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#237 - Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater, 2016
In 1980, a college freshman spends the last weekend before classes hanging out with his new housemates.
Complacency can be a terrible thing when it comes to film. This applies to both filmmaker and filmgoer as the former's willingness to rest on their laurels can effectively be enabled by the latter's desire to have their wishes and expectations met by any means necessary. This cinematic stagnation has the potential to undo creators as the spark that originally made them worthwhile fizzles in the face of diminishing returns or gets lost completely in the name of potentially ruinous divergence from their comfort zone. To borrow a phrase the late John Peel used to describe legendary post-punk outfit The Fall, Richard Linklater is "always different, always the same". Though he has dabbled in genres ranging from rotoscoped surrealism to family-friendly crowd-pleasers, there's a distinctively breezy air to pretty much every film he's ever made as they favour organic character development over tight plotting. That's not to say that he's managed to avoid repetition completely, but he's usually managed to at least offer his own unique spin on familiar material (such as taking the slice-of-life weirdness of Slacker and turning it into a series of inter-connected dreams in Waking Life). Everybody Wants Some!! promises to be a spiritual successor to one of Linklater's most beloved films, 1993's high-school period-piece Dazed and Confused. This builds expectations in both directions - while it would be good to see Linklater spin something fresh out of one of his greatest hits, it could just as easily fall prey to the same unforgiving fate as many a decades-late comedy sequel have already done.
On paper, the premise of Everybody Wants Some!! does not sound especially promising as it focuses on a collection of male college students who are all united by two things - their commitment to playing in the college's baseball team and their combined love of non-stop partying. This could be a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands but Linklater is able to play to his strengths and makes even the most meat-headed of these jocks seem at least interesting (if not necessarily sympathetic). The adjustment period adequately reflects the viewpoint of the protagonist (Blake Jenner) as we start off being launched into the world of these barely-distinguishable dudes but there are plenty of moments that help to build up an appreciably chilled-out type of camaraderie (with a key moment being a handful of characters simultaneously singing along to "Rapper's Delight"). While the film definitely shows its fair share of party-hearty antics as the guys hold out-of-control shindigs or make their way through a variety of different venues, it still makes time for quieter scenes where these jocular fellows are capable of everything from snappy banter to relatively nuanced pseudo-philosophical exchanges regarding numerous subjects such as sub-cultural identity politics, the significance of pop culture, and the sort of general slice-of-life exchanges that have come to define Linklater at his best and tend to be up to standard in this film.
Time will tell if Everybody Wants Some!! manages to have the same lasting impact as its predecessor, but on its own it still proves a fairly fun yet resonant piece of work that manages to transcend its rather basic premise. It may be a real boys' club where the most significant female character is the main guy's love interest, but in the context of the film's tight timeframe pretty much all of the development feels natural enough to compensate for any familiar and potentially reductive college-movie tropes. The many little touches (most notably the pitch-perfect soundtrack featuring everything from New Wave number ones to prog-rock deep cuts) definitely grant the film a lot of personality that carries it through a plot that can feel a little loose even by Linklater's standards. That being said, I think this might actually serve as something of a greatest-hits package for Linklater. Such a phrase may be used to signify a lack of innovation and a dependence on referencing former glories (which may be particularly damning for a relatively experimental filmmaker like Linklater), but it can also describe a filmmaker knowing not only what work of theirs functions but how to effectively reconfigure it into something that feels fresh and engaging. In this regard, Everybody Wants Some!! proves successful as it channels just about everything there is to like about Linklater into a single package - I couldn't ask for anything more.
Richard Linklater, 2016
In 1980, a college freshman spends the last weekend before classes hanging out with his new housemates.
Complacency can be a terrible thing when it comes to film. This applies to both filmmaker and filmgoer as the former's willingness to rest on their laurels can effectively be enabled by the latter's desire to have their wishes and expectations met by any means necessary. This cinematic stagnation has the potential to undo creators as the spark that originally made them worthwhile fizzles in the face of diminishing returns or gets lost completely in the name of potentially ruinous divergence from their comfort zone. To borrow a phrase the late John Peel used to describe legendary post-punk outfit The Fall, Richard Linklater is "always different, always the same". Though he has dabbled in genres ranging from rotoscoped surrealism to family-friendly crowd-pleasers, there's a distinctively breezy air to pretty much every film he's ever made as they favour organic character development over tight plotting. That's not to say that he's managed to avoid repetition completely, but he's usually managed to at least offer his own unique spin on familiar material (such as taking the slice-of-life weirdness of Slacker and turning it into a series of inter-connected dreams in Waking Life). Everybody Wants Some!! promises to be a spiritual successor to one of Linklater's most beloved films, 1993's high-school period-piece Dazed and Confused. This builds expectations in both directions - while it would be good to see Linklater spin something fresh out of one of his greatest hits, it could just as easily fall prey to the same unforgiving fate as many a decades-late comedy sequel have already done.
On paper, the premise of Everybody Wants Some!! does not sound especially promising as it focuses on a collection of male college students who are all united by two things - their commitment to playing in the college's baseball team and their combined love of non-stop partying. This could be a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands but Linklater is able to play to his strengths and makes even the most meat-headed of these jocks seem at least interesting (if not necessarily sympathetic). The adjustment period adequately reflects the viewpoint of the protagonist (Blake Jenner) as we start off being launched into the world of these barely-distinguishable dudes but there are plenty of moments that help to build up an appreciably chilled-out type of camaraderie (with a key moment being a handful of characters simultaneously singing along to "Rapper's Delight"). While the film definitely shows its fair share of party-hearty antics as the guys hold out-of-control shindigs or make their way through a variety of different venues, it still makes time for quieter scenes where these jocular fellows are capable of everything from snappy banter to relatively nuanced pseudo-philosophical exchanges regarding numerous subjects such as sub-cultural identity politics, the significance of pop culture, and the sort of general slice-of-life exchanges that have come to define Linklater at his best and tend to be up to standard in this film.
Time will tell if Everybody Wants Some!! manages to have the same lasting impact as its predecessor, but on its own it still proves a fairly fun yet resonant piece of work that manages to transcend its rather basic premise. It may be a real boys' club where the most significant female character is the main guy's love interest, but in the context of the film's tight timeframe pretty much all of the development feels natural enough to compensate for any familiar and potentially reductive college-movie tropes. The many little touches (most notably the pitch-perfect soundtrack featuring everything from New Wave number ones to prog-rock deep cuts) definitely grant the film a lot of personality that carries it through a plot that can feel a little loose even by Linklater's standards. That being said, I think this might actually serve as something of a greatest-hits package for Linklater. Such a phrase may be used to signify a lack of innovation and a dependence on referencing former glories (which may be particularly damning for a relatively experimental filmmaker like Linklater), but it can also describe a filmmaker knowing not only what work of theirs functions but how to effectively reconfigure it into something that feels fresh and engaging. In this regard, Everybody Wants Some!! proves successful as it channels just about everything there is to like about Linklater into a single package - I couldn't ask for anything more.