Review of Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) by Axet — 28 Apr 2016

It's not that nostalgic comedy dramas built around hit song playlists from the period are a problem.

It's not that autobiographical coming of age memoirs are a problem.

It's not even that entirely unknown casts are tasked to carry plotless narrative. "Dazed and Confused" was good, and "American Graffiti" is a classic. (Actually both had some plot at least.).

No the problem here is a well intentioned writer/director instead of making a movie for an audience, lazily slapped together a half ass scenario expecting his cherished memories to hold up for the rest of us. The music is great, but its use is utterly uninspired. There's attention to the fashions, styles and props of the time. No attention whatsoever is paid to good story craft. There is not one memorable line of dialogue in an endless stream of non-stop banal talk, with incessant intended humor that is never funny but always needlessly raunchy, long soft edged sloppy unmotivated scenes, sluggishly slow pacing, not one minute of suspense (yes even in comedies you need some), and zero visual style.

Linklater is a longtime director working in a variety of genres and notable for exploring offbeat subjects and is highly commendable for his strides in innovative techniques. I've been following him all along. However between "Before Midnight" (Absurdly over-rated cringe inducing eavesdrop on a long, dull bickering middle aged marital conflict in real time with no sense of cinema evident), then "Boyhood" (Not terrible, just obscenely over-praised! Amazing original idea regarding how to make a movie does not translate necessarily into a 'good' movie'!) and now this thing… that following is over. He's worked long and hard to get to this point where he can probably make whatever he wants now and the financing within reason will likely be there for him. That doesn't excuse this terribly deficient effort or the powers that be for financing it. Not that it cost anything to make, the production value is near as low as it gets. Again that's not the problem, an excruciatingly boring self indulgent whack off with no regard for the audience is. Any audience!

To paraphrase from it, "Just because some pages were filled in and cameras rolled doesn't make it a movie!".

Yet it gets a pass by the worthless sheep next door purely because his name is now on their predictably dishonest pretentious list of do-gooders. The stooges are so incompetent or corrupt they destroy any vestige of integrity left in their so-called profession.