New Orleans Film Festival 2009

If George Lucas's American Grafitti defined juvenilia for the generation that "grew up" in the fifties and early sixties, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused is the keystone high school movie for the generation that followed. It's the last day of school for the graduating seniors, class of ’76, and the guys are busy devising divers means of making the lives of incoming freshman miserable. ’Nuff said. Quentin Tarantino in a critics poll in 2002 hailed Dazed and Confused as one of his top ten films of All Time and Entertainment Weekly had it as No. 3 in its fifty top high school movies. Mostly unknown at the time, the cast includes the youthful Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, and Milla Jovovich. See it with a bud.