Slacker

A little like David Byrne's True Stories, minus the music and plot, this is a freewheeling, documentary-style celebration of the bizarrely normal, charmingly oddball, and terminally hip residents of Austin, Texas. It starts with a guy boring a taxi driver to death with talk about parallel realities, shifts gear when the backseat philosopher sees a woman hit by a car, then swerves into comic absurdity when the victim's son is arrested for her murder. And that's just the first five minutes. After this, one character from each scene provides the link to the next, as we encounter a string of bar-room philosophers, New Agers, old anarchists, and other weirdly entertaining specimens - one of whom is hawking what she claims is Madonna's cervical smear. At times, it's like watching someone else's home movies, but there's something oddly compelling about such studied eccentricity.