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Just a recapitulation of all the moments that were happening I the film. Moments as the character said "seize us." Some probably important quotes from the characters as well.

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I don't know how I stumbled upon this article, but I really like it. From the website Write Out of L.A., Robin Write has posted an excellent take on one of my favorite movies of 2014 Boyhood.

From the opening frame of Mason staring up into the sky, through twelve years, to Mason being away from home and family with his potential new friends, Boyhood depicts parts of life. Moments we kind of often take for granted. Or remember differently to someone else. Moments you do not often see in cinema, but are around you all time. And always have been. Richard Linklater poignantly captures these significant life events of all shapes and sizes in the magnificent Boyhood. I'm sure you have all seen it by now, and all have your favorite scenes that touched you. Here are 12 (of course, twelve, but could easily have been forty) smaller moments in the film that lingered with me.

Here are three of the moments Robin selected:

MASON'S HOMEWORK

When Mason's mom hears he has not handed in many of his homework assignments, his response is that the teacher did not ask for them. It is an instant signal that our protagonist is merely a small boy at this point. And that children are likely more logical than we give them credit for.

MOM DOES NOT HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS

The final scene with mom when she breaks down is the one most folks talk about (and likely Oscar nomination clip), but much earlier in the movie when they are finally rid of Bill, mom bursts into tears when she can't answer her daughter's concerns. You truly feel for a mother who is heartbroken that she does not have the answers right now.

BOYS GO CAMPING

Mason gets some male-bonding time with his dad as they go camping. They talk generally about kissing girls, Star Wars, and peeing on camp fires. The real magic of this sequence is how comfortable they appear to be as they catch up on the parts of their respective lives they may have missed thus far.

Boyhood is a marvel for a myriad of reasons, but Robin has zeroed in on the single biggest narrative dynamic: Moments. The final scene in the movie involves college freshman Mason out in the raw beauty of West Texas with some newly found friends.

One of them, Nicole, says this: "You know how everyone's always saying, 'Seize the moment'? I don't know, I'm kinda thinkin' it's the other way around. You know, like, the moment seizes us."

To which Mason responds: "Yeah, I know. It's constant, the moments, it's just... it's like always right now, you know."

And that is in some way the central theme of the movie, not only about human experience, but the way in which Boyhood tells its story. It drops into Mason and his family's existence moment to moment. But unlike a movie that transpires over many years like Forrest Gump which focuses on big moments - winning college football games, meeting Presidents, Vietnam, Watergate -  Boyhood does precisely the opposite. It highlights ordinary moments. That's one of the beauties of the movie, how it takes us into these seemingly mundane slices of life and explores the emotional life flowing through them.

Author Anne Beattie has one of my favorite quotes: "People forget years and remember moments." I think that applies to writing stories... watching movies... and living life.

Boyhood reminds us of that.

For the rest of Robin's post to see his nine other favorite moments from the movie, go here.

Twitter: @WriteoutofLA.

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I don't know how I stumbled upon this article, but I really like it. From the website Write Out of L.A., Robin Write has posted an excellent take on one of my favorite movies of 2014 Boyhood.

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Linklater's 'Boyhood' is Life Told Through the Small Things

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Linklater's 'Boyhood' is Life Told Through the Small Things

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More of explanation and comparison of all the little moments of the film that can be relatable to the audience. The film focuses on main milestones that mostly all people watching will again be able to have something in common with relate in some way.

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As a massive fan of Richard Linklater and someone who has been anticipating this film for months, I made the drive up to Austin this past weekend to view it as soon as I could. Waking up early on a Saturday for a 10:25 a.m. showing in a different city, I regret none of it.

It's been sweeping festivals and breaking high score records on every critical consensus website, but it isn't another one of those movies that critics say that you must see but end up not enjoying. It's one that you should see and will enjoy.
[Richard Linklater on 'Boyhood,' a Film Literally 12 Years in the Making]
Positive raving and innovative filmmaking aside, this film exists on a deeply personal level and speaks to all people through its spot-on depictions of the bores and small landmarks of life. The pure scope of the movie is a testament to Linklater's patience and continuing careful eye for making the quietness and unassuming parts of daily life into a beautiful story.

It's the small things strung together that give the film its power: the asshole teacher preaching about work ethic, Mason's first beer with older friends, his adolescent aversion to family parties and his crippling uncertainty about the future. People come through, some stay and most don't. Boyhood tells you that growing up sucks without ever hinting at such a message. It shows the sweet and the sour and asks you to examine your own childhood and trajectory as a person, while showing you how everything may not be so bad in context.

Although Mason is the obvious center point of the story, the film focuses on interactions that define those around them rather than those that singularly affect him. Mason goes from pudgy to lanky and learns all the lessons in between, while his father evolves from jobless slacker to family man, and his mother goes from husband to husband until she realizes her independence and need for simplicity.

Seamlessly transitioning between ages, Mason will run down the stairs and look noticeably older, then go through a few memorable scenes and emerge as even more grown up later on. And the character of Mason isn't some watered-down amalgamation of common childhood experiences. He is the breathing embodiment of growing up, with ups and downs that either exactly match or relate to something we've all gone through. No memory is a complete miss.

My almost exact similarities to the character (same age, single mom upbringing, divorced dad living in Houston, experiences with step-parents, familiarity with all the filming locations, etc.) aside, Boyhood reaches everyone. Linklater's uncanny eye for the details and his use of cultural timepieces like the GameBoy and Harry Potter matched with similarly timely music choices make the film all the more applicable to teenagers of my generation and the parents who raised them. But Boyhood isn't so narrow in its connections with audiences. Mothers of all ages will weep along as Mason moves out, sisters young and old will sympathize with the annoying car rides and seeing your little sibling at a party, dads will reminisce about hiking and girl advice, and so on.

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In the 12 years of filming, one might expect character lapses, quality bumps or noticeable shifts in tone. But the use of the same family unit throughout the filmmaking process allows for the cast to pick up their struggles and narratives from where they were left, to resume their growth in a perfectly honest way that parallels their own aging as humans. Because the characters are left room to breathe and portray themselves in an unguarded way, the movie feels like a documentary without even aiming to do so.

The film is so beautiful not only because the characters all come full-circle, but because the distinctions in character development are so visible in the three-hour length of the movie. You see the contrast between Mason's dependence on his mother for everything as a child and his independence in college, just as he reaches an age not too younger than his teenage mother was at the beginning of the film. He marvels at nature in the opening scene as a six-year-old boy waiting for a ride, and he marvels at nature in the last scene as an 18-year-old boy exploring with his friends and starting to make his way in the world.

As a bonus for Texans, the filming locations are all familiar enough to serve as comparison points for our own experiences there. Sites in San Marcos, Big Bend, Austin, Alpine, Pedernales, Houston and more will kindle a particular fondness among us for their connection to our own childhoods.

It's the ultimate coming of age film, an instant classic, the best movie you'll see this year. It's Linklater's better narrative answer to Dazed and Confused, and what will ultimately be a nostalgia film for the children of the adults who reminisced along to that 1993 film. And for Texans and teenage boys, it will only become more personal and touching as time goes by.

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Linklater's 'Boyhood' is Life Told Through the Small Things

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As a massive fan of Richard Linklater and someone who has been anticipating this film for months, I made the drive up to Austin this past weekend to view it as soon as I could. Waking up early on a Saturday for a 10:25 a.m. showing in a different city, I regret none of it.

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explains how richard created stories that audience must falll in love with character including boyhood. shows more films he was a part of using his techniques.

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Why this might not seem so easy

In 1990, Richard Linklater self-released his second feature, Slacker, in Austin, Texas. A year later, the film was acquired by distributor Orion Classics and released across the US, coinciding with a newly established cultural zeitgeist spearheaded by the publication of Douglas Coupland's landmark novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Suddenly, and unwittingly, Linklater found himself catapulted to fame as one of the leading spokesmen for an entire generation.

But, for Linklater, the conversation was only interesting when it related to the work itself, and he was quick to downplay his role as a cultural commentator. Nevertheless, his subsequent films have often continued Slacker's chronicling of the practices of youth, and 'spokesman' seems like an appropriate term for someone whose films are drenched in dialogue.

Influenced by literature and philosophy, Linklater's movies display an intense infatuation with verbiage, and the director has confessed to deliberately rejecting the famous filmmaking dictum of "show, don't tell". Adding to the sense that Linklater's work is 'uncinematic' is his preference for building films around the thinnest of plots, placing the emphasis on nuanced characterisation over conventional storytelling.

In short, Linklater's cinema is the kind that viewers of a certain disposition will find infuriating - even if those more inclined to go with the flow are liable to find themselves falling in love with the characters he creates.

The best place to start - Before Sunrise

Near the start of Before Sunrise (1995), one of Linklater's most endearing and enduring films, Jesse ( Ethan Hawke) tells Céline ( Julie Delpy) about an idea he's had for a new TV show: people are filmed for 24 hours, the cameras capturing, in real time, their life as it's lived - the mundane poetry of day to day life. Given the (lack of) action that follows, Jesse's words almost play as Linklater's own statement of intent.

Jesse and Céline have just met on a train travelling through Europe (travel is a recurring theme in Linklater's work), striking up a conversation after witnessing a nearby couple breaking into an argument. Céline is bound for Paris, but Jesse persuades her to get off the train at Vienna: he has a flight back to America booked for the following morning and can't afford a room for the night, so he suggests they spend it walking around town.

And so begins one of the smartest and sharpest romcoms in cinema history. The charming chatter flows free and easy as the would-be couple walk and talk, the narrative action centring upon little more than us getting to know the characters just as they, too, get to know one another - and themselves.

What to watch next

Nine years after Before Sunrise, Linklater, Hawke and Delpy reunited to continue the story of Jesse and Céline in Before Sunset (2004). The film unfolds in real time (a technique also used by Linklater in his 2001 chamber drama Tape), a fact that, when added to the gap between instalments (a third part, Before Midnight, was released in 2013), results in the emergence of two of Linklater's primary concerns: time and memory, and how the two interconnect.

Linklater notably also explored these ideas in his coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014), which was filmed over 12 years. In following the life of Mason Evans Jr ( Ellar Coltrane) from the age of six to 18, the film was built to resemble a memory, as if someone was looking back on their life as a series of moments.

But if time and memory preoccupy Linklater, so does dreaming, and Jesse and Céline also feature as dreamed fragments in his rotoscoped animation, Waking Life (2001). A wide-ranging philosophical discourse, the film sees an unnamed protagonist ( Wiley Wiggins) drift through a lucid dream, observing (and sometimes participating in) a series of erudite, existential conversations. The animation lends the film a suitably dream-like quality, perfectly encapsulating the film's questioning of reality. Linklater re-used the technique for his paranoid, drug-fuelled sci-fi tale A Scanner Darkly (2006), adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel.

With Bernie (2011), Linklater explored the nature of reality in a different way, incorporating documentary-style talking heads into a blackly comic fictional retelling of a true-life murder and trial in the small east Texas town of Carthage. To complicate matters further, some of the interviewees are genuine townspeople, while some are actors, resulting in a unique blend of fact and fiction that makes us question the veracity of what we're seeing on screen. It's a fascinating response to the strangest of situations: the murderer, Bernie Tiede ( Jack Black), was so well liked in Carthage that people wanted to overlook the fact that he had shot an 81-year-old woman in the back (four times), and let him go free.

But Bernie wasn't the first film in which Linklater asked his audience to identify with a criminal - in 1998, he made The Newton Boys, based on "the true story of the most successful bank robbers in the history of the United States". Underrated and overlooked, this relatively early work was Linklater's first real step towards a more narrative-driven cinema of a kind he never fully embraced. Still, in telling the tale of four brothers who justify their bank robbing due to the fact that "all the banks is insured now" and the insurance companies are "the biggest crooks of 'em all", Linklater retained his anti-conformist, rebellious streak.

In fact, this streak even found its way into his most commercial film to date: 2003's excellent comedy The School of Rock, about a failed musician ( Jack Black) who subterfuges his way into a teaching role at a prep school and ends up showing the children how to 'stick it to the man' through the power of rock. Commercial though it may be, it's a commercial film as only Linklater could envision it.

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In 1990, Richard Linklater self-released his second feature, Slacker, in Austin, Texas. A year later, the film was acquired by distributor Orion Classics and released across the US, coinciding with a newly established cultural zeitgeist spearheaded by the publication of Douglas Coupland's landmark novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

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I used some quotes from here mainly one explaining how we as an audience are portrayed in the film. explains many scenes where the film tries to make it seem like its in a time that actually happened . talking about Obama and singing relevant songs at certain years.

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I went with my friend Gabe to a movie theater in New York City, and instantly I knew: I was part of an event. This was no fleeting Netflix stream - we were there to see, and to experience, "Boyhood," the film about an American boy's childhood and adolescence. While the plot of the film might have convinced some to buy tickets, its concept made the line go around the block. Richard Linklater, the director, writer and producer, shot the film over the course of 12 years, allowing the actors' aging to show on film. "Boyhood" follows Mason and his family through marriages, divorces, hairstyles and relationships, tracing the small details of their experiences - camping trips, sketchy late-night hangouts, walks home from school.

Ellar Coltrane, captured from ages seven to 19, plays Mason. We meet him as a first grader in Texas, adorable with his bowl-cut and childish curiosity. He collects arrowheads and contemplates the origins of wasps. He throws pillows at his sister Sam, played by Linklater's daughter Lorelei, when she wakes him up with her (pretty great) Britney Spears impression. Mason's dazed moments of childhood, though, occur as adults spar around him. His mother (Patricia Arquette) does her best to remain resilient as she enters relationships that fall into downward spirals, and often bottles of liquor. Meanwhile, his estranged father (Ethan Hawke) seems to be in his own eternal boyhood, living in Alaska and writing songs on his keyboard before returning to Texas and the periphery of Mason's life. But both struggle to improve, as does everyone surrounding Mason. Even minor characters - his friends in high school, his mother's second and third husbands, his roommate in college - seem caught in attempts to change, no matter how long they're on screen.

The day after seeing "Boyhood," Gabe and I discussed the movie, rehashing every detail that mirrored our childhoods - and there were many. He then told me, though, that after summarizing the film for one of his colleagues at work, he was met with an underwhelmed shrug. "Why would I see a boring movie about a kid's life?" The man had said. "I'd rather live my own."

Like a jersey-wearing sports fan, I instantly disregarded the negative opinion of the movie I so loyally loved. How could you disregard Linklater's elegant way of telling such a simple story? Your life isn't viewed with dreamy camera angles, I wanted to say to him. Your life isn't supplemented by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. Your life isn't perfectly soundtracked with mid-2000s Coldplay, Sheryl Crow and Soulja Boy.

That dismissal of "Boyhood," however, is somewhat valid. When we go to the movies, we don't often seek what we already know. We go to be consumed by Michael Bay explosions, we go to experience the folds of a foreign love story, we go to sit in a velvet chair and lead ourselves away from normality. We've been taught, time and time again, to expect from fiction what we can't from our lives: fast-paced plots, solutions, themes that lead us towards little bits of understanding.

But because "Boyhood" doesn't satisfy our craving for excitement, it forces us to see beauty in what often seems mundane. It's easy to focus on experiences that come preloaded with action or moral messages, but most aren't so coherent or clearly meaningful. And yet, "Boyhood" finds something valuable that thousands want to watch. It's the recognition of our own childhoods - for those of us who grew up in the United States in the 90s and early 2000s, the tangible details aren't wholly unique. He has friends who ride Ripsticks. Lady Gaga's music videos show up twice. There was none of the otherworldliness of a sci-fi or the convincing hope of a rom-com, but Gabe and I still left feeling the dreamy afterglow that tends to follow more escapist films. But this time, the high came from the validation of our own stories as something worth being told.

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Seeing Ourselves in 'Boyhood' - Yale Daily News

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I went with my friend Gabe to a movie theater in New York City, and instantly I knew: I was part of an event. This was no fleeting Netflix stream-we were there to see, and to experience, "Boyhood," the film about an American boy's childhood and adolescence.

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12 Years in the Making: Realism in Boyhood

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12 Years in the Making: Realism in Boyhood

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another view on the realism in the film. gives examples and one I even used about the big scene when masons mom breaks down about there being more to life

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There Is More to Life Than  ____________

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There Is More to Life Than  ____________

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I was thinking of Masons moms quotes she had in the film about there being more to life. so this guy talks about questions he has about life and gives some answers.

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Regardless of how creative you already consider yourself to be, there's a good chance you would like to level up your creative abilities.

You might want to write a better song, think of better solutions to problems at work or around the home or maybe paint a picture.

In any case, the good news is that creativity is not born: it's made, and each one of us has the potential to be more creative and come up with incredible ideas.

"Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The definition of creativity is broad, and reminds us that creativity is not limited to artists or musicians. It does however require that we have some kind of impact on the domain in which we create.

Creativity also emphasizes values.

"The process of having original ideas that have value" - Ken Robinson

This makes up for what Csikszentmihalyi misses out. For instance, we can make a change in the world without adding significant value. Any destructive act, like smashing a window, creates change, but it doesn't necessarily create valuable change.

In short, there isn't one single definition of creativity It's up to us to find a definition that feels true and useful. When you know what your standard is, It's much easier to embrace creativity and start to cultivate it.

And in this article, you will learn how to be more creative and take a good look at what goes into the creative skill:

1. Cultivate Focus

In order to create, there needs to be a focus on creating something, whether it's a song, a theory, a product, or a sculpture.

You could also call this "drive" - it's the initial spark that drives the solution to a problem, or the will to get on your laptop and start typing.

However, it's worth noting there are different stages to the creative process: the divergent stage and the convergent stage.

In the divergent stage, we want a broad focus - we want to be willing to let in lots of different inputs, ideas and insights. This is the time for brainstorming all possible ideas and solutions.

In the convergent stage, we start to narrow our focus, like a camera lens. At this stage, we start to drill down to a handful of ideas or solutions, discriminating throughout the process.

How to cultivate focus?

Take a 20 Minute Walk

Walking away and getting your heart rate up is the best free tool you have in regaining your focus.

I know it might seem counterintuitive to take a break right when you're at your busiest, and especially when you're drowning in your massive to do list, but the effects it will have on your clarity and ability to focus are undeniable.

Walking is physiologically proven to release stress, and clear your mind. In fact, most of my most brilliant ideas (and some pretty terrible ones too) have occurred on my daily walks.

If you give this technique a try, what you'll find is that you're much more productive than you were before you took a breather.

Over time, if you do these walks daily, you'll quickly find that your to-do list starts to feel a lot less significant, and a lot more doable. It's all about keeping razor focused, and that's what short daily walks will gift you.

2. Build a Structure

When I wake up in the morning, I start the day with a structure in mind. I know that 15 minutes will be dedicated to meditation, 30 minutes to coffee and reading, 20 minutes to yoga and so on.

The structure of this morning routine might be boring, but the act of each task in itself has the potential to be, on some level, "creative."

The point of structure is that it gives you the space to make time for something you want to do. It helps you carve out the time to do your creative work. Once you begin that thing in itself, you are free to go about it however you'd like.

Without structure, we can lose focus and can feel overwhelmed with possibility. If you've ever looked at a blank page and felt too overwhelmed with possibility to make a mark on it, you'll know what I mean. How much easier it gets when you are given some guidelines or a deadline?

The trick is finding the right amount of structure for you and your creative needs. Too little structure and we feel overwhelmed. Too much structure, and we risk feeling limited and stifled.

Again, it's worth thinking about creating in those two stages: divergent (less structure) and convergent (more structure.)

How to build a structure?

Create a Morning Routine

Your morning routine doesn't have to be rigid or so arduous you dread waking up. In fact, it should feel like the opposite. When you get a routine that works for you, you'll look forward to starting the day.

We all have different needs and preferences which can shape our ideal routine. In the book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey, you can be inspired over 160 different creators' daily routines, from Charles Darwin to Pablo Picasso.

Experiment with any that take your fancy, and see how you feel with a bit more structure to start your day.

You can also take a look at this article about morning routine for inspirations: The Ultimate Morning Routine to Make You Happy And Productive All Day

3. Find Motivation

There is a theory that suggests: people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself - not by external pressures. This is also known as intrinsic motivation; a drive that comes from within.

Think of a time when you did some of your best work - chances are you were totally absorbed in what you were doing, to the exclusion of everything else. You were completely focused on the work itself, barely noticing time flying by.

Now think of a time when you felt under pressure to perform. Maybe it was an exam, or a commission for an important client, or maybe your boss had told you "there's a lot riding on this."

Notice the difference? In the first memory, you were driven by intrinsic motivation, which made it relatively easy, even enjoyable, to be highly creative.

In the second memory however, extrinsic motivation was breathing down your neck, distracting you by whispering about the rewards for success and the horrible consequences of failure: likely making it harder to focus on the task at hand.

For this reason, intrinsic motivation, if you can find it, is what separates the good from great creative work.

This isn't to say only internal motivators help. I personally get motivated by luring myself to work with a good cappuccino at my favourite cafe. That will get me ready to write or edit or whatever I've been avoiding.

How to find motivation?

Connect to Your "Why"

Your "Why" is your fuel: the thing that drives you forward, that gives you a reason to do what you're doing.

'He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.' - Friedrich Nietzche

When you have a reason to do something, a purpose or a goal that matters to you, you can connect your daily actions to it. Then, each act becomes infused with meaning and you find that intrinsic motivation comes naturally.

The trick is to remember your "why" and connect with it on a regular basis.

Think about how you want to feel on a daily basis. What would you like to accomplish in the next year? What would you like for yourself in the next five years? How about in your lifetime?

Ultimately, the tasks you face on a daily basis, or at least some of them, will connect to a greater purpose if you follow this path and you will find you feel more motivated to create and less resistance.

If you aren't sure where to start looking for motivation, this will help: How to Get Motivated and Be Happy Every Day When You Wake Up

Scroll down to continue reading article

4. Be an Expert in a Chosen Domain

Research has shown that just as expertise in one domain does not predict expertise in other unrelated domains; creativity in one domain does not predict creativity in other unrelated domains.

So just because you can paint a pretty picture, doesn't mean you can creatively solve a mathematical problem.

If you've taken one of those tests like the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which will ask you to think of a bazillion uses for a pencil, and scored well, unfortunately this is only an indicator of divergent thinking skills. It is not a predictor for creativity all round.

The good news is, you can train your creativity in your chosen domain. Much like a muscle, you can isolate exercises to strengthen it.

Of course you can still do a total body workout - or a "total creativity workout" - but it means your creativity-training exercises need to come from a wide variety of domains; not just thinking up uses for a pencil.

How to become an expert?

Make a Mastery Training Plan

Following our physical workout analogy, it's worth applying the habits of great athletes to your chosen creative domain. For example:
1. Decide what area/s you want to work on
Much like a tennis player who decides they need to improve their serving technique, you can decide what area within your creative domain you want to improve at. Get specific.
2. Decide how much time you can dedicate
Most of us don't have all day to train like a pro tennis player might, but you can likely squeeze 20 to 30 minutes in a day, if you want to. Whatever the time you can allow is, decide to dedicate yourself to it.
3. Review your progress
Finally, in order to check your progress, you can take regular reviews. Decide what your metrics are, and take time each week to check in with yourself.

How many days did you practice? How did you compare to the previous week? This kind of review can help you stay on track, and actually creates more intrinsic motivation as you see yourself develop.

5. Create a Conducive Environment

A psychologist in 1943 proposed that behaviour is:

"a function of both the person as well as the physical environment they are in."

I would suggest that the act of creating is a behaviour and that, even though it begins as an internal process, it's very much affected by and even dependent on the environment we are in.

I started noticing how environment affects me when I worked in an office. Over time, I realized that the more people who were in or who were talking, the more distracted I was. If I got to the office early before my coworkers arrived, I was twice as effective.

I was even more effective if I was at home. Now that I work from home, I know I'm even more effective when in certain coffee shops. Ideally, places that have high ceilings, gentle lighting, some barely noticeable background music - and excellent coffee.

It's these little variations in our environment that can really shape our creative output.

If you're an introvert, you probably do your best work alone. If you're an extrovert, you probably do your best work in the company of others.

This isn't to say you should find one way of doing things and stick to it: in fact, varying your environment from time to time is a great way to stoke the creative fire too, which we'll touch on more later.

How to create a conducive environment?

Add or Subtract Stimuli

Novelty in our environment has been shown to stimulate the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that increases our desire to seek out reward.

If you're looking for creative motivation, adding some novelty into your environment can be just what you need.

On the other hand, some people are highly sensitive and when it comes to having too much stimulation in their environment, they find it difficult to focus.

Experiment with working in different environments. Note how you feel. Note whether you do better creative work or have more interesting ideas when you're alone or with others.

Try listening to music, people chatting or try being in complete silence. Try a dimly lit room, try working in bright sunlight.

In each case, note how you feel before, during and afterwards and rate the quality of your work.

The Bottom Line

Creativity is not one particular skill or talent one can have. It comes in as many broad and unique flavors as there are people on this earth.

To be more creative, take little steps each day. Acknowledge where and when you feel most inspired, motivated and original and spend more energy in those areas.

More Articles About Creativity

Featured photo credit: Sticker Mule via unsplash.com

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Regardless of how creative you already consider yourself to be, there's a good chance you would like to level up your creative abilities. You might want to write a better song, think of better solutions to problems at work or around the home or maybe paint a picture.

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Description of the accomplishment of Richard and films he's produced. Intro to his early life.

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Richard Linklater | Biography, Education, Movies, & Facts

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Richard Linklater: Richard Linklater, American filmmaker known for idiosyncratic, personal films that reflect his self-taught directorial origins. He is best known for the films Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise (and its sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight), School of Rock, and Boyhood.

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I needed a well explained definition of what a coming of age film actually was. one thing I understood initially is you see growth in one character overall, could be in many deferent ways.

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A coming-of-age is a genre that focuses on psychological and moral growth of a main character who is growing from youth to adulthood. Personal growth is the most important characteristic in this genre. It relies on emotional responses and dialogue rather than action. (How do you know who's the main character? It's the one who changes the most.)

There are many children's stories (or stories about children) in which the child loses their innocence. When that character is a bit older (adolescent) then it's called a coming-of-age story.

Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't you. That isn't you at all.

- Leila Sales

Structure Of A Coming-of-age Story

At the beginning of the story, childhood has already been left behind, and the hero has concluded that the world is not a safe or blissful place. An event that occurred prior to the beginning of the story, or the hero's overall situation, has made the hero feel lost or stuck in a world over which she has little or no control (the death of a brother in ; a dystopian society in The Hunger Games; the social pressure and institutional indifference of school in The Breakfast Club).

After the hero's introduction in the setup of the story, he is presented with an Opportunity that will either make life even worse (Katniss' sister being chosen for the hunger games; the introduction of the bully in ), or will hold the promise of some escape from his pain (the report of a dead body in ; the Rolling Stone assignment in Almost Famous). I n response, these heroes' outer motivations are declared, and their pursuit of those goals begins.

As with any character arc, it is in this journey that their transformation occurs. But in coming of age stories, the conflicts the characters face force them to realize that they are now on their own, that parents, friends and society will not save them, and they must rely on themselves. And with this painful realization comes each hero's individuation. He now defines himself and stands up for who he is - usually in defiance of parents or figures of authority.

So at the end of the journeys in the movies above - and in all coming of age stories - the world has not changed. It's as painful and inhospitable as ever. But the hero is now equipped with the strength and courage and independence to face the world head on, and to move into adulthood living his or her essence.

- Michael Hauge, Story Mastery website

I have a friend who swears she can't stand any kind of coming-of-age story. I think this is because her definition is a little narrower than mine - she's thinking of the genre typified by the likes of American Pie.

In one sense, all memorable stories are coming of age stories, if what we mean by the term is a story about someone who moves from one stage of development to a more advanced one. [...] Films explicitly labeled a "coming-of-age story," however, are often about nothing more than someone's becoming aware of sex.

- Howard Suber

This seems to be the common message of coming-of-age stories for a YA audience:

You're not going to die. Here's the white-hot truth: if you go bankrupt, you'll still be okay. If you lose the gig, the lover, the house, you'll still be okay. If you sing off-key, get beat by the competition, have your heart shattered, get fired... it's not going to kill you. Ask anyone who's been through it.

- Danielle LaPorte, Canadian author

Features of a Coming-of-age Story

Coming-of-age stories tend to emphasise dialogue or internal monologue over action.

They are often set in the past.

The heroes of coming-of-age stories are typically teenagers. Almost without exception, coming of age stories are about the transition from adolescence to adulthood, from being defined by family or society to defining oneself. The hero is somewhere between 10-years-old (Elliott in E.T.) and late teens (the four heroes of American Graffiti). However, sometimes an adult is emotionally delayed. An example of a coming-of-age character in her late twenties is Ruth in I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore.

A psychoanalytic reading of a coming-of-age story done badly might "pathologize" childhood - i.e read childhood as a symptom to be overcome in the journey to mature adulthood. This is why in a lot of coming-of-age tales, the child (adolescent) grows a bit, but at the end demonstrates that they haven't given up on childhood completely. We see it, for instance, in Monster House, in which DJ decides to go trick-or-treating after all, despite eschewing all boyish things at the beginning of the story.

In order to come of age, the main character will have to leave home. Coming-of-age tales therefore quite often conform to mythic structure.

What Is A Bildungsroman?

My friend who can't stand coming-of-age stories is probably fine with the bildungsroman. (The plural, by the way, is bildungsromane.)

The bildungsroman is a specific subgenre of coming-of-age story. It is especially prominent in literature and focuses on the protagonist's psychological and moral growth, and thus character change is extremely important.

The German translates as 'novel of formation' or 'novel of education'.

The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest son going out in the world to seek his fortune.

Usually in the beginning of the story there is an emotional loss which makes the protagonist leave on his journey.

The goal is maturity, and the protagonist achieves it gradually and with difficulty.

This makes the bildungsromane inherently Romantic, because it has an optimistic ending that affirms the main character's entry into adulthood.

Another Romantic idea: belief in the individual. Romanticism is all about the individual taking responsibility for themselves, living their own best life, finding one's own place within society and so on.

The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he/she is ultimately accepted into society - the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity.

YA novels evolved from the bildungsroman.

In its broadest sense, every story is a bildungsroman, right down to toddlers who star in picture books. Doesn't every character grow, outside those in series fiction (which Maria Nikolajeva calls 'paraliterature'?) Some sort of character arc is a requirement for a full and complete narrative.

Some academics prefer to narrow the term to a more useful definition: Bildungsromane star characters who mature from childhood to adulthood. This, at least, is useful.

The guy who came up with the word (Wilhelm Dilthey, 1870), meant it to refer to stories in which

1. There is a cultural goal

2. Which is the complete unfolding of all the natural qualities

3. Then there's a clear path toward that goal

By this definition, the bildungsroman is a direct path from confusion to clarity.

Here's another definition of the bildungsroman, by Jerome Buckley:

1. A sensitive child grows up in a rural setting feeling confined by his entire family (but especially by the father), and the father can't understand the boy's imaginative life (because these stories are traditionally about boys).

2. School proves restrictive so the boy leaves home to go into an urban centre.

3. He will have at least two romantic experiences.

4. One of those has the potential to corrupt him and the other has the potential to purify him.

5. His initiation is complete when he does a bunch of soul-searching then triumphs over the trials he faces with his parents/money/women and accepts his own capacity for work and for love.

Which is probably a bit too specific. Also, in the traditional bildungsroman, the main character is setting out to deliberately become independent. He's trying to cultivate himself via novel experience. These are quest narratives. The quest is 'to find oneself and grow up'.

But have you heard of the Entwicklungsroman?

Another type of story about the maturation process.

This is a very broad category in which an adolescent character grows (some). It's subtly different from a bildungsroman because in the bildungsroman, the adolescent matures to adulthood.

Entwicklungsromane can be thought of as novels of growth or development, whereas bildungsromane are coming-of-age novels sometimes referred to as 'apprenticeship novels'.

I suspect a lot of YA novels are more entwicklungsromane than bildungsromane, because rarely does a YA character seem like an adult at the end of the story. More likely they've overcome one particular problem, but still have a lot of growing to do before they can exist in the world independently and happily. Then again, when does one become an adult?

There's no room in the traditional definition of Bildungsromane for female characters. If a story stars a female, it's probably an Entwicklungsroman. Most authors throughout the history of literature consider growing up female as a choice between auxiliary or secondary personhood, sacrificial victimization, madness and death (paraphrasing Annis Pratt, in Archetypal Patterns In Women's Fiction). There's no real psychological growth or maturity there.

That said, there are examples of female protagonists who seem to fit the bildungsroman perfectly. Katherine Paterson's Lyddie is one example.

1. Lyddie is emotionally orphaned by her father. Her mother's out of the picture too.

2. Though embarrassed about being illiterate she decides to journey from the family farm in Vermont. She eventually arrives in the mill town Lowell, Massachussets.

3. She is educated in a straightforward literacy narrative by coworkers Betsy and Diana.

4. She has two sexualised encounters with men.

5. The first is quite debasing when her foreman harasses her.

6. The other is more like a purifying romance in that Lyddie's neighbour wants to marry her because he loves her mind.

7. She returns to her home and recognises how much she has known.

8. She decides to defer marrying Luke until she has graduated from Oberlin.

9. Her initial reasons for leaving home have come from a self-conscious recognition that she needed to learn how to earn a place in the world.

10. Her final decision is based on the epiphany that the only thing limiting her is her own self-image.

11. She overcomes poverty, ignorance and personal pettiness. She learns to balance her own materialism with her love of others and love of learning.

Examples of Coming-of-age Stories

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly - First of the three big novels which define YA.

The Catcher In The Rye - Second of the three big novels which define YA.

The Outsiders - The third. This book changed YA fiction forever, not least because it was written by someone who was still a teenager herself.

The Wonder Years - an adolescent boy comes of age in 1960s America, an especially good setting for a coming-of-age series because that's when America herself was going through some kind of 'psychological growth'.

Mad Men - in this show a number of characters come of age. Peggy and Joan are the 'secret protagonists', set against Don Draper who will never change much.

Freaks and Geeks - a 'Breaking Bad' kind of plot in which a good girl learns to break free of her nerdy reputation

The Breakfast Club

The Perks of Being a Wallflower - the book is far better than the film, and I'm not someone who always says that

Malcolm In The Middle

Happy Days

Never Let Me Go

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - an example of Anglophone Bildungsroman

Sons and Lovers - is another, about a sexual awakening, which is one thing today's worst teen coming-of-age movies have in common

David Copperfield is another stand-out Anglophone example.

A Mill In The Floss - there is no room in the original definition of Bildungsroman for female protagonists, but this is definitely a coming-of-age example.

What Maisie Knew - although Maisie is still very young she loses her childhood innocence.

The Secret Life Of Bees

Huck Finn

About A Boy - in this case the main character is far too old to be living like a teenager and his young protege is more emotionally aware than he is. This, of course, is the point of the story.

Harry Potter - a boy learns how special he is

Gone With The Wind - the main character is older and of marriageable age, but still pretty inward looking.

Adventureland - The main character has just finished university, but as he says into the phone at the beginning of the story he has been so focused on academics that he has no life experience to speak of.

We Are The Best - a group of girls about 12 or 13 years old who go on a mythological journey.

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What Is A "Coming-of-age" Story? - Slap Happy Larry

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A coming-of-age is a genre that focuses on psychological and moral growth of a main character who is growing from youth to adulthood. Personal growth is the most important characteristic in this genre. It relies on emotional responses and dialogue rather than action. (How do you know who's the main character?

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Another page explaining what coming of age was this one saying it's the growth of an adolescent into adulthood usually. gives a bunch of examples that were kinda unnecessary after the definition i needed.

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Most scholars agree on a standard definition of the coming-of-age narrative: the coming-of-age narrative: Simply put, it follows the development of a child or adolescent into adulthood. The roots of this narrative theme can be traced back to the bildungsroman, or "formation novel." Late 18th-century German novels, such as Johann Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795), established a narrative pattern that would be followed by several other authors in the forthcoming centuries. This pattern typically features a young protagonist-either male or female-who undergoes a troubled search for an adult identity by process of trials, experiences, and revelations. This theme is prominent in several well-known European and American novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1849-50) and Great Expectations (1860-61); Horatio Alger, Jr.'s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks (1868); Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1869); Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The popularity of this narrative has continued into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as shown in critically acclaimed books such as Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1993) and Jon Krakauer's 1996 account of the life and death of Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, and through popular culture texts, such as J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

While there is agreement on a standard working definition of a coming-of-age narrative, there is little agreement among scholars on the constituent elements of these narratives. James Hardin, a theorist of genre studies, argues that there can be no agreement about the elements of a coming-ofage narrative because of the various meanings of the word Bildung in German. While most scholars interpret the word's meaning as "formation," Hardin contends that this interpretation is unique to a series of 18th- and 19th-century novels, and to use that term and its meaning for an examination of 20thand 21st-century novels is to take it out of its proper context. Other interpretations of the German word Bildung, such as initiation, education, and building, have served to further complicate understanding of the coming-of-age narrative. In addition to a debate over the origin of the term, other scholars argue over the age group of protagonists coming of age in these texts. Most 18th- and 19th-century protagonists featured in these novels came of age in their midto- late teenage years.

Throughout the 20th century, however, the range in years for a coming-of-age narrative widened from this age group to include protagonists in their early to mid-20s. It is for this reason that the genre studies scholar Barbara White limits the definition of a coming-of-age narrative to focus on protagonists between the ages of 12 and 19. Additionally, in the latter part of the 20th century, the works of anthropologists, such as Arnold van Gennup and Margaret Mead, have added to the debate over the elements of a coming-of-age narrative. Through their research in rites of passage and social development and structure, the works of anthropologists such as van Gennup and Mead allow scholars to examine the sociocultural implications of these narratives. It is the sociocultural implications that cause the most debate among scholars. Indeed, since a coming-of-age narrative is dependent on a quest for an adult identity, this narrative is closely linked to other areas of identity development, such as gender, race, social class, and national identity (see nationalism).

As Kenneth Millard argues, a recurring element of the coming-of-age narrative is the way in which a protagonist's adult identity is framed by historical events and points of origin and conditioned by social obligations and expectations. Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn serves as an example of this theory. In the novel, a young Huck accompanies Jim, a runaway slave, on a trip down the Mississippi River to reach the free North. The novel's climax occurs when Jim is caught by slave catchers, and Huck must make a decision between informing Miss Watson, Jim's owner, about Jim's location or attempting to free Jim from his bondage. In his decision, Huck must balance the social obligation of returning "property" to its rightful owner and his own conscience-during his trip, Huck has come to see Jim not as a piece of property but as a human. Ironically, Huck makes the decision to "go to hell" by following his conscience, attempting to free Jim from his captivity.

Twain's novel, of course, was published after the institution of slavery was abolished, but it serves as a historical point of reference, as Finn would have grown up in pre-Civil War America. Huck Finn's adult identity is framed within these racist confines; although African Americans were free, they still were considered as inferior to whites. Thus, the socially acceptable and expected thing for Huck to do would be to turn Jim in to Miss Watson, and it is the deviation from this expectation that Huck believes will condemn his soul. The Huck Finn example also serves as a way to highlight three additional features of the comingof- age narrative. One of these features is the loss of childhood innocence. In Twain's novel, although Huck naïvely misunderstands the consequences of his decision, his naïveté speaks volumes to readers. The consequence of his decision marks his transition from childhood to adulthood. Prior to the novel's climax, Huck has been witness to the darker side of the adult world-from his father's racist diatribe about the voting rights of recently freed slaves to a long and bloody family feud to the con artistry of the Duke and Dauphin. Unbeknownst to Huck-but abundantly clear to the novel's readers- is the influence that these events have on his decision to attempt to free Jim-the first adult decision of his life. Because of his experiences and this decision, Huck realizes that he may be outcast from his society, as he has deviated from its expected adult norms, and he will no longer be able to go back to live his previous lifestyle of barefooted, pipesmoking truancy.

This deviation from expected norms highlights another feature of the coming-of-age narrative: the realization of social expectations and norms. To once again use the Huck Finn example, Huck fully realizes the implications of his decision: He considers himself damned and acknowledges that he will be unable to fully participate in the adult world because of this violation. As such, he is able to recognize the social, adult world now laid out before him. While this realization further distances Huck from his childhood innocence, it also presents him with a choice: Either accept this adult world and conform to its norms and standards or decide on self-exile. Huckleberry Finn, of course, chooses the latter, as he decides to light out for the territories of the American West rather than conform to the rigid social obligations demanded by pre-Civil War rural Missouri. Huck's choice to light out for the territories highlights a third feature of the coming-of-age narrative. His decision to leave is rooted in another choice: to accept a socially constructed identity, or to construct a personal sense of identity for oneself. While this idea is one of the oldest and most common themes of literature, when examined through the lens of a coming-of-age narrative, it takes on additional weight. Not all coming-of-age protagonists are as fortunate as Huck Finn, though.

For some, their gender, race, and class serve as impediments to a sense of freedom. As the feminist scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes, most 19th-century female protagonists have two options presented before them when coming of age: marriage, the socially acceptable option for young women; or death, the end result for those young women who deviate from socially expected norms. Indeed, constraining one's identity to social norms and expectations is the choice for one of 19th-century America's most wellknown female protagonists, Jo March. In Alcott's Little Women, the creative and headstrong Jo winds up married by the novel's end. Race and class also serve as factors in these narratives. The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) comes to realize his situation very early on in the novel. After the narrator, a promising young African-American student, agrees to show a white benefactor the poor living conditions of sharecroppers living around the narrator's college, he is expelled from school and is forced to decide between accepting society's roles for an African-American man or developing his own identity. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild features the real-life story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate from a well-to-do East Coast family. When McCandless realizes the limitations of the options set before him-continued graduate studies, a position in a well-paying job in the business world-he renounces his previous materialistic life and sets off on the roads of America in an attempt to discover who he truly is. National character is also an important factor in coming-of-age narratives. Some preeminent American literature scholars, such as Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and R. W. B Lewis, have argued that the coming-of-age narrative is one of the most dominant narratives in American literature. For these scholars, a sense of history, or lack thereof, is key to their view of the importance of the coming-of-age narrative in American literature. At the heart of this contention is the argument that the American national identity shares several key characteristics with the coming-of-age narrative. The first of these characteristics is Lewis's argument that the American national character is primarily based on renewal and innocence. His theory of the American Adam states that American culture is constantly going back to beginnings and new starts, an attempt to revert to a lost childhood or return to a forgotten Eden. This theory, according to Lewis, is at the center of most American literature-a constant return to youth, with an emphasis on the experiences, revelations, and trials inherent in a coming-of-age narrative.

Thus, in a sense, the focus on coming of age in American literature and in the national character can be argued as an unwillingness to acknowledge history: All events are subject to change and to reinterpretation, a kind of automatic "redo" where each generation must begin its task of the coming of age process. Like Lewis, Ihab Hassan sees the idea of innocence as a conscious denial of American history, but he contends that the denial is also firmly rooted in political ideology. The focus on a wide-eyed, naive innocence of each generation defining itself is not just a literary trope for Hassan; rather, it is deeply enmeshed in an ideology that offers no roots, no genealogies, and no sense of a permanent and static identity. For Leslie Fiedler, this focus on coming-ofage narratives underscores the preoccupation with youth found in American culture. Fiedler argues that this desire to return to a childlike, Edenic state is predicated on the idea that the American national character is constantly fluid and dynamic, youthful and energetic. To allow the national character to grow static and permanent would force American culture to grow old, and perhaps grow up. The coming-of-age narrative is quite simple to define; however, the implications of that definition are numerous and wide-ranging. What began as a way to fictionalize how a child became an adult became complicated throughout the centuries by other issues. Race, class, and gender all play a pivotal role in how a youth is expected to grow into an adult in various societies. Furthermore, the acceptance or rejection of social obligations and duties is another factor in how teens grow into adults. All of these factors expand a relatively benign textbook definition into a wide-ranging, thoroughly complex theme.

See also Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me, Ultima; Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio; Austen, Jane: Emm a; Chopin, Kate: Awakening, The; Crane, Stephen: Red Badge of Courage, The; Kincaid, Jamaica: Annie John; Knowles, John: Separate Peace, A; Marshall, Paul Brown Girl, Brownstone; McCarthy, Cormac: All the Pretty Horses; McCullers, Carson: Member of the Wedding, The; Shakespeare, William: Henry IV, Part I; Steinbeck, John: Red Pony, The; Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Hobbit, The; Updike, John: "A & P."

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Coming Of Age Most scholars agree on a standard definition of the coming-of-age narrative: the coming-of-age narrative: Simply put, it follows the development of a child or adolescent into adulthood. The roots of this narrative theme can be traced back to the bildungsroman, or "formation novel."

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A review from a movie critic summarizing may points film focused on. expressing his view on what the film did good

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Boyhood Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert

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Richard Linklater's drama about a young boy growing into manhood is also a film about the fleeting nature of existence.

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It’s Okay If You Didn’t Like ‘Boyhood’, And Here Are Many Reasons Why

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It’s Okay If You Didn’t Like ‘Boyhood’, And Here Are Many Reasons Why

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A story with dead ends and unfinished feeling. Reality is movies factor focused on feeling real. Another coming of age story.

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If you saw it, you probably loved it, too. I mean, you'd have to be crazy not to, given how all kinds of important people have already said it's excellent. I'll get into my theories as to why it's so beloved later in this review (hint: 12 years!). What's considerably more difficult to understand is why it's being so effusively regarded as "one of the most extraordinary movies of...the 21st Century so far" (The New York Times' A.O. Scott wrote that).

Frankly, since watching it, I've felt like a crazy person, because the movie I watched ranged from being mediocre to unintentionally schlocky. For some time now, I've been struggling to understand why I'm so out of the loop on this one. It's not because I don't like experimental or independent films or even Richard Linklater for that matter, who's an otherwise solid filmmaker. Cutting to the chase, I didn't like Boyhood because it wasted my time with mostly unlikable characters, trivial content, occasional bad performances, predictable events, narrative dead-ends, generally bad storytelling and a whole lot of nothing.

Too bad Arquette, Hawke and the ambitious production timeline were squandered on this lazy-disguised-as-profound story. The short list of positive elements in Boyhood might otherwise have elevated its status to being just an average film with a noteworthy making-of, yet somehow the noteworthy production timeline has rocket-boostered the movie to legendary status in spite of all the problems -- problems that would've sunk any other project but which appear to be irrelevant in this case.

To that end, great dramatic movies heighten reality in order to expose new or deeper truths and insights through challenges that are played out during a series of interwoven events. Another Oscar-winning movie with a "real" family story, Robert Redford's Ordinary People, draws us into an upper-middle class family coping with the death of a child, a suicide attempt by another child, and learning how to emotionally unpack each tragedy while re-learning to live with each other or to split further apart. Decisions have consequences, and those consequences provide entertaining footholds for the audience as we take this journey with the characters. Now imagine Ordinary People without any of the dramatic tension, no reaction to Timothy Hutton's attempted suicide, with one unrelated scene after another strung together without any real narrative progression or denouement in which the story elements are drawn together. That's how Boyhood plays out. It passes off, no pun intended, an ordinary series of disconnected events that lead nowhere and provide very few deeper truths, other than, generously speaking, an occasional chunk of Forrest Gump philosophy ("You don't need bumpers. Life doesn't give you bumpers, Lieutenant Dan." I added the Lieutenant Dan part.)

We're supposed to accept this for the sake of the film's real life theme.

There's a storytelling format for capturing real life known as "documentaries." The key ingredient that makes documentaries compelling, even ones that don't have a strong narrative thread or particularly gripping events, is this: they're actually real with real people and real events (in most cases). The justifiably acclaimed Up series of documentaries, for example, follows the lives of a group of people, captured every seven years and, like Boyhood, we watch the characters grow up and grow old, and we witness how their actual lives have changed. Unlike Boyhood, this is truly real and therefore utterly fascinating. Boyhood isn't any more real than a reenactment of a documentary, therefore the realness alone doesn't carry it. Without actual realness to latch onto, there needs to be a well-told story in its place with characters who do something more than just exist.

But fine, Boyhood attempted to show us some of the more mundane "real" moments in life, with very few curve-balls or conflicts that we've never seen before. For the sake of argument let's grant the movie some credit for giving us scenes that usually get cut out of movies. Even if we grant it that, it still failed to connect each moment in a logical or cohesive way.

To paraphrase Trey Parker, Boyhood was a series of "and thens." And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened -- as opposed to "this happened which led to something else which then motivated the protagonist to become this other thing." This is what's called drama. This is what nearly all great stories possess. Deleting this from the screenplay is not unlike deciding to deliberately record sound that's over-modulated, or to purposefully under-exposing the film so it's really, really hard to see. It's a massive blunder, intentional or not. Take out any one scene from Ordinary People (or Terms of Endearment, or Kramer vs. Kramer, or American Beauty, or The Godfather Part II, each of which are Oscar winning, family-centric films), and the narrative thread irreparably snaps. Take out any scene in Boyhood and the movie keeps rolling along because there really isn't a narrative. That's not a good thing, no matter how much we deceive ourselves into thinking it's artistic or profound.

Let's talk about Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, another coming-of-age story.

Malick was highly experimental with his storytelling and absolutely self-indulgent in places, but throughout his nonlinear narrative, as well as the photographic splendor and existentialism, Malick gave us a solid protagonist with clear aspirations and conflicts to resolve. Things occur that advance the protagonist through these choices and toward a greater understanding of life. Scenes pay off, and there are consequences. Where Boyhood is ordinary and tedious, The Tree of Life is profound in both its ambition and its storytelling. Even if you despised it because you thought it was overly indulgent or just too weird, as a story you have to admit that it satisfies the responsibilities of a good dramatic narrative on top of being unlike anything you've seen before. Every frame has a justifiable reason for being in The Tree of Life. Not so with Boyhood.

There's a scene in which Patricia Arquette, as Mason's mother Olivia, scolds Mason's older sister for forgetting to pick up Mason from school. That's a scene. Nothing else happens. Nothing led up to it. Nothing happens as a consequence of it. Normally, in good storytelling, a scene like this might lead to something bad or interesting happening as the result of the sister's irresponsibility, or it might offer some insight into the relationship between Mason and his older sister. But this scene simply wasted our time, failing to have a purpose or consequence. If we take this scene out of the movie, what will we miss? Nothing. Will we be able to follow the rest of the movie? Yes.

There's another similarly disposable scene when Mason is in junior high school. He's hanging out with some older teens inside a, I don't know, a house under construction? Is this Mason's house? Did they break into someone else's house? We're never provided any background on why they're in this house, or even given an establishing shot of the house's exterior. So, the boys are drinking beer and saying things like "true 'dat" while throwing a circular-saw blade into a sheet of drywall. One of the older kids, played by Nick Krause ( The Descendants, TV's Parenthood), teases a smaller kid because the smaller kid refuses to have a beer. Unlike other protagonists, Mason doesn't come to the kid's defense or join in with the hectoring, and instead just sits there quietly. Another older kid grabs a wooden board and forces the smaller kid to hold it up so the older kid can break it with his fist, karate style. The smaller kid holds up the board and the older kid breaks it clean in half. And... scene. Again, nothing else happens. This doesn't lead us to the next scene or anywhere else in the movie for that matter. We learn nothing about Mason either, other than it's part of his life. None of the kids are injured with the saw blade or by punching the boards, which made me wonder why they're doing what they're doing or why I'm even watching this scene. Yet again, if I had taken a bathroom break during this scene, I wouldn't have missed a damn thing.

Most of the movie is filled with unnecessary scenes like that one. Other than to observe the aging process, we only need to watch about one-third of the movie in order to see what's moderately necessary: the beginning, a couple of sequences with Ethan Hawke, the Evil Drunken Stepdad sequence, perhaps Mason's 16th birthday and Mason leaving for college (Arquette's Oscar scene).

The trailer also showed us glimpses of the precious few good shots -- shots that are scattered throughout scenes as relevant as:

--Kids playing video games
--More kids playing video games
--Mason going to a new school
--Mason cutting out a map of Texas
--Mason walking home from school
--A random weirdo awkwardly bouncing a basketball (yes, that's a scene)
--Other video games
--The kids going to a Harry Potter movie
--The kids meeting a guy who hates Obama
--Mason talking about his favorite authors
--Ethan Hawke singing a song
--A teacher telling Mason to work harder (some of the worst acting in the film)

Don't ask me what happens as the result of those scenes, because the answer is nothing. Even Linklater himself admitted that "nothing much" happens in Boyhood.

Steve Martin's rant from Planes, Trains and Automobiles comes to mind:

You know, not everything is an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You're a miracle! Your stories have none of that. They're not even amusing accidentally! "Honey, I'd like you to meet Del Griffith, he's got some amusing anecdotes for you. Oh and here's a gun so you can blow your brains out. You'll thank me for it." [...] And by the way, you know, when you're telling these little stories? Here's a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!

It felt like I was trapped on an airplane next to a blowhard who volunteers his childhood story for three hours, and while there's some off-the-shelf tragedy and a handful of amusing anecdotes in there, none of it has a point worthy of the time and exhaustion, mainly because it's a stranger and I'm not given any reason to like him, other than he's talking my ear off.

It's just 12 years of an ordinary kid's life, concluding with a twist on the "seize the day" cliche. I'm not making that last thing up, by the way. At the end of the movie, Mason's girlfriend tells him, "Everyone's always saying seize the moment. I don't know, I'm kind of thinking, you know, like the moment seizes us." If the structure of that trite maxim sounds familiar, you might've seen the old Ben Stiller superhero comedy Mystery Men in which "The Sphinx" character constantly recites words of wisdom, but he only just reverses the second part of the maxim. For example, "He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions;" "When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts;" and, "When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you."

Yes, "one of the most extraordinary movies of...the 21st Century so far."

Believe it or not, the myriad of dead-end, disposable scenes wasn't nearly as offensive as the two painfully cliched Evil Drunken Stepdad stories.

Spoiler alert: there's nothing new or interesting here either. And Linklater shoehorns not one but two of them into movie. Early in the film, Arquette's Olivia pursues her master's degree and is creepily asked on date by one of her professors, an older man named Bill Welbrock, played by Marco Perella ( A Scanner Darkly, Walker: Texas Ranger). CUT TO: Suddenly, Olivia and Bill have returned from their honeymoon in Paris. We discover that Gregarious Professor Bill is actually a raging alcoholic and an asshole, first seen drinking large Solo cups of vodka and Sprite, then graduating to single-malt. And he lapsed into all of the predictable Evil Drunken Stepdad things.

The entire Bill story is nothing more than a Lifetime movie-of-the-week in its best moments, and an old ABC After School Special during its worst. Evil Drunken Stepdad Bill yells at the stepkids; Evil Drunken Stepdad Bill gets drunk and breaks some kitchenware; Evil Drunken Stepdad Bill abuses Olivia and tells the kids she's "just being dramatic;" Evil Drunken Stepdad Bill forces stepson Mason to cut his hair short; and then Evil Drunken Stepdad Bill insists that Olivia isn't allowed to leave him. We've seen the Evil Drunken Stepdad trope played out like this over and over again in movie after movie (for better-told Evil Drunken Stepdad stories, see Sling Blade, This Boy's Life, Radio Flyer, Pan's Labyrinth, Hamlet, etc, etc).

Indeed, we're forced to see it twice in Boyhood because Olivia eventually remarries, this time to an Iraq War veteran who starts out nice and, shocker, turns into another Evil Drunken Stepdad. In one scene, teenage Mason arrives home to find Evil Drunken Stepdad #2 sitting on the front porch with a stack of empty beer cans -- a scene that was more entertaining and better performed when the Evil Drunken Stepdad was Dwight Yoakam in Sling Blade. Of course, Evil Drunken Stepdad #2 calls Mason a fag and hassles him about the usual Evil Drunken Stepdad things. And... scene.

Why do we root for characters in a movie? Because they have clear goals and challenges. They have intentions and subsequent obstacles in their lives, which they must overcome in service of satisfying those intentions. Some characters achieve it, others don't. That's drama. Riggan Thomson in Birdman seeks to become a respectable actor and shed his reputation for playing a comic-book superhero, but he has to overcome the production of a fiasco Broadway show, a nasty theater critic, his co-star and his own self-doubt personified in the voice of Birdman. Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs wants to succeed as an FBI agent, capture Buffalo Bill and to honor her father's spirit, but has to circumnavigate two serial killers and occasional sexism to get there. Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II seeks to preserve both his actual family and his crime family and faces obstacles from without and within, then fails magnificently, and this makes his story both interesting and cinematic.

What are Mason's intentions? Who is this kid and, more importantly, why am I expected to care about his story for three hours of my life? I have no idea. See if you can explain Mason's role in the movie without mentioning "12 years" or "growing up." It's not easy, and that's not something we should applaud, even in our post-romantic, increasingly ironic society. Perhaps the real achievement of Boyhood is that Linklater was able to successfully trick his audience into applauding a movie with a pointless lead character wandering through a cringe-worthy series of scenes.

Arguably Linklater's biggest mistake was focusing on Mason as the protagonist. Actually, I should stop using that word to describe Mason because it implies the inclusion of specific pieces of the movie puzzle that aren't satisfied by Boyhood. There's a watchable movie in there somewhere about the relationship between Arquette and Hawke, and their struggles to raise a broken family. Instead we're given Mason who starts out well enough and grows up to become a typical, Millennial emo kid. Maybe that should've been the title of the movie: The Making of a Typical Millennial. I hasten to note that I'm not blaming Ellar Coltrane for all this. It'd be like blaming poor Hayden Christensen for Attack of the Clones.

But every time Mason was the focus of a scene, which was most of the movie, I was far less interested than when Arquette or Hawke stepped up. When the parents were featured in a scene, it felt like the makings of a real movie. Maybe it's because I'm roughly the same age as Hawke and Arquette, or maybe it's simply because these characters actually had intentions and obstacles. These crucial storytelling rules endowed the Dad and Mom with qualities that made them the most interesting aspects of an otherwise dull and pointless movie. Hawke and Arquette do more than grow incrementally older. They change as people and as parents. They're confronted by obstacles, and out of everyone in this movie we root for them. It's just a shame that they're hardly on screen and that they're given such stale material to work with.

Did I mention Mason has an older sister? I think I did. Yeah, she doesn't do anything in the movie except to forget to pick Mason up from school.

"One of the most extraordinary movies of...the 21st Century so far." One of the most overrated, that's for sure.

To be clear: the movie didn't take a full 12 years to make. It was filmed in short bursts throughout 12 years. In that time, Linklater also made School of Rock, Before Sunset, Bad News Bears, Fast Food Nation, A Scanner Darkly, Me and Orson Welles, Bernie and Before Midnight. So, let's not get too carried away. But I must confess, it's really cool to see the characters age, and Linklater does it without corny text signifying the years, so we pick up on the advancement of time by way of hairstyles and pop-culture references. No one can deny that it's fascinating to observe, and this is one reason why so many people seem to dig it -- the time-lapse effect. But in and of itself, watching actors get older isn't a movie. We watched the little fat kid on Three and a Half Men grow up for ten years, and that awful show doesn't deserve anything, especially our time or attention.

As a thought experiment, strip the "12 years" thing from the equation. Imagine it wasn't a factor in the making of the movie. Let's say Boyhood was made during a 12 month span, but still fictitiously covered 12 years, with different actors playing Mason as he grows up. Would the movie still be as widely acclaimed? I've always contended that a movie is only as good as its story, and it should hold up without any other contrivances. For example, you could probably strip away the computer animation from Brad Bird's The Incredibles and remake it using crudely drawn 2D animation and it'd still be a good movie. But if we take out the 12 year production schedule, is Boyhood still the award-nominated, universally loved movie we know now? I doubt it.

What did Boyhood give us that we can't get by following a random teenager's Facebook timeline? A teenager who's not a friend or a relative. A total stranger. Disconnected, trivial moments.

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BobCesca.com Blog with special thanks to K. Porter.

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It's Okay If You Didn't Like 'Boyhood', And Here Are Many Reasons Why

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If you saw it, you probably loved it, too. I mean, you'd have to be crazy not to, given how all kinds of important people have already said it's excellent. I'll get into my theories as to why it's so beloved later in this review (hint: 12 years!).

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From Baby Fat to Stubble: Growing Up in Real TimeVideo

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From Baby Fat to Stubble: Growing Up in Real TimeVideo

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Intro with a two minute clip and uses more short clips along the way. Was shot over 12 consecutive years. Shows many different characters and time passing. Realism and raw moments.

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Richard Linklater discusses a sequence from his drama "Boyhood," with Ellar Coltrane and Ethan Hawke. Credit Credit Matt Lankes/IFC Films

The first shot in "Boyhood," Richard Linklater's tender, profound film, is of a cloudy sky. The second is of a boy staring up at that sky, one arm bent under his head, the other flung out straight on the ground. He's a pretty child with calm eyes, a snub nose and a full mouth. It's a face that you get to know and love because, even as this child is watching the world, you're watching him grow. From scene to scene, you see the curve of his jaw change, notice his thickening brows and witness his slender arms opening to embrace the world and its clear and darkening skies.

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Ellar Coltrane as a youngster in "Boyhood," filmed over 12 consecutive years by the director Richard Linklater. Credit Deana Newcomb/Ifc Films

Filmed over 12 consecutive years, "Boyhood" centers on Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who's 6 when the story opens and 18 when it ends. In between, he goes to school; argues with his sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter); and watches his mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), struggle with work and men while paying the bills, moving from home to home and earning several degrees. Every so often, her ex-husband, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), roars into the children's lives, initially in a 1968 GTO. It isn't a dad car (although it does belong to one: Mr. Linklater). It is, rather, the same model of masculine cool that rumbles through "Two-Lane Blacktop," one of Mr. Linklater's favorite movies, and which he's slipped into films like "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused."

The Times critic Manohla Dargis reviews "Boyhood." Credit Credit Matt Lankes/IFC Films

The GTO is a minor authorial marker, and probably helped keep costs down in this relatively inexpensive production. (The movie was heroically bankrolled from the start by its distributor, Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films.) More practically, it works as an expressive emblem to go along with Mason Sr.'s absences, his careless parenting, on-and-off facial hair and earnest bohemian rhapsodies. Unforgiving observers may write Mason Sr. off as a deadbeat, but, like Olivia, who sometimes lobs expletives at her unfazed children, he's deeply loving. These aren't movie parents with formulaic arcs and storybook solutions, but characters whose honest, raw hurt and moments of casual grace carry the shock of the real. These are people you know, maybe people like you.

Ellar Coltrane at age 18 in "Boyhood." Credit IFC Films, via Associated Press

The realism is jolting, and so brilliantly realized and understated that it would be easy to overlook. In "Boyhood," Mr. Linklater's inspired idea of showing the very thing that most movies either ignore or awkwardly elide - the passage of time - is its impressive, headline-making conceit. Starting in 2002, he gathered his four lead actors each year for a three- to four-day shoot, working on the script as they went along. (The consummate anti-slacker, Mr. Linklater also shot during that period a clutch of shorts and features, including "Before Sunset," the second in a trilogy of films with Mr. Hawke; a fictional adaptation of " Fast Food Nation"; and a weirdly touching comedy about a murderer, " Bernie.")

Ethan Hawke and Mr. Coltrane in "Boyhood." Credit Matt Lankes/IFC Films

What emerged from those dozen years is a series of meticulously textured and structured scenes set to the rhythm of life. The structure is crucial. Mr. Linklater has long experimented with nontraditional narratives, from the baton-relay form of "Slacker," in which he leaves one character to follow the next, to the peripatetic ramblings of his "Before" trilogy. His films are sometimes mischaracterized as having no plot, perhaps because they may seem so, when compared with aggressively incident-jammed mainstream movies. One of the fascinating things about "Boyhood" is that a lot happens - there are parties and fights, laughter and tears - but all these events take place in a distinctly quotidian register and without the usual filmmaking prodding and cues.

Mr. Coltrane as Mason at age 9. Credit Matt Lankes/IFC Films

Instead, the movie ebbs and flows from year to year, interspersed with temporal signposts like a Britney Spears song or a Nintendo Wii. One minute, Mason is looking quizzically at Olivia while she chats with a professor, Bill (Marco Perella); the next, he's with his sister and Bill's children, Mindy (Jamie Howard) and Randy (Andrew Villarreal), in the backyard the two families now share as one. Some of the transitions are imperceptible, especially when Mason is younger, and all are meaningful. Midway through, when he strips off his shirt to go swimming with his father and then asks about girls, you see the last traces of baby fat and true childhood. By the next section, Mason has shot up and slimmed down, and is now talking to girls, not just about them.

Patricia Arquette, with Mr. Coltrane, in "Boyhood." Credit Matt Lankes/IFC Films

For a filmmaker known for the loquaciousness of his characters, Mr. Linklater has an almost un-American rejection of overexplanation. When you first meet Mason at 6, gazing at the sky while lying on a patch of grass, he looks a touch beatific. He also looks like a little kid staring into space. Is he happy, sad or bored? And when he gazes at a dead bird, what does he think?; how does he feel? Mr. Linklater doesn't say. Instead, he fills the frame with a close-up of Mason's face, letting the silence and weight of death linger. Mr. Linklater's characters can talk a blue streak, but rarely in his work, and never in "Boyhood," do you hear the hum of his narrative design under their words.

The film's visual style is precise, unassuming to the point of seeming invisibility and in the service of the characters, with compositions that remain unfussy and uncluttered, even when the rooms are busy. When Mr. Linklater films a landscape, your eye locks not on the camerawork but on the beauty of these spaces and the people in them - the enveloping greenness of the neighborhood in which Mason first rides a bike, for instance, and the tranquillity of the watering hole that, years later, he swims in with his dad. Mr. Linklater is especially fond of showing two people walking and talking, and you learn as much about the characters' relationships from how they inhabit space - his two-shots speak volumes - as from what they say. He's a poet-geometrician of intimacy.

It's almost surprising that no one seems to have made a movie like "Boyhood" before. Its closest counterpart is probably the "7 Up" series, Michael Apted's multipart documentary project that since 1964 has dropped in every seven years on the same, more or less, British women and men, beginning when they were 7. Watching seemingly carefree children thrive and fail as they age - or, more prosaically, turn into dreary, respectable citizens - can be like a knife in your heart. It can also be somewhat eerie, simply because the series compresses decades of a human life into scenes that are, by turns, seamless and jagged - an eeriness that "Boyhood" shares as 12 years of Mason's life slips by in 165 startlingly fast minutes. We're here today, gone tomorrow.

Radical in its conceit, familiar in its everyday details, "Boyhood" exists at the juncture of classical cinema and the modern art film without being slavishly indebted to either tradition. It's a model of cinematic realism, and its pleasures are obvious yet mysterious. Even after seeing the film three times, I haven't fully figured out why it has maintained such a hold on me, and why I'm eager to see it again. There are many reasons to love movies, from the stories they tell, to the beautiful characters who live and die for us. And yet the story in "Boyhood" is blissfully simple: A child grows up. This, along with the modesty of its physical production - its humble rooms, quiet moments, ordinary lives - can obscure Mr. Linklater's ambitions and the greatness of his achievement.

It's no surprise that watching actors naturally age on camera without latex and digital effects makes for mesmerizing viewing. And at first it may be hard to notice much more than the creases etching Mr. Hawke's face, the sexy swells of Ms. Arquette's belly and Mr. Coltrane's growth spurts. You may see your own face in those faces, your children's, too. This kind of identification is familiar, as is the idea that movies preserve time. André Bazin wrote that art emerged from our desire to counter the passage of time and the inevitable decay it brings. But in "Boyhood," Mr. Linklater's masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn't fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.
"Boyhood" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains some familiar expletives and scenes of domestic violence.

Director

Richard Linklater

Stars

Ellar Coltrane , Patricia Arquette , Ethan Hawke , Elijah Smith , Lorelei Linklater

Movie data powered by IMDb.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Baby Fat to Stubble: Growing Up in Real Time. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Movie Review: Linklater's 'Boyhood' Is a Model of Cinematic Realism

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The first shot in "Boyhood," Richard Linklater's tender, profound film, is of a cloudy sky. The second is of a boy staring up at that sky, one arm bent under his head, the other flung out straight on the ground. He's a pretty child with calm eyes, a snub nose and a full mouth.

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Richard Linklater crafts a wonderful movie in 'Boyhood' - Movie Review

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Richard Linklater crafts a wonderful movie in 'Boyhood' - Movie Review

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The real thing the same actors not a makeup thing. Feels like real life. No big events plenty of small big ones.

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Document View | Access World News | NewsBank

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I sat down at an early screening of "Boyhood" knowing only three things: It was written and directed by Richard Linklater, it starred Patricia Arquette and the running time was just over two and a half hours. I hadn't seen a preview trailer, or a list of who else was in it.

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Film not about boyhood at all. its about nervous insecurities, family dramas, and quotidian travails of a boy. About a boy from first grade to the end of high school.

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The film focuses on Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter), mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) learn, grow, and fight, ignore, and taunt one another, facing life's myriad ups and downs over the course of a dozen years. What makes Boyhood so remarkable, though, is that Linklater actually shot the film in short annual increments across 12 years, so that we witness not just the arc of a story but the actual physical and emotional transformations of the characters-and the actors-as they grow and age. Accordion-like, the film collapses those 12 years into just under three hours. The effect is stunning.

Mason/Ellar slowly transforms from a boy in first grade to a young man who, at age 18, is ready for college. His sister also grows up before our eyes, from a bratty kid bent on harassing her younger brother to a pensive young woman pondering what's next in life. Their mother endures a series of bad partners while trying to build a career and take care of her family. And their father drifts in and out of their lives, a goofy boy in a grown man's body who refuses to acquiesce to adulthood and its responsibilities, until he capitulates two-thirds of the way through the story, trading in his prized GTO for a minivan to appease a new wife and baby.

Mason and Samantha are little kids, then tweens, and then teens, their soft and round young faces becoming more angular and specific, their bodies elongating-Mason develops a slow, lanky insouciance, while Samantha turns into a dark-eyed, petite twentysomething. For Olivia and Mason Sr., the transformation is more subtle, but no less striking as time marks its passage across their faces, creasing their eyes, while the weight of wisdom settles over their hunched shoulders.

Linklater's latest temporal gambit shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Anyone familiar with the director's increasingly sophisticated body of work knows that time is a recurring theme. In films as radically diverse as Tape (01), which unfolds in real time, or Waking Life (01), in which the story's dreamy meandering creates the sense of a continuously unfolding present, Linklater has repeatedly explored the vicissitudes of temporality, and line after line of dialogue in these movies reflects on the subjective experience of time, or questions its philosophical significance, or considers its sly complexity. "Time goes by, and people cry, and everything goes too fast," sings Céline (Julie Delpy) at the start of Before Sunset (04), for example.

Indeed, Linklater comes closest to the feat of Boyhood and its temporal exploration with his Before Sunrise/ Before Sunset/ Before Midnight trilogy, a masterful chronicle of love and marriage similarly shot at intervals, in this case spanning 18 years. The story begins with Before Sunrise (95), when Céline and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet on a train. Jesse convinces Céline to join him in Vienna for the evening before he catches a plane home, and the two spend the next 12 hours together. The film continuously reminds us of time-we're aware of the pair's constraints, and the half-day shared between them feels very much like real time. And this sense of real time is enhanced by several particularly long takes, including a beautiful unbroken six-minute shot on a streetcar as the couple talks. We can feel the present moment unfolding before our eyes.

The story picks up nine years later with Before Sunset, a film that bumps the temporal experimentation up a notch by making the two-hour movie cover a two-hour span. Once again, we experience a sense of urgency due to Jesse's impending departure and the literal reality of the minutes passing. Simultaneously, we also feel the pull of the past, the sense of longing and loss for a relationship that never had time to blossom. These two temporalities merge overtly in the opening shots, as Linklater introduces a series of flashbacks, intercutting imagery of the characters in 1995 and in the present; on a metaphorical level, the images from Before Sunrise imbue Before Sunset with an aura of memory-recollections of a woozy past rich with ardor underscore the urge to rekindle old yearnings.

With the newest film, we lurch forward another nine years, into a marriage and a sense of intimacy fraught with tension, bitterness, and the weight of time spent together. Before Midnight (13) is set in Greece as Jesse and Céline, along with their twin daughters, try in vain to enjoy a vacation together. If the previous two films delight in their ability to conjure the delicious pleasures of early romance and erotic possibility, Before Midnight burns with its unerring portrait of lovers who feel like they have exhausted all the possibilities and are thus stuck not with the unknown but the known. They comprehend all too well each other's irritating foibles, disappointing flaws, and pettiness. Céline's self-righteousness is grating, and Jesse's immaturity-after all these years-is infuriating. Bickering has replaced flirtation; disdain has replaced desire; and the way forward requires a new reckoning with intimacy. The temporal experimentation in this film is less overt than in the previous two films in the trilogy-the film is structured as a series of vignettes. Each segment, however, boasts a vivid sense of the present tense thanks in part to the use of long takes once again.

Overall, the brilliance of the trilogy lies in its beautiful demonstration of how time unfurls, not necessarily forward in an easy and smooth progression, but in fits and starts, in moments of searing intensity surrounded by years of relentless longing and frustration. Time opens up into a languorous sprawl, which might concentrate in one moment, then clip along in a blur of months and even years.

The trilogy achieves something else quite remarkable: it charts Linklater's two-decade maturation, and that of a generation that grew up alongside him. And it's this sense of maturation that infuses Boyhood, catapulting it beyond a typical indie-film narrative to something far more ambitious in scope.

B oyhood begins in black with just the sound of a guitar strumming. It's the opening riff of Coldplay's "Yellow." Then we see a blue sky dotted with puffy clouds, and as the lyrics begin-"Look at the stars, see how they shine for you"-the film reveals a close-up of a boy's face (one that recalls Linklater's own boyish looks). It's Mason, and he's lying on the grass, his pensive eyes gazing upward, and in both his dreamy countenance and his sense of wonder, we're invited to consider the passage of time through his perspective, and therefore with interest, curiosity, even serenity. The film's point of view will embody these qualities throughout. A minute later we meet Mason's mother, Olivia, and a few minutes after that, the boy is riding a bike, then spray-painting graffiti, watching TV, bowling with his dad. There's a violent stepdad, baseball games, camping trips, visits with grandparents, the prom, and high-school graduation. There are quiet conversations, brooding accusations, and surprising revelations. We move from age 7 to 8 to 9, and then suddenly at some point-oh my God!-Mason is a sulky teenager with long stringy hair and pouty lips. One event rolls into another, time unfolds, and, as in so many of Linklater's films, there's no traditional narrative structure to force conflict, no three acts to dictate development. Instead, a series of non-hierarchical situations take place, or perhaps more accurately in this case, they take time.

Hawke has described Boyhood as an example of "human time-lapse photography," and in so doing, he identifies the film's essential feat: it returns cinema to its original mandate, to reflect reality as it occurs in time in a sequence of images. This is an important point. The displacement of celluloid images by digital images has been a consistent source of cultural anxiety for more than a decade now, as has the concomitant loss of trust in the veracity of images. Distrust of the digital is wrapped up in our larger ambivalence about technological progress, and our conviction that the modern condition of living in a state of distraction is directly tied to the dizzying array of new devices.

Linklater, however, renews our expectation of cinema as a realm of wonder-but not by advancing its techniques or reveling in its increasing capacity to reshape reality in its portrayals. Just as the goal of time-lapse photography is to present normally imperceptible phenomena for scrutiny-flowers blossoming, clouds tumbling across the sky, and so on-he finds a way to give us the lives and bodies of his characters, who grow and change against the backdrop of the world and its events.

Boyhood allows us to move back and forth between the figure and ground of story and history, between fictional characters and our own world, and in the process we witness the passage of time for a sustained and unparalleled duration.

We live in an era that celebrates the self-regarding glimpse (selfies), that has found some strange pleasure in the repetition of seven-second video loops (Vines), and that has even engineered something as ineffably ephemeral as the Snapchat image that vanishes after 10 seconds. Time as it's represented in contemporary image culture is instantaneous, fleeting, and quickly forgotten. Looking at our culture more broadly, we constantly fret about the accelerating pace of contemporary life and about the future, which used to sprawl in front of us across a vast horizon and now looms all too close. Even glaciers are moving faster, and events that were previously calculated to take place in 500 years are now supposed to happen in 50. Time is no longer thought of in terms of progress or a contemplative unfurling of placid duration. Against this backdrop, Linklater proposes a different vector: he invites us to be present-to look at the stars and see how they shine for us.

A year or two before Linklater began shooting Boyhood, author, economist, and "technology thinker" W. Brian Arthur argued that we need to adopt a new kind of knowing to align with a technology-based economy. In a world characterized by rapid change and technological development, it is no longer enough to rely on previous experience or old frameworks for understanding and knowledge. While previous eras emphasized order, determinacy, and stasis, our current era emphasizes, in Arthur's words, contingency, indeterminacy, sense-making, and openness to change. In the 2005 book Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, Arthur described a new way of knowing in this context, explaining: "You need to 'feel out' what to do. You hang back, you observe. You're more like a surfer or a really good race-car driver. You don't act out of deduction, you act out of an inner feel, making sense as you go. You're not even thinking. You're at one with the situation."

In a sense, this way of knowing is what Linklater represents in Boyhood. We're invited to hang back and observe rather than rely on conventional story frameworks. We're asked to feel and empathize with Mason and the other characters rather than enjoy the usual roller-coaster ride of dramatic conflict. We're asked to be open to indeterminacy and change. Can we accept the film's invitation to be at one with the events on screen?

A new era requires a new sense of time, and dozens of artists, especially media artists, have been engaging with time as a topic-from Douglas Gordon's iconic 1993 video installation 24 Hour Psycho, which slows Alfred Hitchcock's 104-minute film down to last 1,440 minutes, to Christian Marclay's 2010 The Clock, which excerpts and arranges snippets pegged to certain times culled from the history of cinema to create a 24-hour chronicle. An army of media artists, including Sharon Lockhart, Tacita Dean, Bill Viola, Mark Lewis, and Candice Breitz, to name just a few, participate in similar temporal investigations with films, videos, and installations. Taken together, this work disrupts the easy forward flow of the past rolling into the present toward an oncoming future, in order to explore new configurations. Time is suspended and questioned; it is reconfigured, recombined, reoriented.

Linklater bridges the gap between these more art-oriented projects and contemporary narrative cinema. He offers us a new sense of knowing time by inviting us to be present as it unfurls. His perspective is deftly formulated by Mason, who says with wonder toward the end of Boyhood: "It's as if all of time unfolded so that we could be here." It has, asserts Linklater. It has.

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The film focuses on Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter), mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) learn, grow, and fight, ignore, and taunt one another, facing life's myriad ups and downs over the course of a dozen years.

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Boyhood: A film that’s beautiful or horrific, depending on how you look at it

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Boyhood: A film that’s beautiful or horrific, depending on how you look at it

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There are no boy becomes man moments. No super big moments only graduating from high school. The real world is not magic. realism big key

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Life is just as spectacular as it is in the movies, but only very occasionally, and then mostly in hindsight. That's enough to make the rest of it worth living, and it's enough to inspire a body of work, but the long process of waiting for meaning to accumulate rarely makes for exciting drama. The work of American filmmaker Richard Linklater is an exception. The long trail of fleeting moments is a theme in his movies, which somehow collapse the difference between art as it makes life seem and life as it mostly is. Romantic moments come wrapped in the mundane, which his eye redeems.

Boyhood is Linklater's latest and most ambitious project: a movie shot in increments over 12 years, during which a young boy, Mason (played by the eerily gifted Ellar Coltrane), becomes a young adult. We also chart the growth of his older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, Richard's daughter), and his parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette), who separate before the movie begins: Hawke, the "Fun Dad," slowly becomes responsible, while Arquette goes back to school and grapples with single motherhood.

The movie is an experience of the life cycle in under three hours, and its concept is its story: The project is remarkable, but the plot isn't meant to be. Even when important things happen, time moves on at a steady side scroll, as it does in life. Boyhood is as moving as you've heard it is. It's also horrific, depending on how you look at it, because the life cycle is all there is, as far as we know, and it derives meaning only from itself. Considering this stirs up either a sense of grace or desperation. In one of the film's most affecting scenes, Arquette breaks down as she watches her son pack for college. "I just thought there would be more," she says.

In an earlier scene, Mason asks his father whether there's any real magic in the world. Hawke hedges, making a case for the magic of the non-magical, before conceding that no, technically the world contains no elves. Watching Mason grow up, watching Coltrane grow up, means reliving certain foundational disappointments, and relearning lessons you've forgotten or never quite internalized. (I still haven't wrapped my head around the fact that the adult world isn't static - it feels like a sweater that I failed to grow into.)

But the harshest toke is the cumulative effect of the movie itself. You expect life to have texture, moments and pauses as significant as they're made out to be before "real life" starts (another misconception of youth - continuing into adulthood - being that life starts and stops at points other than birth and death). But big moments only blow up in memory; you might have had a hunch at the time, but ideally you didn't, because the more aware you are of how precious the moment is, the more aware you are of its passing forever. Meaningful things don't happen; they haunt.

Boyhood has most in common with Linklater's Before trilogy, which advances in real time: A 23-year-old American, Jesse (Hawke), meets a French woman, Céline (Julie Delpy), on a train, and the two decide spontaneously to spend a night together in Vienna ( Before Sunrise). They reconnect in Paris after nine years, over the course of which Jesse has written a novel about the experience ( Before Sunset); and, nine years after that, deal with the trials of marriage and family life ( Before Midnight). Like Boyhood, it's a risky concept, one that only Linklater could pull off: He's an excellent listener, with a tenderness for life and a retractable ego, capable of stepping back and letting his movies grow around the people in them. As a result, his work is mostly unhampered by his generational biases: Before Sunrise holds up despite the neo-beatnik romanticism characteristic of Generation X but unfashionable now (hungry, middle-class twentysomethings don't backpack through Europe any more; they do internships). Mason's formative experiences are no less familiar for being mediated by the Internet, or less profound for taking place to the sound of Daft Punk.

The Before trilogy succeeds because Linklater deals in universals, and because it feels true: There really is ecstasy in this life, followed by heartache, followed by tedium, which Linklater doesn't ignore. The series is as much about the irritation and banality that form the substance of a relationship as it is the occasional bliss that inspires one. True romance, like anything else, is a cycle rather than a grand narrative: Before Midnight, the final instalment of a great love story, is essentially about a lover's spat, which is ultimately, touchingly, resolved.

Boyhood is similarly low key. There are no splashy boy-becomes-man moments, and in the end, Mason does nothing more incredible than graduate from high school and leave for college. His mother's relationships - particularly one with an abusive, drunken professor - are sometimes harrowing, but the film moves past them apace; his dad starts a new family, but everyone pretty much accepts this and gets along. These don't feel like plot points so much as things that happen in sequence and culminate in a spectacle of living.

Two things make Boyhood difficult to analyze. One is that it's so completely an experience; the second is that, if you think too hard about that experience, it becomes the awful truth: All of everything leads nowhere except back to the beginning. The same problems arise in new guises, the same lessons are learned and forgotten, kids grow up and (in the sequel, maybe) make new kids. To accept this is, of course, grace. The real world isn't magic, but the consolation, as Hawke's character tries to express, is that the mind is elastic, and internal worlds are infinite. There's no point, but the lesson is that we don't really need one.

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Boyhood: A film that's beautiful or horrific, depending on how you look at it

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Life is just as spectacular as it is in the movies, but only very occasionally, and then mostly in hindsight. That's enough to make the rest of it worth living, and it's enough to inspire a body of work, but the long process of waiting for meaning to accumulate rarely makes for exciting drama.