Burl reviews Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Burl here everybody, spiraling back to the year 1980, when disco dancing was on everybody’s mind and the curiosities of the 1970s – pet rocks, roller coasters, disaster movies and Evel Knievel – were quickly losing their lustre! The last big Irwin Allen disaster picture, When Time Ran Out, came out that year, and so did Caddyshack, Airplane and The Empire Strikes Back; but all of these had been out in theaters for some time by the dates upon which the story of Everybody Wants Some!! is purported to take place (August 28, 29, 30), so the characters have probably already seen those movies, especially the Yoda picture! Ha ha! But they meander about so much that we would hardly be surprised if their peregrinations took them to the cinema, and the camera stayed with them in something approaching real time!

Yes, Everybody Wants Some!!, the newest effort from Richard Linklater, is a “spiritual sequel,” apparently, to the great Dazed & Confused! Ha ha, as a fan of that picture, I certainly was happy to rush out and see this new one, and I’m happy to say it did not disappoint! It doesn’t match the standard set by Dazed & Confused, mind you, or even the remarkable Slacker; but few films could!

Instead of high school and junior high school students running around on the last day of school, we’ve got college students on the last weekend before the first day of school! Our everyman quasi-protagonist is Jake, who carts around a box of records as he meets his new roomies in a university baseball house! Ha ha, I didn’t know they had those either – I certainly don’t recall hearing of such accommodations in my happy college days! I don’t even know if my school had a baseball team, ha ha!

But apparently they are real, because that’s where Linklater lived when he went to college! And these houses were full of hyper-competitive guys wearing moustaches, whose judgment skills have not quite caught up to their expansive senses of self-worth! But of course lessons are learned and characters are built, a little tiny bit anyway, over the course of the weekend descried in this picture! Some of the characters are more appealing than others, and though they're all nominally members of the same social caste, which is to say jocks of high standing, within that group there are all manner of sub-types and stratification! Ha ha, there's even a stoner!

Now speaking of that, I saw this movie under pretty optimal circumstances: in the movie palace with a couple of buddies, a dose of wig-tightener and a smuggled-in king can! Ha ha! And, watching under these conditions, what really struck me about the movie was the fair play it employs with its characters: no one, not even the preening superjocks or the maniacal, violence-prone jerk, is all bad, and nobody else, even the wide-eyed naïf representing the writer-director, is all nice! Everyone gets their chance at being a dick or a Decent Dan, ha ha, and the movie is better for it! We get to see these adaptable lads at a country bar, a punk show, an art school party and even, briefly, on the baseball diamond!

It was altogether a hugely enjoyable experience at the movies, I must say, but only time and further viewings will tell whether this is a movie with staying power! I do look forward to those future viewings, however, and in the meantime give Everybody Wants Some!! three and a half duck-feet necklaces! Ha ha!