Home Featured Everybody Wants Some!! Review – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
Everybody Wants Some!! Review – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love

Everybody Wants Some!! Review – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love

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There are fewer film-makers as good as Richard Linklater for creating a connection between the audience and a set of characters onscreen. The director has practically made it his career’s work to manifest nostalgia and human connection into tangible story-telling, his films each about very little other than the simple, poignant melodrama that surrounds people existing together. It was true of the Before trilogy, a set of stories about one couple’s serendipitous journey to find love together over decades, and it was true of his now legendary real-time tale of childhood, Boyhood. And so to is it true of Everybody Wants Some!!, a light-hearted but still very aware reflection on what it is to be that most romanticized of combinations: young, male and just starting college.

Blake Jenner‘s Jake opens the picture, turning up the volume for Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ as he makes his way up to his new residence for college. On a baseball scholarship, Jake is going to be living with most of his team-mates in a house on the outskirts of their Texan university. Once there, he’s introduced to several of his housemates before heading on his first jaunt to a local watering hole to kickstart their weekend, the last before classes start on Monday morning.

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At first, the film seems like a typical frat comedy with all the trimmings of a Van Wilder or an American Pie: the young men joke around and bond over trying to flirt with prospective partners. And each member of the ensemble falling into semi-rigid stereotypes definitely lends to that; there’s the competitive one (Tyler Hoechlan), the dumb one (Temple Baker), the wise leader (Ryan Guzman) etc., all played by a stellar cast. But as the first group conversation occurs, it’s clear there’s a lot more going on under the masquerade of some horny college students looking to get laid.

Everybody Wants Some!! plays like someone’s wistful recollection of a faded memory. The weekend is pasted together through elongated scenes of hanging out in the house that lead to getting ready that lead into heading out again, all leading into each other with jump-cuts that jump hours at a time at select intervals. The film is selective, like nostalgia, in what it shows and how it shows the group. There’s no hostility between them, even when tempers flare at losing a game of table tennis, and there’s little to no harshness in their dogging of each other, the film (thankfully) sparing the single black member from ever being highlighted as such. All its missing is some narration and being bookended with old man Jake spinning a “and it was the best weekend I ever knew…”

Which is something that may otherwise feel pretentious, but this is Richard Linklater, and more importantly, this is Linklater making a “spiritual successor” to Dazed and Confused. The film has a rose-tinted fascination with its own subject matter and era, extending as far as its title, named after a Van Halen track. When Jake and his buddies find themselves in a punk concert, completely alien to their preferred spot of disco dancing, they eventually just shed their anxieties and go with it, running straight into a circle pit. The events are all peppered with sophomore philosophical wisdom to give them context, discussions ranging from just being who you are, to selling out, to a conversation between Jake and his own sweetheart Beverley (Zoey Deutch) that challenges his want to compete in sports.

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These digressions that frame the piece do, on occasion, stretch its boundaries a little. It’s hard to believe a group of college age athletes being this clever without flippancy and simultaneously obsessed with sexual intercourse and polite when they don’t get it, but EWS!! makes it work by having shades of parable to it. Masculinity as depicted in the film, and masculine friendship, is so refreshingly gentle, it’s hard not to be charmed. And speaking as someone who was far, far from this reality in his teen years and first (and second) attempts at college, the movie did have some charming to do. But it manages it by displaying the group as kind-natured, warm individuals who abhor arrogance outside of sport, and who value each other as friends and as team-mates. It’s not so much about making those of us that weren’t the popular sporty-types empathize with them as it is trying to reign in the cultural perception of jocks as needing to be dominant forces in every space.

It’s neither a worldview nor a lesson everyone will want some of, but that’s part of the point: some of us don’t need to hear it. This is for those that may need to, while the rest of us can just enjoy the old photo album.

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