‘Twathood’ — Christ, this one hurt.

So last night’s viewing was, without a doubt, the most excruciating film experience of my life and that was Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’. How bad? Well, I had to apologise to my fellow film-watchers for “constantly bursting into violent spasms” during it. My muscles are still aching today.

‘Boyhood’ is about (spoiler — it isn’t about anything!) a young boy who grows up. He and his sister stay with their single mother who is struggling to raise them. After a while their absent father returns on the scene. He is a layabout who can’t keep down a job but the kids love him because he seems exciting and has a cool car. And then it hit me — this film is, essentially, the family set-up from ‘Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby’ stretched out to three fucking hours. It is cliché central as the dead-beat dad, who still argues with their mum, brings chaos but also some fun into their lives. The mum is the stern taskmaster (surprise!) but the dad lets them swear and try beer. Wow, I’ve never seen THAT in a film before. By this point I was in danger of asphyxiation as I had hardly any air left in my lungs from the constant sighing I was involuntarily engaged in whilst watching this shit and we were only thirty minutes in.

But life is full of surprises so maybe, as he grows up, we will be presented with some. Well, fuck you because not only is this film 3 hours long but everything, every single plot-point or story-beat you can see coming so hard it’s like looking into Ron Jeremy’s face.

So his mother hooks up with an abusive alcoholic male who is not good for her not just once… but twice! Yeah, not only do you have to sit through one of the most obvious story beats that is then flogged to death but you have to sit through it twice as his mother makes the same obvious mistake again. And nothing comes of any of it and I didn’t care!

That was one of the other surprising aspects about the film: we spend all this time in these people’s company for so long and not once did I ever give a damn about any of them. In fact, I cared so little that at the end of the movie I declared that this film doesn’t, technically, need to exist.

Possibly the biggest annoyance (and there are many) is that the few characters who are actually “interesting” or have some vitality about them, such as his sister who is vastly more interesting than he is, disappear almost completely. People who seemed to bring some vibrancy are jettisoned so we can focus on this kid who is the physical manifestation and celebration of the force of inertia. Christ, this kid is dull! Everyone else in the movie has flaws, problems etc, apart from our main boy who simply seems to float through this movie like a lump of deadwood in a stream or a slowly rotating urinal cake in a pissy trough. And despite all the occasional flourishes of “drama” this is a highly idealised view of boyhood and one that is incredibly sanitised. Sure, nearly all the adults are heavily flawed yet our “hero” seems to be presented to us for our adoration. “Behold the Boy!” we are told. Whilst everyone else is in turmoil he seems untouchable, pure, above it all. This is a huge problem because not only does it make him extraordinarily uninteresting but also emphases his sense of detachment and that, again, he is simply being used as a idealisation of boyhood, more than likely Linklater’s himself. He doesn’t rebel, he doesn’t kick back, he doesn’t do, well… anything. He breathes I guess but even that’s up for debate. He is the most inactive character I have ever seen in a movie, including Bernie in ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’.

But what is most annoying — in fact, it almost pushed me to physical violence — is the dialogue as you are forced to endure some of the most screamingly shallow, pretentious, sub-par philosophising I’ve ever witnessed and bear in mind that’s coming from me. Christ, I thought some of the dialogue in ‘Slacker’ was eye-rolling bad but ‘Boyhood’ manages to take inane pontificating to a whole other level of towering banality. Oh, and how can we make this even more toe-curlingly awful? How about right after someone says something “profound” regarding life that we play The Flaming Lips’ ‘Do You Realise’. If the music choices in this film were any more on the nose you could put them on your face and call them a pair of glasses.

There is a scene that almost made me vomit in which Ethan Hawke gives his son a mix-cd he has made for him of the best solo tracks by the members of The Beatles after they broke up and he has called it The Black Album. Hawke then goes on to pontificate about The Beatles and their music in a way that would have felt clichéd and unoriginal even back when the band were still fucking together.

I still like Linklater although I can only handle his movies when he isn’t doing all this naval-gazing crap. ‘School of Rock’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’ and ‘Bernie’ are, for me, still his most satisfying movies but when he goes into his “Let’s talk about life” mode he becomes grating to the point of intolerable cheesiness. Three hours of grated cheese. That’s ‘Boyhood’.

‘Boyhood’ is a movie about a boy growing up. The problem with it is that that is all it is about. You’d be as well watching some slime-mould growing as it would be vastly more exciting.