well, coming from the director of Dazed and Confuse, what would you expect?

Rating: 4/10 (8 May 2006)

The bottom line is whether or not the film was entertaining or not. Yes and no. The story depicts two people falling in love for the evening. But did the viewer become attached to their situation by the end? No, at the end of the film, the two forget the idea o never seeing each other again and decide to meet there exactly six months from that date, no matter the circumstances. At times the realness of the characters sort of turns a part of the audience off by giving away too much of the character's personalities. The part of the audience that could identify with particular traits of the characters was pleased, but the other became a bit alienated by doing this. This latter part of the audience, the part that was not so swayed by the character's identities, must have been thankful that the 18 plus hours of the adventure were not actually shot in real-time, or more relationships would have been weakened rather than strengthened due to one of the two leaving the movie theater out of pure boredom. The point is that the story was not maximized to its full potential. The characters were lacking traits that could have made them dynamic. Although Linklater was playing off of the realistic atmosphere he was trying to create, often this does not describe the reason people go to the movies: to fulfill a fantasy; to enter a new, entertaining world for a ninety minute time span. If the viewer is not entranced by the artificial world created within the movie, then viewers will not be inspired. And if there exists no inspiration, then life would get, well, boring.