What’s Aged the Best?
The combination of McConaughey and the cast
In the discussion (7)
Approx. transcript time · 00:33:42Read transcript
- Opening nominations are McConaughey, the 70s music, the cars, the cast and the high school hierarchy, with others invited to add their own.
- The limited temporal narrative structure, with everything taking place over one day, never gets old and feels like a full day, recalling how the social part of a school day started after the last class, ran through practice or a game and then seven to ten hours of hanging out; the action is the juice.
- It is hard not to say the cast: McConaughey's first movie, Affleck, a golden generation, plus indelible characters for people who went on to have no careers; even though there was no tape on McConaughey in 1993, like drafting a player with no tape, he reads as a movie star, having done only one Miller Lite commercial.
- Around 1996, with Lone Star and A Time to Kill, McConaughey was pushed as a star on Premier and Vanity Fair covers, and that is when the film's cult-classic status grew because people saw him as Wooderson; in a making-of documentary he recounts being nobody on the Friday and famous, stopped on the street, by the Monday after A Time to Kill opened.
- A Time to Kill is far less remembered than Dazed and Confused, which is a more generationally beloved movie, though it is defended as good; Grisham was the MCU of the era, with real excitement for The Firm and The Client.
- The answer offered is the combination of McConaughey and the cast, with the pleasure of seeing McConaughey at that point of his career.
- Late additions: count how many times Don gets into a car, about 15, since apart from two school scenes he is in a car the whole time; Tim Lincecum looking like an adult Mitch Kramer became a running joke through the 2000s; and the nerds' theory in the car that President Ford's football concussions were affecting the economy now reads as a CTE subplot, which Chevy Chase's portrayal would support.