I see that invective and raise you all-in…

An even better take on Linklater from Armond White in the New York Press:

Everything wrong with today’s movie culture can be found in Before Sunset. Not to exaggerate this pipsqueak movie, but its very “smallness” is symptomatic of the diminished expectations and paltry substance that have become standard. Linklater’s screenplay collaboration with his performers enshrines the indie audience’s solipsistic taste. Their nonvoluptuous love story reduces courtship rituals to talk and unexciting talk at that. The woman is slyly aggressive, and the man is abashed about his desperation. Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are not rejecting the screwball comedy model so much as indulging their own lack of imagination. (Any episode of tv’s Elimidate or Blind Date tell us as much about how men and women feign and risk.) It’s a grim joke that anyone took this method seriously the first time around, and the sequel will feel superfluous to anyone except those viewers vain enough to see themselves in Hawke and Delpy. The sign of Linklater’s facetiousness is that his couple comes off as over-sincere and pretentious rather than embarrassingly real.

It’s a Sundance fallacy that Linklater (and Kevin Smith’s execrable Chasing Amy) gets the precise tone of modern lovers. Loving doesn’t change, but how people fancy their attractiveness or intelligence is often a matter of fashion, and Linklater is practiced at hipster intellectuality. (Waking Life was a snooze.) A screenwriter as gifted as Whit Stillman can show how lovers avoid talking about themselves, but all Hawke and Delpy do is parade their obnoxiousness. When he says, “I’m designed to be dissatisfied with everything,” and she boasts, “I’m a romantic,” it’s a meeting of non-minds. This couple and their enabler are really stuck on themselves. By rejecting traditional movie romanticism, they deprive the audience’s romantic needs.

To answer the question in the comments below, I think that Linklater’s pretension-to-achievement ratios and critical-reputation-to-achievement ratios are now both significantly higher than Kevin Smith’s. A lot (although still not enough) of critics hated Jersey Girl and the Jay-and-Silent-Bob-make-the-12th-toothless-satire-of-Hollywood-released-this-month thing, and while I’m not sure if Dogma is now seen as having a reputation created entirely by censorship threats–which it was–you never hear people talk about it anymore. Linklater’s movies, conversely, are virtually all praised to the skies. And while Smith is pretentious and even less talented than Linklater, there does seem to be some self-mockery in him: I don’t think he sees himself as making masterpieces. I mean, better to have “characters” share your highly uninteresting blather about comic books than about German philosophy.

Then there’s the final death-is-not-an-option question–who do you hate more? I can’t really answer that, but I can say that 1)I like Smith’s one good-but-still-overrated movie (Clerks) more than Linklater’s ditto (Dazed and Confused), and 2)I might hate Before Sunset even more than Chasing Amy; the latter’s acting is even worse than its misogyny, but it does have a few watchable scenes, which you certainly can’t say about the former. I probably need to withhold judgment until I see School of Rock, though…