Boyhood 2014
I knew this movie would be boring. For better or worse I rented the movie on DVD so I was able to stop it when it just got too painfully slow, which was about 10 times over about a day and a half, sometimes after just a few minutes of watching. It really is that terrible. While there are events going on, nothing really happens for the first 90 minutes of the movie. Just a kid growing up, getting lectured a lot, while his mother goes through a series of bad relationships. Ethan Hawke grows a terrible mustache! It is a really long setup that tells us very little. Despite the run time, a lot of the side characters are flat and played poorly, though the core cast is pretty strong. In the last 45 minutes or so the boy actually gets some lines and an outlook that seems a little older than his 17 years, finally ending with him on drugs on his first day of college. Yay! Happy ending! Happy that it was over.
Some people have already expressed great affection for this movie (Metacritic has it as the most critically acclaimed movie of 2014 with a rating of 100 out of 100), and the idea of filming a movie over a 12 year period so that we can see the actors actually age is interesting, if a complete affront to the magic of movies which have been able to do exactly the same thing using makeup or a series of actors without any real loss to the storytelling. It is a realistic story, which is a lot of what makes it so annoying, but everyone alive has a similar story to tell and this one doesn’t really stand out. Maybe you have to be a parent to like this one, but it fell incredibly flat for me, only somewhat redeemed during the very last part of the movie. D+.
Written: 15 Mar 2015
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital