DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater STARRING: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman, Juston Street, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell, Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson, Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Austin Amelio, Tanner Kalina, Forrest Vickery USA 2016
10
If there’s a more entertaining movie this year, then 2016 is going to be a belter. Everybody Wants Some!! is an evolutionary leap in today’s comedy. There’s this kind of slacker singular artistic vision that is able to bring immaturity, casual sex, drugs, flirtation, alcohol, mud wrestling, baseball, romance, stupidity and philosophical quests into this huge bowl of crazy awesome campus bromance.
Set in the world of 1980s college life, Everybody Wants Some!! takes place during the empty weekend before the start of a new academic year at a Texas college. Richard Linklater shifts gears to sports and comedy, this time around follows a group of college baseball players as they navigate their way through the freedoms and responsibilities of unsupervised adulthood.
Richard Linklater changes the rules of the game again. He describes Everybody Wants Some!!, which takes place in 1980, as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, his ’70s influential high school feature. We might also add that is somehow a sequel to Boyhood, since it picks up at almost exactly moment the movie left off: where a young man arrives at college, avid to learn and experience life, feeling somehow lost and motivated to find himself.
So if Boyhood was a journey about growing up, love, heartbreaking, family issues blah blah blah, Everybody Wants Some!! is somehow like cutting some slack from your shoulders, all that weight drops away completely. One of the highlights of the movie is the way Linklater tags along immaturity with some kind of reflection and perspective, being 18 doesn’t mean that we can’t think about the future, even if you want just to live the present.
Everything seems right in this movie, from the dialogues to the costumes, from the hair to the colors, even a split screen over a phone conversation is priceless. There is no such thing as political correctness, everything is straightforward and transcends honesty. Perhaps that happens because we can divide the characters by their own temperament and attitude, making everything more immediate for the audience, because it’s quite easy to relate to the characters. From punk to country, from disco to 70’s psychedelic rock, even the musical frames in this movie are beyond our own expectations.
We totally understand why Linklater says that Everybody Wants Some!! is the spiritual sequel of Dazed And Confused, it’s also a nostalgic affair and a gratifying experience.