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No bouquets for Richard Linklater for Everybody Wants Some

CWatching Richard Linklater‘s homage to his youth, Everybody Wants Some, brought back memories of my own college days at about the same time that the film takes place. I soon realized I had something in common with the characters in Linklater’s film. Very little in my college experience would have made an entertaining movie, and very little of what happens to these characters is very entertaining either.

Everybody Wants Some covers the three days before classes begin at a fictional Texas college in the fall of 1980. Jake (Blake Jenner), a freshman pitcher, moves into what’s essentially a baseball team frat house. Over the next three days, he and his new teammates drink a lot, smoke pot a lot, bet on any competition imaginable, attend a single baseball practice, but mostly go to all types of parties and bars and chase (and usually go to bed with) women, 

If this synopsis seems a bit sketchy, that’s because Everybody Wants Some has no real plot, and the dialogue sounds clever only to people who are drunk or high (“You’ve got to embrace your inner strange, man. Just be weird.”) The film also has very few actually funny moments (I laughed four or five times during the entire movie) and amiable but largely interchangeable characters played by largely interchangeable actors, most of whom look like they just walked in off the set of a porn film. The only two characters in Everybody Wants Some who have a semblance of an actual personality are the team stoner, WIlloughby (Wyatt Russell), and the overly hyped-up jerk, Jay (Juston Street). Within 30 minutes of his arrival, Jake is just another one of the guys until he has a last act romance with a drama student (Zoey Deutch), which serves as a welcome break from the nonstop, testosterone-fueled repetitiveness of the rest of the movie.  At least, Everybody Wants Some looks and feels authentic; writer/director Linklater has an ear for period tunes, and the costuming and production design, with settings from a disco to a country bar, are perfect. Everybody Wants Some serves as a pleasant reminder of what campus culture of that era looked and sounded like, but as an actual movie, it fails to make the grade. Continue reading →

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