend River in West Texas near Mexico. The time spent there is magical. Lovey-dovey Dalton and Barb are cosy together. Mason and Nicole seem suddenly on the verge of greater intimacy too. We’re left with the impression that Nicole is Mason’s soulmate-in-waiting. She’s a dancer, teaching jazz dance and other forms of dance to children in elementary school. She’s down to earth and unpretentious. Mason looks at her the way he used to look at clouds as a child — keenly, imaginatively. We’re pretty sure we know where this will lead.Nicole says to Mason:“You know how everyone’s always saying, ‘Seize the moment?’ I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around. You know, like, the moment seizes us.”Mason listens, smiles, pauses, says:“Yeah. Yeah, I know. It’s constant. The moment, it’s just…it’s always right now, you know?”She says she knows.Mason looks happy hearing this unexpected wisdom from her, loving its honesty and the source of it. They sit together as the day nears sunset, the sky ablaze with bright red and yellow. He looks at her as she looks shyly at the ground then back at him, and you know for sure they want to kiss. But the film ends before they do, giving us the chance to imagine it, which of course is better and sweeter.~ • ~ • ~ • ~In the nostalgic reverie that is Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, the first-person protagonist Charles Ryder returns to a place of great remembrance. Waugh writes as follows:“‘I have been there before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer.”But Charles Ryder was mistaken. He hadn’t and couldn’t have been there before. He saw a memory of a place, not the place itself. Only now in this exact moment is he in this place, but even in this exact moment the place is not fixed because he and his planet are accelerating through space and time, each thing inseparable from the other. Which means this truth: you can’t go back because there’s no back to go back to. When we return to the fond scene of some remembrance it’s always through memory or dream, not through physical action. The past is gone forever except in the narrative we retain of it in our heads. And we have to do this for the sake of sanity because the story we tell ourselves of ourselves is the thing that gives coherent meaning to our lives. We are the tale we tell that tells us who we are. The place of remembrance is a reminder of it, though only an illusion seen in a landscape. Never, ever are you going back to anything.This is what the film means, or means to me. It is visionary, prophetic and wise. It handles a reality difficult to comprehend in the best way possible — emotionally, stating its purpose from the very beginning. Mason as young boy stares deep into the deep blue. He’s emotionally connected to it somehow, though quite how he is yet to comprehend. He will spend his life reflecting on it, feeling that such reflection is important. Whatever the great unity might be, he longs to know how he fits into it. His is the self-examined life, the best of all possible, as Socrates told us. His search for the truth of reality as expressed by the cosmos is a journey of exploration taken deep into himself.This fine observation made by Jorge Luis Borges in another context wisely anticipates this film:“Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.”

Boyhood est un film que je pourrais mettre dans la catégorie des films "OVNI". Pourquoi ? Car il est particulier et il ne ressemble à aucun autre. Le réalisateur a fait le tournage du film pendant 12 années de suite avec le même casting du premier au dernier jour. C'est un voyage de près de 3h sur la vie de famille et sur le temps qui défile à une vitesse folle.L'histoire est celle d'une mère (Patricia Arquette) qui vie avec ses deux jeunes enfants. Elle est divorcée. Ils vont devoir déménager et la mère va suivre des cours pour avoir le métier qu'elle rêve. C'est à partir de ce point de départ que le film se lance.Avant de voir le film j'avais une appréhension. Je n'avais lu aucune critique de la presse ou du public. Je partais en terrain inconnu et j'avais peur qu'il ne m'intéresse pas. Surtout avec une durée aussi longue. Et pourtant j'ai bien fait de l'avoir vu car quand j'étais au générique de fin je me suis dis "wahouuh, quel film !". J'écris cette critique le lendemain de l'avoir vu et j'y pense encore. Ce n'est pas le meilleur film que j'ai vu de toute ma vie mais il me marquera pendant encore longtemps.Le casting est parfait. Juste avec Patricia Arquette où j'ai un peu de mal avec elle. Que ça soit dans Boyhood ou ailleurs. Je trouve pas qu'elle joue superbement bien. Bien que dans celui-ci elle joue tout de même bien son rôle de mère qui essaie tout pour le bien de ses enfants. Le frère et la sœur jouent à la perfection. Quand tu commences à faire le tournage d'un film en ayant quoi, à peine 6-7 ans, il y ressort toujours un naturel plus fort sur les plus jeunes. Mais là ce sentiment est encore plus fort. Et aussi parce qu'on les voit grandir. On les voit mûrir. On les voit plus timides. Ils ont tous leurs rôles qui leurs collent à la peau pendant 12 années de leurs vies. C'est vraiment une drôle de sensation de voir l'histoire qui progresse mais de voir aussi en même temps la vraie progression des acteurs. Jeunes comme adultes. Cette fois pas de maquillages pour paraître plus vieux. Pas de perruques pour changer de look. Pas de changement d'acteurs pour remplacer un petit à l'âge d'adolescent. Jamais une progression du scénario n'aura été aussi forte que dans ce film. Pour moi.Tout ce qu'on va voir suit tout de qu'il y a de plus banales dans n'importe quelles vies. Et aussi parfois des moments tragiques. Mais jamais sur la mort. Je me suis d'ailleurs fait la réflexion que jamais dans le film on assiste à une scène horrible. Pas de décès. Pas d'accidents. Pas de maladies. Le seul passage à vif est celui où la mère tombe sur son prof de cours, ils se marient et vivent ensemble mais il se trouve qu'après plusieurs années de vie commune, il devient alcoolique. Au début il se cache cette mauvaise habitude puis le temps passe et il ne le cache plus. Et il devient violent envers sa femme. Envers ses enfants et ses beaux enfants. À part ça le réalisateur veut plutôt nous faire voir que malgré les petites ou plus grosses difficultés dans nos vies sur Terre il est possible de se soutenir en restant avec notre famille et avec l'amour qu'elle nous apporte. Que sans une famille nous ne sommes rien.Comme on pourrait le dire, la vie n'est pas un long fleuve tranquille. Les enfants qui se chamaillent. L'ex père qui revient après une longue absence et sort de plus en plus avec ses enfants. Le passage du prof violent, encore déménager en urgence avec deux enfants dans les bras, les enfants qui grandissent. L'école et ses problèmes. Le collège. Le lycée. Les premiers flirts. Les premières sorties entre potes. L'alcool. Les premiers sentiments. Passer son diplôme. En voyant ce film il est impossible de ne pas se voir aussi. Voir le passé de notre vie. Voir comment en seulement 12 petites années autant de changements il peut y en avoir. En bien ou en moins bien.À aucun moment on nous dit à quelle année on se situe. C'est voulu de la part du réalisateur. Le film est sorti en 2014. Au tout début du film, avec l'habitude dans le cinéma pour les films d'aujourd'hui je me suis même dis que comme il est sorti il y a pas longtemps, ils ont remis dans le contexte les débuts des années 2000. Mais non. Tout ce qu'on voit à réellement été tourner à cette époque. Du début à la fin on nous montre plein d'éléments pour pouvoir se situer à peu près quelle année nous sommes. Le 11 septembre 2001, la première Xbox, la Game Boy Advance SP, les wacman, les grosses télés cathodiques, la soirée de lancement en librairies du roman Harry Potter et les Reliques de la Mort, la campagne d'élection d'Obama, la Wii, les MP3...Voilà les seuls éléments pour se faire une idée de l'époque à laquelle les scènes ont été filmés. Je trouve ça génial.C'est une traversée dans l'âge absolument magnifique. Pas une seule seconde je me suis lassée. J'ai suivi toutes ces familles recomposées avec bonheur.Les bonus sont complets. 33 minutes d'interview du réalisateur. 10 minutes de "grandir devant les caméras" et les coulisses du tournage de 18 minutes. De ce dernier bonus c'est de façon originale car on nous montre uniquement les vraies séquences de tournages. Pas de voix off des acteurs ou de l'équipe du film. On nous montre année par année le tournage.

だが、ここで筆者が見つけて買ったものはリージョン違いで日本では観ることができない品でした。皆様のお間違えの無きように。

increible la dediación al arte de cinema en esta peli. vez como cambian los personajes tras tiempo, perfectamente ajustado a los tiempos como se grabó en trozitos durante 12 años, pero hasta mejor es como van cambiando los actores y su actuación y el mismo director. Recomendado altamente. Nada de drama falsa e inventada, más bien la vida como nos pasa.