Suburbia Reviews

A long, dark night o' slacker despair, courtesy of Richard Linklater and self-important blowhard Eric Bogosian. Their souls poisoned by the ugliness of strip malls and the bourgeois amenities of middle-class life, Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi), Sooze (Amie Carey), Buff (Steve Zahn), Tim (Nicky Katt) and Bee-Bee (Dina Spybey) are profoundly alienated and waste their time hanging around a convenience-store parking lot, drinking and bemoaning their lot. This particularly night is defined by a visit from high-school classmate Pony (Jayce Bartok), a folk-rocker riding the wave of modest overnight success, and his slutty, condescending publicist (Parker Posey). What passes for irony here is that much though the kids profess to hate the system, they're dying to sell out for material success: They're not only ready to make a deal with the devil — they'd happily type it up while kissing his nether parts, except that you know they can't type. But the opening sequence — a montage of traveling shots of ugly suburban landscapes, set to the strains of Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity," the quintessential ode to feeling sorry for yourself — gives away Linklater and Bogosian's real take on their miserable protagonists.