Dazed and Confused [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

The radios blare Alice Cooper singing "School's Out" as an assortment of characters in bellbottoms and love beads voraciously seek out a party in a warm June night of 1976 in Richard Linklater's film about the last day of school in Austin, Texas during the Me-Generation years of the mid-70s. For high school juniors like Randy "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) and O'Bannion (Ben Affleck), the day marks their transition to high school seniors and they proceed to humiliate and haze the incoming freshmen from the junior high school. Junior high school graduates Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) and his pals have to avoid the rabid soon-to-be seniors as they chase the innocent newcomers around town with custom designed paddles. The teens cruise the night in search of the ultimate end-of-the-year blast, accompanied by twenty-something drop-out Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), as they try to invest some meaning or passion into this rite-of-passage. But as one character says, "If I ever say these were the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself."