Starring Before Midnight's Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, this new public service announcement for the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas sees the delightfully snooty pair (notice Hawke name-dropping Tolstoy with great ease) lambast a member of the audience for using their phone while they are talking.
It's a fun little short that serves as a nice warm up for Before Midnight, and as a reminder that The Alamo Drafthouse knows how to expertly belittle people into behaving in their screens. Seriously, imagine how peaceful it would be if a major cinema chain was brave enough to show a video like the following one before each film? The campaign starts here.
As all time favourite filmmakers go, Richard Linklater ranks very highly on my list. After first seeing Dazed and Confused as a teenager and then quickly digesting the rest of his filmography in a short space of time, it helped shape my cinematic tastes for the years that have followed and probably explains why the site you are currently reading is called Slacker Cinema. A major highlight of that filmography was 1995's Before Sunrise, the Vienna set romance that introduced the characters of Jesse and Celine, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Linklater, Hawke and Delpy returned to those characters in 2004's Before Sunset and now, another 9 years later, are back once again with Before Midnight. Now married with kids, Jesse and Celine's relationship has reached a new completeness, the questions from the final scene in 2004's installment satisfyingly answered. Now, living within their own romantic legend, Before Midnight continues the ongoing love story.
Jesse and Celine seem to have found themselves a comfortable life (this time on a Greek island), and equally, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy seem even more comfortable in the roles that they are best known for. Also back on board as co-writers (along with Linklater, Delpy and Hawke received an Oscar nomination for Before Sunset) it's reassuring to know that they wouldn't have risked returning to these roles had they not had something relevant to say.
Receiving great word of mouth after its debut at Sundance in January, Before Midnight arrives in cinemas this summer.
