FanFiltration said:
I was so happy today to find a film that I have been searching for for many many years. Close to 18 years ago, I saw the last hour on T.V., but never knew the name. Every time I would ask people if they knew what it was, they would say "Quest for Fire". That was incredibly frustrating. Well after all this time, someone replied with the film's title to a Google post describing the basic plot as I had remembered it.
Missing Link (1988)
The movie is set in Africa roughly one million years ago, at a time when one species of "man-apes" was being displaced by the ancestors of modern humans.
After experiencing a hallucination brought on by ingesting a hallucinogenic plant (possibly a reference to the stoned ape theory), he realizes the stone ax that he has been carrying after finding it at the site where his tribe was killed is a weapon. When he comes across a human footprint at the ocean shore, he sniffs it and then starts hitting it, wanting revenge against the humans.
Missing Link is an unusual film in that it blends elements of drama, documentary, and avant-garde cinema. There is no dialogue, though there is narration (by Michael Gambon). There is also very little action. Instead, the film is filled with extended, picturesque sequences reminiscent of the style often used in nature documentaries. Perhaps due to its unconventionality, the movie was not a commercial success.
This film remains out of print, and hard to find. A very poor copy is on YouTube. It's mistitled as "Missing Link - 2013 Full Movie HD". It's not from 2013, and it most certainly is not presented in HD. Worth checking out if you are a fellow psychedelic warrior.
8 Magic Mushrooms out of 10
Whatever else the Internet has done, it's certainly made it sometime barely possible to see things which were completely impossible to find once upon a time.
Anyway....
Dazed and Confused- What a difference a decade makes. First saw this on TV almost ten years ago during my own high school years. At the time, I found it a little bit nostalgic, a sort of look at what I was presumably supposed to going through during my own rigorous high school education. Now, quite apart from looking back on what I've missed, I noticed the aching streak of sad melancholia which runs through, a tale of existential emptiness and purgatorial suburban existence which though bound by its setting, is curiously forward-looking too. That's not to say that there isn't lots of humor and stoner jokes, but bubbling underneath is a much darker story, youth viewed with experience, not nostalgic, but melancholic and almost sad and existentially empty. Though there's joy in discovery, there's a darker underpinning of unrest and even sadism in the little small town setting. Committing a felony is a hell of a lot more exciting than graduating. Even the film grain now seems like a reminder of something soon-to-be-gone. Linklater's sitcom setting exists at the corner of Sartre and Camu's hell, the director's look back to the 70s defined the 90s in ways I couldn't even realize. A cast of future stars and a killer soundtrack too. Tuesday's gone, but it's what she's taken with her that you can only see in your rear-view mirror.