Honey I Grew Up the Kid

15. Dec, 2014 0 Comments

Boyhood
12 Years A Boy
Official WebsiteÂ | Trailers & Mo
R | 165 min

gorw boyhood

I finally did it – I saw Boyhood. The movie was 12 years in the making. Me seeing it was 22 weeks in the seeing. Seeing is believing. And yet I can’t believe that no one ever made a movie like this before – filming someone every year for a decade-ish and then making some kind of a movie out of it. Richard Linklater did it! And the result is awesome – as an idea, but not necessarily as a movie

One is certainly in awe of watching little Ellar Coltrane go from a chubby cheeked tyke into a collegiate furrowed-browed man in under 3 hours, and yet I still wanted something more. For such an incredible journey of growing (for screen sister Lorelei Linklater too!), you’d think it would’ve evoked more of an emotional experience, but there’s little emotion to be seconded, besides feeling scared by a glass-throwing drunken stepfather, and Patricia Arquette telling a Mexican laborer that he can make something of himself, and then he, BOOM, years later shows up and made something of himself!

Did Arquette’s (and ex-screen-hubby Ethan Hawke‘s) boy Mason (Ellar) make something of himself? Sure, we saw him grow and growns up, but we didn’t really grow to know him all that well. We were there when he graduated from video games to booze and drugs, then to girls, and then to adult thoughts and stuff, but what does it all mean? Don’t know if this distance from the character was by design, or that’s just who Ellar is as a person IRL, but there has to be something more than just turning on the camera, pointing and shooting, and then showing us what was captured. Guess we’ll juss have to wait for Manhood, and if so, can’t wait!! But I guess we can wait another 12 years!

patricia boyhood