transmission twenty-seven: "everybody wants some!!"
in which i get an excuse to post a branson reese review of a movie
i'm beginning to latch onto richard linklater as one of my favorite directors. the truth is, I think i've been here for a while: since watching the “before” trilogy a while back at the very least, and watching “hit man” earlier this year only reinforced that feeling. quietly, assuredly, he's become one of my favorites, and I mean to go back and check out all that he's directed.
“everybody wants some!!” is, in some ways, a spiritual sequel to linklater's own “dazed and confused”. the latter holds a fairly significant space in pop culture – it did give us the mcconaughey “alright alright alright” - and is a wonderful high school movie. anything I could say about “dazed and confused” and the ways in which it is perfectly representative of the high school experience is better said in the following branson reese-penned review, so I will not even try:
this film came out more than twenty years later, and it is the college film to “dazed”'s high school film. it follows the rookies of a college baseball team, as they amble around the final few days before university starts, basically going through the checklist of what college movies portray: boys talking about “getting” women, parties, smoking weed and drinking. on paper – just like “dazed” - this could come off as linklater playing the hits. but his conversational style of dialogue, the breezy tone of the movie itself, helps make this into way more than the sum of its parts.
what helps make “everybody wants some!!” so good is the thematic undercurrent. it plays in territory that is by no means necessarily new or novel for a university movie – one of the big themes of the film is trying to figure out who you are at your core, and whether the things you do define you. but the way that the movie weaves this into the different characters and their little mini-arcs is a big part of what makes this movie such a breezy watch. seriously, if you go to the letterboxd reviews, a lot of them are asking for this nearly two-hour-long movie to be even longer. not to be controversial, dear reader, but I agree. this is the sort of movie that you could bask in for hours and hours. linklater humanizes archetypes of the “college movie” genre of americana in a way that makes them come off as genuine while still being jocks who want to get laid – there's something to be said about the way that critics have referred to linklater as a “jock poet” in the past – and what could be a fairly abrasive films ends up being fairly sweet instead.
the cast is pretty large, but of particular note is glenn powell, who would of course go on to become immensely popular as an actor, and work with linklater again in “hit man”. these two movies share ideas in that regard, of whether you can change who you are, of whether that’s being a fraud in some way, or if changing who you are can somehow make you more genuine of a person. this is definitely a topic that has interested linklater, and i’m interested to see if it pops up in any of his non-glenn powell movies, or if it’s a topic that comes hand-in-hand with the young actor. nevertheless, he’s really good in this movie as a guy who never really stops talking and making shit up. though he’s not the lead, he absolutely steals the movie, and it’s not hard seeing why he became the biggest actor out of the cast in the last few years.
if you're looking for a movie that plays in the space of the university film, I really cannot recommend it enough. thank you all for reading, i will see you next week!