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A great many of the maint threads of criticism against Boyhood would have been side stepped if it had been called 12 Years instead of Boyhood. Felt like a lot of people just sat baffled by what they were supposed to be invested in watching a 6 year old and didn't engage with the moms story at all.

my hunch is that every filmmaker who thought they could do a better 'boyhood' looked at what they could actually do with twelve years to make a movie and realized that linklater accomplished pretty much everything worth doing with time as a cinematic resource—anything else would be a gimmick

Linklater himself is doing a Merrily We Roll Along movie using the same techniques, although he's already had to recast one character for external reasons. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrily...

it's funny that critics of the film called the twelve-year thing a gimmick, because if you watch it again now—it's the whole point. the grief and tenderness that comes with watching so much life pass literally before our eyes still hits. the smallness of those lives is what makes it meaningful

I loved that, for the most part, the moments that were shown were small and not overly dramatic. Life is an accretion of moments, not scenes, and the movie understands that deeply. Still, could have just used AI to age/de-age the actors, right?

it's possible that if you make, idk, a war movie or a romance over that much time, you'd find something new to say. but i think the cinematic power of time really is simply that it makes us aware of our mortality, and linklater already did that, with arquette's monologue at the end punctuating it