Boy to Man: Boyhood is a unique and totally memorable movie

Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a major accomplishment on any level - a truly fine movie about the growth from childhood to young-adulthood (roughly age 6 to 18) - something, I imagine, like portrait of the artist (film director and writer, in this case) as a young man - but what's most remarkable is that Linklater and his cast filmed this over the course of 12 years, so we watch the young man (Ellar Coltrane) and the others in his family - mother, father, sister - mature and grow, or age, as in no other movie ever filmed. The closest analogue is probably the incredible Up series, from England, filmed now over 49 years and counting. But Boyhood may be even more incredible, for a lot of reasons: first of all, it's about the course of a life, and it does include a few highly tense and dramatic scenes, but most of the scenes are significant not as mileposts or ceremonies (we don't see weddings, for example) but rather the kind of quiet moments that make up a life: serious conversations among friends, between father (Ethan Hawke) and children, boyfriend-girlfriend. In other words, it doesn't feel cinematic or orchestrated but rather, captured - much like Linklater's Before Sunrise series, in that regard, or like an American Eric Rohmer film, though far more lively and less abstract. Second, though it's about the boy of course it's also about those in his family: we watch Hawke evolve from a self-centered and immature dad who's more or less abandoned his wife and 2 kids into a rather dull, conventional family man (2nd marriage), symbolized by his selling his GTO and moving into a family van (one of the few "images" of change that the characters discuss directly); we see the mom, Patricia Arquette, go through two more bad marriages, but we don't dwell on the melodrama, life just passes before us, in cinema time as in real time, until, at the end, she's lonely and scared as her younger child moves off to college and into his own life. How fortunate, or skilled, Linklater is to have elicited such great, consistent, and credible performances from his team over a 12-year span! The look and feel of the movie is completely consistent, so you have no sense that it was filmed in a dozen or so segments; the story line unfolds cleanly and fluently - a unique, and totally memorable movie. Deserving of the awards it has won and will win.