Tag: richard linklater

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A shot from Richard Linklater's "Blue Moon," showing Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley smiling at each other in a bar, as reviewed by poet/critic Ezekiel Yu.

Lyrics for a Lovelorn: on Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” (2025)

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, there was Rodgers and Hart. Before “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Edelweiss,” there was “My Funny Valentine” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and, of course, “Blue Moon.” The twosome wrote hundreds of songs to wide acclaim before the relationship strained, and Richard Rodgers eventually moved on with Oscar Hammerstein II to produce that glorious run of musicals, on stage and screen. Though his contribution to the Great American Songbook is undeniable, who nowadays, apart from enthusiasts, knows the name Lorenz Hart?

A faded reputation is the fate of most artists—good luck getting Joe Schmoe to recognize even Rodgers and Hammerstein—but it’s one thing to fade, and another thing to be overshadowed. The first occurs one way or another, despite the desire to stick around; the second seems to happen in spite of that desire, and more often than not involves the backhanded adulation of a premature eulogy.

Such transience is the concern of Blue Moon (2025), Richard Linklater’s latest film about a night in the life of the lovelorn lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke. He has just come from the opening performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (“Oklahoma Exclamation Point,” he remarks snidely), March 1943, parking himself at the bar of storied Broadway watering hole, Sardi’s. There, he chews the fat with bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), a young GI pianist and aspiring composer Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees), and, unexpectedly sitting in the corner, the essayist/children’s writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot from Richard Linklater's classic 1990s film, "SubUrbia," as reviewed by Jessica Schneider thirty years later.

1990s Eternal Ennui: Reviewing Richard Linklater’s “SubUrbia” (1996)

There was something unusual about American culture in the 1990s. For one, this was the final generation privy to the ‘safety bubble’—a time before 9/11, before the Internet became a necessity rather than a luxury, and before the world lived on their phones. As someone who underwent her teens and early 20s throughout this time, I can say there was a sense of ‘living in the present’ that is unlike today. (After all, in summer one is only alive at night.)

This was a time that gently evoked the 1960s and ‘70s, where poetry was ‘popular’ (slam, Allen Ginsberg, and the Confessionals), young women were having memoirs published about their depressions, women song writers were being taken seriously, and with that there was this sense of ‘possibility’, at least among those who were white, middle-class, and living in the suburbs. So much is possible at 3 a.m. in a Denny’s. But there was also this idea of invincibility—that this Blockbuster Rental on every corner era would always be, so one need not aim for change. Films like Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994) and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995) touch upon this, but nowhere else is this eternal ennui seen better than in Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot of the protagonists from Richard Linklater's "Before Midnight".

The Weight of Years: Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight” (2013)

At the end of Before Sunset (2004), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) walks Celine (Julie Delpy) up to her apartment moments before he is set to catch a plane for America. As with the first film, Before Sunrise (1995), there is a pressing urgency to get to know and to say as much as possible within a short span of time. In fact, by the end of the second film, the characters have only now spent a total of two days together, yet their connection is undeniable. Before Midnight (2013), however, doesn’t carry this time-sensitive urgency as we come to learn that the couple is now married with twins.

Alright, this must be a happy ending (or beginning) then. Jesse is a published writer who also works as a professor. Celine is involved in activism and has recently been offered her ‘dream job’. They live in Paris. The couple, while vacationing in Greece, sees Jesse’s son Hank off at the airport, and this gets Jesse wondering if he has been present enough within his son’s life. Everything seems like a fairy tale. While in Greece, they visit a writer’s home and are offered copious amounts of food and drink. It is a seaside villa along the Mediterranean, and how many would be offered such an opportunity, much less how many writers live well off enough to afford such? It’s not that the couple is excessively extravagant, just that their situation, while real, is perhaps the most unrelatable. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot of the two leads from Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset", second film of the "Before Trilogy"

The Magic, The Sunset: Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunset” (2004)

We’d like to think that being a few years older and a few years wiser could offer us our much needed life do over. Scenes replay in our minds: if only I could have met that person now, I might have reacted differently. And it is not so much the events and eras that change, but rather, our perspectives. Only time can help shape that. Life will often, more or less, remain the same.

It is now nine years later, and Jesse and Celine are both nine years older. He’s written a book and is giving a reading in Paris, which is where Celine lives. She shows up. The book is about their night together, and Celine admits that she’s read the book twice. At the end of Before Sunrise, we don’t know if the characters will meet in six months. In Before Sunset, we come to learn that Celine’s grandmother died and was buried on the day they were supposed to meet. Hence, she could not come to Vienna. But he did. He admits to waiting and feeling that disappointment and perhaps this missed meeting was the thing that jaded them both to the idea of Romantic love.

The characters, now that they’re older, are also more levelheaded. Celine has an environmental job and Jesse works as a writer/professor. He is in a loveless marriage and she is dating a guy who is never around. She admits that men enter her life, only to depart, but not before thanking her for showing them what love is. This makes her angry and resentful. Celine, while still the same, is more outspoken than her earlier character. She is a feminist who punishes herself for still having these Romantic longings. ‘The concept that we should find one person to spend our lives with is evil,’ she says. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot of Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" (1995)

Wistful Dissolve: Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” (1995)

Within one of my short story collections, I have a tale that begins, ‘Only the summers counted as time.’ The story, while having a very different setting than that of Richard Linklater’s 1995 classic Before Sunrise, captures somewhat similar ideas. ‘That was 30 years ago, and so that means 30 summers,’ a summer camp counselor said. This quote stuck with me, so much so, that my childhood summers felt like they stood outside as a sort of time.

I recall my first moment watching this film. It would have been summer, 1995 after renting the cassette from Blockbuster. I worked my job, and late into the night I watched the film on VHS and felt myself brought to Vienna, wandering the streets with these two characters. Oh, and how I wished I could find a guy as cute and as deep as Ethan Hawke who, within this film, embodies the young, artistic girl’s fantasy. ‘I didn’t just go to Europe to read Hemingway,’ he tells Celine (Julie Delpy). ‘I came to be anonymous.’ […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A scene from Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

Time Relaxes: On Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014)

he opening of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood – a cloud-crowded sky and the stare of a boy – is one of vast possibility. Here is a yet-to-be shaped visage (with Coldplay crooning about stars and how they shine for you) captured in one of those indelible moments, no doubt, when time relaxes into some afterschool daze, and no other obligation exists save to lie down, dampened by grass, and to look around, thinking.

It is a moment most of us have felt, and probably longed for, if our childhoods were as frequently troubled as Mason’s (Ellar Coltrane), the young boy whose face will change over the course of the film, over the course of twelve years, but whose eyes will still somehow retain that same lingering sense of possibility.

This is a film about moments. About time, certainly, but really about how moments build up, over time, into people, relations, and everything else. Linklater’s decision to tell the story in a series of vignettes (partly a consequence of how the film was shot, I imagine) was a wise one, for it captures this process of moment-accrual in efficient bursts, letting the viewer make the appropriate connections in the intervening elisions. […]