So this was released recently on a Criterion 4K disc, and it seemed like a good movie for a Friday night, not being too apparently grim and thinky or anything. And I’d say it delivered on that.

This is a movie that’s doing that “portrait of high school life from the director’s teen years” thing, so in that sense is in the direct lineage of The Last Picture Show (set in the ’50s) and American Graffiti (set in the ’60s). But this one is set in the ‘70s, on the last day of school in a small town in Texas.

It’s got the ensemble cast, it’s got the shaggy plotting, it’s bathed in the warm glow of nostalgia (even as it’s sometimes portraying kinda awful people, because small-town Texas high-schoolers in the ’70s are what they are). It’s amiable, low-key, and enjoyable — and since it’s not on the AFI list, I didn’t need to grapple with it as a Top 100 movie the way I did with American Graffiti, which is similarly amiable but also similarly slight.

It is, in short, a good Friday night movie, a chill way to relax and soak in Linklater’s nostalgic vibes.

But here’s the wild thing: As I was about to write this up, I’m like “you know what, I think I might have watched this before, it seemed a little familiar,” and I went searching, and sure enough I did. In 2006, apparently after having seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I Netflixed this. My take then was:

It’s not good! It is, in fact, worse [than Fast Times]. Basically, it’s the same exact movie except that it’s set in Texas and all the characters are dope fiends, and it’s like one zillion times less fun. The entire movie is essentially watching the antics of drunken, drugged-up louts, and yay. Also, whereas Fast Times was set in the ’80s because it was made in the ‘80s, this is set in the ‘70s despite being made in the ‘90s, and I am allergic to retro.

Despite allegedly being the same person as the guy who wrote that, I have had to try to do real mental detective work to figure out how I got to that hot take. My best guess is that back then, I was a lot closer to my own high school days, right. And so whereas today, the characters of the movie are just characters in a movie, back then, they kind of mapped up to the small-town burnout losers that I knew and remembered; and so rather than seeing it through the nostalgic glow of Linklater’s nostalgia, I was watching it through a haze of my own distaste for small-town rural high school.

Still, wow, what a take. There’s a reason I don’t really trust my past judgments on things.