Alright, alright, alright!
September 29, 2023 5:57 AM Subscribe
Making Dazed [45m] is a 2005 reunion/behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the 1993 film Dazed And Confused. Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, and more look back at the film that helped launch their careers.
Like that post yesterday about feelgood movies... while maybe not feelgood, this is a great hangover/stupid Saturday morning/when I'm only going to watch part of a movie movie for me. Looking forward to watching this!
posted by Snowishberlin at 7:21 AM on September 29, 2023
posted by Snowishberlin at 7:21 AM on September 29, 2023
2005? Seems like a reunion/behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Making Dazed is overdue!
posted by senor biggles at 8:39 AM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by senor biggles at 8:39 AM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
This movie remains gold. My local indie movie theatre showed it last summer, and of course me and some friends went because we have fond memories of this film. The audience was definitely strongly Gex X folks with a smattering of some old hippies. We all had a good time.
To me, this is my preferred stoner movie. It is a beautiful lazy movie about one night in your high school years when you all all kinda aimlessly drift from one place to the next.
posted by Kitteh at 8:47 AM on September 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
To me, this is my preferred stoner movie. It is a beautiful lazy movie about one night in your high school years when you all all kinda aimlessly drift from one place to the next.
posted by Kitteh at 8:47 AM on September 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
It hadn't occurred to be until just now that it's the slacker "American Graffiti"...
posted by AJaffe at 9:17 AM on September 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by AJaffe at 9:17 AM on September 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
Which would make Slacker the slacker THX 1138.
posted by mcdoublewide at 9:38 AM on September 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by mcdoublewide at 9:38 AM on September 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
I bounced off this movie hard. I saw it right after I finished high school and all of the hazing that occurs early on in the film gave me such a visceral and angry reaction that I couldn't enjoy it.
I watched it many years after it came out as an ascending high school student and remember being haunted by the Parker Posey character, although it turns out our high school didn't have much of a bullying problem. (As far as I could tell? I guess we were a big enough school that there were some awful people milling about, but our social scene didn't resemble the kind of teen movie hellscape that I feared.) I always liked that most of the students in the movie partake in the hazing rituals as a semi-serious, good-natured thing. That's not to say that I think hazing is good-natured -- just that the whole picture of how and why it happens makes more sense when you have a bunch of people cheerfully giving you a hard time "because of tradition" in addition to the odd sadist who gets excited about it.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:52 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
I watched it many years after it came out as an ascending high school student and remember being haunted by the Parker Posey character, although it turns out our high school didn't have much of a bullying problem. (As far as I could tell? I guess we were a big enough school that there were some awful people milling about, but our social scene didn't resemble the kind of teen movie hellscape that I feared.) I always liked that most of the students in the movie partake in the hazing rituals as a semi-serious, good-natured thing. That's not to say that I think hazing is good-natured -- just that the whole picture of how and why it happens makes more sense when you have a bunch of people cheerfully giving you a hard time "because of tradition" in addition to the odd sadist who gets excited about it.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:52 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
I bounced off this movie hard as well. I graduated from high school in 1975, about 1500 miles north of Austin and our experience was so much more different. Hazing of freshman was usually in the fall and only consisted of getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere for a "snipe hunt". Football is not a religion in the north either. Cops calling the football coach? WTF? The Woodson character was actually one of the only things that worked, we always had one or two older guys hanging around, hoping to score a younger girl not immune to their bullshit charms.
And JFC, if you're gonna call the movie Dazed and Confused, go to London and plead with the three old men until they concede to give the rights to the damn song. It would have sounded so much better than "Slow Ride" at the end.
posted by Ber at 2:10 PM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
And JFC, if you're gonna call the movie Dazed and Confused, go to London and plead with the three old men until they concede to give the rights to the damn song. It would have sounded so much better than "Slow Ride" at the end.
posted by Ber at 2:10 PM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
I saw this movie around the time it came out. I guess I was about 23 or 24, think I saw it as a VHS rental. It didn't really resonate with me one way or another. I remember many people my age being hyped about it but I can barely remember any of it (and no I wasn't baked when I saw it).
I went to high school in the city of Chicago in the 1980s so none of it seemed familiar to me. Maybe I should watch it again, but I mainly remember thinking it was kind of forgettable. Seeing that I have forgotten it, I think I remember correctly.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:17 PM on September 29, 2023
I went to high school in the city of Chicago in the 1980s so none of it seemed familiar to me. Maybe I should watch it again, but I mainly remember thinking it was kind of forgettable. Seeing that I have forgotten it, I think I remember correctly.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:17 PM on September 29, 2023
Now that I've had a chance to watch the doc: wowww something about the letterbox format and general "time has passed" markers of that 2005 documentary has made me realize that 2005 was a very long time ago. (Second half is mostly Affleck and McConaughey, which was cool of them, but for actor input I'd have rather heard from Parker Posey.)
Also, not to make this weird, but I've never been attracted to Matthew McConaughey and particular not to his character in the movie ("that's what I like about high school girls"), so I was surprised to discover that he was absolutely gorgeous in the 1993 behind-the-scenes material. McConaughey has a pleasant charm that can sometimes elevate really tedious material, but he was an shockingly attractive twentysomething. Seriously, who knew?!
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:29 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Also, not to make this weird, but I've never been attracted to Matthew McConaughey and particular not to his character in the movie ("that's what I like about high school girls"), so I was surprised to discover that he was absolutely gorgeous in the 1993 behind-the-scenes material. McConaughey has a pleasant charm that can sometimes elevate really tedious material, but he was an shockingly attractive twentysomething. Seriously, who knew?!
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:29 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
If you have any interest in this movie at all, I recommend Melissa Maerz's oral history.
posted by joseph_elmhurst at 3:12 PM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by joseph_elmhurst at 3:12 PM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
Snooort! "That's how I found my walk. You know that walk. It ain't chin forward; it ain't heart forward. This is forward."
McConaughey's character and Randall "Pink" Floyd and the asshole jock Ben Affleck played. Really all of them. It was like the whole galaxy of 1970s ridiculous teen male hotness modes that I became mesmerized by when I was a pre-teen gazer-upon my teenaged cousins and their friends was suddenly on screen decades later. If they remembered it wrong, then so did I because from my perspective they did it all exactly perfectly right. Slacker nearly bored the teeth out of my head, but Dazed and Confused was amazing.
posted by Don Pepino at 3:40 PM on September 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
McConaughey's character and Randall "Pink" Floyd and the asshole jock Ben Affleck played. Really all of them. It was like the whole galaxy of 1970s ridiculous teen male hotness modes that I became mesmerized by when I was a pre-teen gazer-upon my teenaged cousins and their friends was suddenly on screen decades later. If they remembered it wrong, then so did I because from my perspective they did it all exactly perfectly right. Slacker nearly bored the teeth out of my head, but Dazed and Confused was amazing.
posted by Don Pepino at 3:40 PM on September 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
As someone who was in high school in Texas and Oklahoma during the nineties, this movie got it so so exactly right, in a way that was almost certainly a two-way street (i.e. a lot of us learned how to be teenagers from watching this movie.)
posted by Navelgazer at 3:56 PM on September 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Navelgazer at 3:56 PM on September 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
I kinda bounced off it, having graduated from a rural/suburban football-oriented HS in the late 70s (further North so hey). It almost seemed authentic, but the Texas-specific hazing rituals seemed fairly specific to them (our generic bullying was mean kids always hassling kids). For something oriented to details and authenticity, getting many of the details just a bit different made it seem kinda uncanny valley.
posted by ovvl at 4:21 PM on September 29, 2023
posted by ovvl at 4:21 PM on September 29, 2023
This documentary originally aired on AMC and is included on the Criterion boxed set. Alas, no residuals in YouT*be.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:35 PM on September 29, 2023
posted by Ideefixe at 4:35 PM on September 29, 2023
I have always loved this film, and it holds up to infinite rewatches.
It remains shocking to me just how similar a small town in 1970s East Texas was, on-screen, to the small town in 1990s Quebec I grew up in as a teenager. We even had a Moon Tower.
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:34 PM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
It remains shocking to me just how similar a small town in 1970s East Texas was, on-screen, to the small town in 1990s Quebec I grew up in as a teenager. We even had a Moon Tower.
posted by jordantwodelta at 6:34 PM on September 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
I think, shockingly, this film is one of the movies I have watched the most, along with Star Wars and Casablanca. Literally hundreds of times.
Why have I deemed it worthy of rewatching? Because the performances are so incredibly nuanced. I know part of it is the editing, but part of it is genuinely the actors doing acting and telling the audience a little something about their character. It's a tiny something that maybe you don't notice the first 40 times you watch, but on viewing number 41, you see that shift of the eyes while a line is delivered, or a slgh that you've never noticed before, and it is to totally entirely a part of that character, the fabric of the entire thing gains a new thread and the tapestry comes more clearly into focus.
Okay, so, the hazing, since that was brought up early, it's worth talking about. I think one interesting thing to note about the hazing is that the females are subjecting themselves willingly to the hazing, with some form of support through going through the ritual from those subjecting them to it. The males, on the other hand, are actually in some cases fleeing in fear of their lives. It's an interesting comparison of a rite of passage between genders, of course in the context of the time and place in which it's being practiced.
But more than anything else, this is a story about the passing of torches. Mitch Kramer has been singled out as a nerd for his time in middle school, but during this night, his fate is changed from being that to being one of the cool kids. And not one of the asshole cool kids, but one of the actual COOL kids. Sabrina's life is similarly changed, finding her own older mentor to ease her into a cooler life than she would have had otherwise. Cynthia had not seen her red hair as any kind of asset before this evening. These little kinds of changes in the lives of the younger kids are happening all across the movie.
Likewise, the juniors-to-be-seniors are having their own life changing moments. Obviously Pink's story is the most prominent, but Tony and Mike both have their own journeys of discovery, for better or worse.
The entire film is a real masterpiece of what makes the small moments become big moments for individuals. I could write 10,000 words if not more if I were to detail every little thing I see when I watch thing movie, and that would probably be punctuated with several "oh, I hadn't noticed this before" moments.
It truly stacks up next to something like Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon or any of those old movies that you can watch again and again. It's full of delicate character moments that are subtle and full of discovery. i don't know why, if this isn't somehow fully congruent with your own personal experience, that is enough for you to dismiss it as a piece of cinema. I think it's one of the most remarkable films created in my lifetime, and I'm always happy to revisit it.
It's on Peacock Premium right now.
posted by hippybear at 7:51 PM on September 29, 2023 [12 favorites]
Why have I deemed it worthy of rewatching? Because the performances are so incredibly nuanced. I know part of it is the editing, but part of it is genuinely the actors doing acting and telling the audience a little something about their character. It's a tiny something that maybe you don't notice the first 40 times you watch, but on viewing number 41, you see that shift of the eyes while a line is delivered, or a slgh that you've never noticed before, and it is to totally entirely a part of that character, the fabric of the entire thing gains a new thread and the tapestry comes more clearly into focus.
Okay, so, the hazing, since that was brought up early, it's worth talking about. I think one interesting thing to note about the hazing is that the females are subjecting themselves willingly to the hazing, with some form of support through going through the ritual from those subjecting them to it. The males, on the other hand, are actually in some cases fleeing in fear of their lives. It's an interesting comparison of a rite of passage between genders, of course in the context of the time and place in which it's being practiced.
But more than anything else, this is a story about the passing of torches. Mitch Kramer has been singled out as a nerd for his time in middle school, but during this night, his fate is changed from being that to being one of the cool kids. And not one of the asshole cool kids, but one of the actual COOL kids. Sabrina's life is similarly changed, finding her own older mentor to ease her into a cooler life than she would have had otherwise. Cynthia had not seen her red hair as any kind of asset before this evening. These little kinds of changes in the lives of the younger kids are happening all across the movie.
Likewise, the juniors-to-be-seniors are having their own life changing moments. Obviously Pink's story is the most prominent, but Tony and Mike both have their own journeys of discovery, for better or worse.
The entire film is a real masterpiece of what makes the small moments become big moments for individuals. I could write 10,000 words if not more if I were to detail every little thing I see when I watch thing movie, and that would probably be punctuated with several "oh, I hadn't noticed this before" moments.
It truly stacks up next to something like Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon or any of those old movies that you can watch again and again. It's full of delicate character moments that are subtle and full of discovery. i don't know why, if this isn't somehow fully congruent with your own personal experience, that is enough for you to dismiss it as a piece of cinema. I think it's one of the most remarkable films created in my lifetime, and I'm always happy to revisit it.
It's on Peacock Premium right now.
posted by hippybear at 7:51 PM on September 29, 2023 [12 favorites]
The very first time I smoked weed was 20 minutes before seeing this movie in my university's Campus Center. My stoner friends enthusiastically expressed that this was quite righteous.
posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only at 7:59 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only at 7:59 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
This is just great cinema. Thanks for the post, hippybear; I'd missed the making-of until now. I've also seen Dazed and Confused many, many times; it's a reliable go-to, mostly because great acting, no guns, and nobody dies. It's a rare bird. Plus, Parker Posey.
posted by heyho at 6:09 AM on September 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by heyho at 6:09 AM on September 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
(I completely forgot about the guns, probably because no one gets shot.)
posted by heyho at 11:14 AM on September 30, 2023
posted by heyho at 11:14 AM on September 30, 2023
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posted by thecjm at 6:44 AM on September 29, 2023 [3 favorites]