Boyhood: A Terrible Non-film With No Point.

Dear Reader,

        Recently I've been catching up on some of the "MY LIST" films of my Netflix account. You know, dear reader, how that stuff gets backed up because it takes little to no effort to click "add to list," but it takes considerably more effort to sit and actually block off 2-3 hours of our lives to invest in a film. Especially when our lives are so busy with work, school, family, etc, or if you're me: complaining about your life, working on creative projects, watching porn, crying in the shower...anyway there are a million-and-a-half reasons that we avoid rummaging through all the media content we "plan to watch." So last night, after feeling accomplished from doing some pretty solid writing, I decided to enrich my life by watching one of the many "critically acclaimed" films I have marked aside.
        I decided to watch the movie Boyhood.
        There are those movies, dear reader, that all your friends tell you to watch because they are "amazing," and "beautiful," and "profound". Ones that all the critics unanimously agree to be a heartfelt accomplishment of the human experience. Boyhood had that reputation, and let me tell you, dear reader, I did NOT agree with the hype.
        Let me first assure you I'm not just trying to be edgy by having a dissenting opinion. I watched this movie because I was excited to see it...after all...I'm a huge movie buff, and, I too had a boyhood.
       But Boyhood is not actually a film. It's a corny time capsule of an adorable kid that I don't give a single sh!t about, because nothing interesting ever happens to him, and he has barely anything interesting to say. In fact, you can almost see him never getting anything out of his life.
        This film has no structure, no plot, very little character development other that the characters literally aging before our eyes... really it took the beginning parts of every boring, forgettable story you've ever told, and filmed them. None of the scenes had any consequences to any of the characters. It left me wondering: Did everyone have such a deep connection with this film because EVERYONE is this boring? Am I this boring? No, no, that can't be it, it simply can't be. People are interesting and battle worn, people have grown up with all sorts of interesting and tragic occurrences. So it wasn't that this didn't capture our "boyhoods," it's that it focused on the pointless, forgettable moments that aren't worth talking about in the first place.  
        This was the movie equivalent to a meaningless piece of modern art that everyone is desperately applauding while they pretentiously give meaning to it, despite the fact that it had no meaning to begin with. Everyone unanimously agrees on its "profundity," but it has nothing profound at all to say. So instead of actually using their brains and criticizing it for what it is, they take it as a chance to masterbate to their own sense of pointlessness.
        The filmmaker doesn't believe in foreshadowing or narrative payoff. For example: There is a scene where Mason, our boyhood boy, and Ethan Hawke, who plays his father, are putting up Obama/Biden campaign signs. I won't get all political, but I voted for him, fine. Whatever. In the scene they are running around in Texas and asking people if they can put the signs on their lawn. There is a random attractive blonde woman that appears and has a moment with the boy and makes eyes with Ethan...if you've ever seen any movie ever, you'd think "Oh, maybe this woman will have some impact on their lives, because she's a character in the story being introduced." Nope. That would make sense. Just like the stereotypical hick that comes outside and tells them to "get off my lawn or i'll shoot ya!" Is he going to impact their life? No, don't be ridiculous.
        This becomes a pattern. We are introduced to a seemingly endless parade of characters that serve no narrative purpose, and a bunch of characters that are recurring, but who experience no growth, and whose plots are unresolved.
        You might be saying to yourself "well that's life." Okay true. But that's not film. There are story telling  formulas and structures that have been uncovered and studied over thousands of years that should be respected-- not out of respect's sake, but out of the idea that they WORK and are logical to human thought. You don't just walk into a chemistry lab and start combining chemicals because it's "creative," that's how you f@cking die. Okay so the stakes of making a terrible film aren't life and death, but understand my point. It's pretentious and lazy. It's like making up your own rules to playing hide and seek as a child, or thinking you're playing the drums by banging on pots and pans. It's experimental, but it's incomplete and illogical.
        "As long as you're expressing yourself sweaty!"
         If you reach a point in pitching a film idea that says, "let's just do it to show a reflection on the pointless and inconsequentially boring parts of life and take over a decade to film it..." Don't make that film. If you make 6 different useless scenes where the main character has a conversation with 6 different useless friends that we've never seen in the film before, and it isn't even necessary to follow along... you've made a bad film. In fact, you could take out any number of scenes from this wretched waste of time, and it would be completely inconsequential to the film. That's bad.
         A lot of the praise has apparently come from the fact that the film "Took twelve years to make." So?
 Something isn't inherently good because it takes a long time to make. It took JRR Tolkien ten years to write the Lord of the Rings. It took Peter Jackson 18 months to interpret the masterpiece and make them into incredible films. Art takes its own time. The length of time you took to cook a meal has no bearings on whether or not it tastes good. I want to kill myself after having sat through this and hearing how "well received" by critics is was. Are they all just offering a sarcastic round of applause for the actors and film-makers so they didn't feel as though they wasted over a decade of their lives that they will never get back? I just wasted three hours of my life that I'll never get back, where's my round of applause?
        "It's up to the audience to interpret a meaning!"
        NO it's just lazy story telling. You can have an ambiguous ending, sure. But this entire story is ambiguous. The end of Birdman leaves you wondering whether or not Micheal Keaton is actually dead, or whether or not "birdman" was just the looming shadow of his expectations and maybe he finally shed his former self and was able to evolve as an artist into something more than just "the birdman". It's ambiguous because it offers the audience a QUESTION, not because there is simply no point to it. Is Leo's character in Inception actually in a dream? If he is in a dream does he even care? Because he could learn to be happy with his family finally together down there...so whether or not he's in a dream makes no difference to whether or not he wants to wake up. So the audience is given something to think about, something to engage with, some question to answer.    
         Boyhood offers no questions. And even the characters that boring old Mason is surrounded with are rendered meaningless because NONE of their plots are resolved. Again, it's just a series of irrelevant moments masquerading as "deep".
        Like the ending scene for example, when Mason skips his orientation to run out to the desert with his new roommate and 2 girls we are supposed to care about because they are cute. This scene is riddled with dialogue straight from the first script you've ever written where you try to give your teenage character, high on drugs, a "profound moment" but you and the audience know that it's not actually profound, it's just a stoned character having trouble articulating the confusion of his own existence. Either way you should be ashamed as a writer because what you are actually doing is taking a stupid, useless moment, that might be used as an establishing shot for a party scene, and turning into the punctuation of your film.  So rather than try to articulate the beautiful phenomenon of this boy's existence on the earth, you hide behind it by presenting how glib and ironic it is when kids get stoned rather than actually explore the feelings they are having.
        WoOOh..life is like...a paradox man! And art is just...whatever you say it is! No. There are objective ways to tell what makes good art. There are objective ways to tell if your writing is terrible. It's a juvenile attempt to have a cute moment to end your crappy film that you wasted over a decade making. It comes off as contrived and completely empty because it comes from a boy we've spent three hours with who has had nothing interesting happen to him, and he's speaking with a character we literally just met 4 frames ago that we know nothing about, other than the fact that she is a human girl.

Here. Read this:

Girl we don't care about: People always talk about seizing the moment, but, like, I kinda think it's the other way around. It's like, the moment that seizes us, you know?

Mason: Yeah, I know. It's like constant...the moments. Like right now.

Cumshot. Credits.

        Ummm...What? Was that supposed to...what in the heavenly f@ck was that? I'll tell you what it was...pointless. It's a nice little "f@ck you" to the audience that purposefully offers no depth, no intrigue, and no point.
        So is that the point? The point is that there is no point? The little moments are precious, is that it? It took you three hours to tell me that? Bravo! Bravo! No. The point is that you had twelve f@cking years to make a decent, compelling script, but you didn't feel like it.
        I'm beside myself with rage. Not every little moment deserves to be shared. It doesn't make it "deep" to jumble together a bunch of pointless scenes that have nothing to do with one another in any sort of sequence, and applaud the characters for realizing how pointless they are. That's called boring, and it's the exact opposite of why we make films and tell stories and share wisdom. I think I'm beating a dead horse here, but I can't stop my hands from typing. Lorrrrdy this Nonfilm was so stupid.
        If we're supposed to believe that "these are just life's little moments from the kid's perspective," I'd like to tell him to wake the f@ck up, because he's responsible for an audience now, and he has learned NOTHING about anyone else's life. How did his dad and his new wife meet? What happened to his two step-siblings that were just randomly in his life for 3 scenes, and are now trapped with an abusive father for all we know? WHO CARES? NOT MASON. That's the lesson I got from this movie. What's he majoring in when he goes to college? WHO CARES. Does he still like photography? Is that his one creative outlet that he has in order to escape his brutally selfish and useless perspective on life? Why didn't he bring his camera to that gorgeous "climax" scene with his new set of friends that the audience isn't made to care about at all? WHO CARES (is there a pattern here?)
        Even this useless blog that nobody reads has a POINT TO IT. But I'm not expecting to be showered with accolades for just "being me." I guess that's the culture we live in now. Good for you scamp! You got taller!
        I don't know, I tried to like it. I did. But the meaninglessness of the film kept creeping in. It might just be brilliant for that very reason. It's convincing it's audience how beautiful and meaningful it is as it wallows in its trite meaninglessness. Genius. I mean, I for one can't get it out of my head, as you can plainly see. Not because it's good, or has any resemblance to story structure or character development...but because it's so painfully bad. I'd think my theory had some validity to it, but so much care and detail clearly went into making this. Like picking out pop songs from the year they were filming, and making sure that none of the characters had any consequence to Mason's life, and giving the cast different "looks"... (hats off to the wardrobe department though.)
        You know what this movie is? This movie is the movie that every 19 year old thought would be a great story to tell. Not because he thought it would be interesting, but because he wanted everyone to notice him, so he wrote a script about all the humdrum bullsh!t that he saw as profound, but everyone else just sees as "things that happen and are normal things."
        Help. I'm losing my mind. Just answer me this, dear reader... have you seen this film? If you haven't, don't bother, if you have...would you sit through that bullsh!t again for a second viewing? No you wouldn't. Because you probably have goals and a purpose, and wouldn't want to sit and listen to a close friend drone on and on about pointless, meandering anecdotes for almost 3 hours, much less WATCH a complete stranger go through all those non-stories. You don't make a film about a tree getting taller, because you have respect for your audience, so why would you make one about a kid?
        "Seinfeld pitched a show about nothing," You might say. Okay. But the "nothingness" is in the everyday situations and conversations in life that actually amount to high jinx and pithy arguments, and best of all, it ties every plot point up into a neat little hilarious bow.
        This has none of that. It simply revels in useless mundanity. With thrilling moments of human boyhood such as:

- bowling with dad. What happened when you bowled with dad? I bowled poorly and never bowled again!
- Playing Halo with a random friend that you'll never meet again! Is it a friend or a sibling? Oh well, it has nothing to do with anything anyway... You remember Halo though, right?
-Getting a haircut from your mean stepdad! But don't worry, because the biggest arch in this story is basically pointing out all of Mason's different haircuts!
- Suddenly alcoholic step-dad decides to throw a glass at Mason...okay here we go, there is going to be some conflict right? Right? The next scene, suddenly alcoholic father is questioning the kids and checking their phones to where mommy is...then she comes to the rescue saying "I'm taking my kids!" then he says "no you aren't" then she says "yes I am!" then he says "Okay fine." So she leaves with Mason and Mason's boring sister whose only character development, again, is the fact that her hair changes.
- Random teacher we have never seen tells Mason that he shouldn't focus on photography because following your dreams is pointless. That teacher is never seen or heard from again.
-Scene where adolescent boys talk about "getting some pussy" in an abandoned...garage...deconstructed house? Sure. Fine. That happens all the time, but why am I watching it? Who are these kids and why do I care? This is the first time any of them have appeared on screen. Then one of them says that he "has some whores coming." because he wants to errr, assert his manlyness? Are they like actual prostitutes? Or does the boy just refer to women as whores? I don't know and I don't think the writer gives a sh!t because this character is only in the film for another 45 seconds. So this scene actually might lead somewhere...maybe the boy will lose his virginity to some girl or prostitute --as I said it's never made clear-- but NOPE! The older kid says "Just kidding! We don't have anyone else coming to this sausage fest." and then the scene ends out of fear that something relatively interesting might happen. I've seen better story structure in porn. And better acting, quite frankly.
- scene where step dad #2 yells at Mason for coming home late. Then nothing happens. So not only do we suffer through one pointless step-dad nonplot in the beginning of the film-- I guess they didn't think the audience had enough of these meandering moments to soak in-- so we watch it AGAIN with a completely different dad!
-Mason talks with his girlfriend of whom we know nothing about but I guess that's unimportant. They are in a car and Mason talks about being addicted to Facebook. Okay, I see your point. Is this going to go somewhere? His girlfriend puts the phone in front of him as he's driving. Okay this might develop...the number one cause of death for kids his age are car accidents...nope. scene ends.
- Girlfriend we know nothing about has sex with a college guy and breaks up with Mason. But we as an audience don't care because she means nothing to us. Which is basically what Ethan Hawke tells his son when he tells him to "forget about her." Done. I already have Ethan, she meant nothing to any of us, including Mason from what I've seen. We aren't going to just pretend to care about this girl of whom we don't know a single thing about other than she is cute. And that's pretty much the dialogue.
- Mason has a boring graduation party filled with a bunch of characters we've never seen before, as well as characters that will never get their plots resolved because Mason doesn't give a sh!t about any of them, so neither can we. His immediate family speaks, and says a bunch of terribly useless stuff about how proud they are of him. Then they ask his sister to speak, and we've been following her useless @ss for almost as long as Mason. Is she going to talk about how lucky she is to have gone through her life with a great brother like him? Is she going to offer some advise from the two years of college she has already experienced? No. She says "good luck" and then giggles. It's like the writer decided that her character would remain the same immature, bratty girl she had been at seven year old some two-and-a-half hours ago. Great.
        Art is meant to augment reality, reach in a pull out the beauty and honest moments that we have as people. It's meant to enrich, offend, offer insight, or tear something down. This isn't art, this is narcissism. If I wanted to remember my terribly boring high school graduation, I can just look back into my Facebook feed and view all the awkward photos that don't matter to anybody, and barely matter to me. That's all this film is: a video slide show of someone I don't care about.
       My favorite scene however, has to be the hilarious scene where we see Patricia Arquette saying goodbye to her kid. This is basically the film's attempt to recap all the torturous nothingness we just sat through. She talks about all of life's little milestones and then breaks down in front of her teenage boy because she's afraid she has no more milestones left in her life. Her son is about to take a huge step in his life, and she can only make it about herself. This scene is the most contrived, ass-backward and out of character moment in the film. She starts crying for whatever reason, I guess she's emotional for having wasted twelve years of her life filming this useless piece of garbage or whatever. And will we get any resolution for this moment? HA!  Will we, f@ck. It just ends. It's just another ejaculation of a terrible moment that doesn't lead to any sort of growth in the film. If I were that character listening to my mother have a piss-fit the moment I'm about to leave to further my education, I'm livid:
        "Why don't you pick up a BOOK you useless woman!" I'd tell her "Aren't you a College Professor? Have you never read Nietzche? What about "Man's search for meaning" by Victor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who witnessed first hand the murderous indifference of the Nazi soldiers that just 'did what they had to do.' What about Soren Kierkegaard and his 'leap of faith?' How are you in charge of shaping young minds, when you don't understand the basic fundamentals of life's journey? That's terrifying. Have you not dealt with the fact that life is suffering, and the point of life is to have inner growth and overcome adversity? Why are you dumping this on me now, you useless shrew? Get your sh!t together, I'm leaving for college in ten minutes. This is what you want me to leave behind? Wow thanks mom, I'll be sure to feel guilty about leaving you to be alone with your insufferable self. Maybe you should stop sleeping with all these broken men and bringing them into our home."
        I mean I know it's probably blasphemous to say or even offensive to some unenlightened, pretentious turds, but what about THE BIBLE. The Bible that was GIVEN to Mason in some random, go-nowhere scene where the filmmaker was trying to paint this unbelievable cliche of a religious conservative family sitting around a porch, touting Bible verses and shooting guns-- which is ANOTHER unexplained narrative plot point! Ethan Hawke is this clearly staunch democrat, putting up Obama signs and stealing McCain signs off of people's lawns as I mentioned earlier, (See, Boyhood, I referenced something that happened earlier in my work so my audience could make a connection!) and then all of the sudden he's married to a conservative woman with extremely catholic family. What. The. Resounding. F@ck. If you're going to bring in the Bible as a gimmick to say "AwwWw look at these slack-jawed simpletons" at least have some integrity in your narrative and come to the conclusion that the Bible offers endlessly poetic universal truths to billions of people...But i'm sure they didn't want to upset or alienate their secular audience and force them to learn about other cultures. Anyways I digress...but at least (unlike boyhood) there is a point and purpose to my diatribe...point being: Don't have things happen to your characters that you aren't planning to use for a later purpose, especially if there can be a clear payoff and you just decide not to follow through!
        If you're going to have a character randomly and irrationally break down in front of her son about not having any meaning in her life, and 10 minutes ago you had a birthday scene where he's given a Bible...I dunno...maybe offer some kind of narrative resolution to your terrible film? Something? I mean I know it's hokey and overly simplistic, but hey, that's the precedent that you've set for this piece of meaningless post-modern garbage, isn't it?
        The most important question you should ask when creating a piece of art should be WHY? What are you trying to tell your audience with this piece? "People have childhoods," OH thank's for telling me.
        "People have pedestrian things happen to them and narrative has no purpose." Okay. Fine. But at least make the characters interesting! Were you trying to say that people, overall, have terribly boring childhoods? 'Cuz that's what I got from this unrelenting Odyssey of crap.
         But guys, remember... it took twelve years to make!
        Look, I'm all for breaking form and experimenting with film structure. But this is an insult to the audience. It's as shallow as it is time consuming.      
        Ugh. Well dear reader, after sitting through Boyhood I came away with the following: A boy gets taller, Ethan Hawk grows and shaves a mustache subsequently, and an aging actress gets more and more attractive due to the wonders of cosmetic surgery and diet pills...I'm at a loss. 3 hours of the pointless little parts in life all mangled together to create one huge pointless film. It was cinematic blue-balls that lead up to something interesting happening, but the interesting thing never happens...and it just keeps going on and on.

F@ck that movie. I should have just watched Fargo again for the twenty-seventh time. I guess that's the point to this post. If you've sat through that movie, I'm sorry, if you haven't, don't.