Boyhood

In the film Boyhood, there can be a tendency to view the product closeups as being intentionally shown to indicate a point in time - Game Boys and Halo on Xbox and iPods and iPhones.  Usually, of course, that's just what such things are - and indeed, in this case they are again. The twist is that the shots had to be set up when those products were actually being used, because the film was done over the course of 12 years. There was no need to go back and find those products so they could be included: The shots were done then and there, or they were not. Similarly, nobody had to craft how Ethan Hawke's Dad was railing against Bush and Iraq and McCain so that it sounded as if it fit in that time: It already would have, because nobody would have known a different way to talk about them.

It makes the film its own special kind of time capsule, showing how the world changed over a specific decade. In this way it's similar to The Best Years of Our Lives. That film came out right after World War II ended, and can't have shown how folks viewed the war upon further reflection. It had to show attitudes that were already prevalent. Nobody was going to come from the future and tell the filmmakers about the Cold War or McCarthy or revisionism in Japan. Or, for that matter, about how people 70 years later might see the ubiquitous smoking as an indicator of the time period, rather than just What People Did at that time.