Review of Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) by Dirigiblepulp — 31 Jan 2017

So much more subtle and humane than it appears superficially. Though that should be no surprise considering it's Richard freaking Linklater. And my God is it funny. "Did he just flick a lime in my drink?!".

I noticed a similarity with the structure of La La Land here. This film starts as basically an 80's style college sex romp and transforms into the beginnings of a college set bildungsroman, with a sexless intellectually driven romance at its center. It's about finding your place in a place where everyone is doing that exact same thing (what happens when the best baseball player from every high school in the state goes to the same college?) The evolution of expectations into a more cogent and adult understanding of your place in the world and the beauty inherent in that.

This is a cheekier film than Dazed and Confused but in the same way that film was about nostalgia and the best years of your life before it could be understood, this is about the slow dawning of that realization. For some (Wyatt Russell's Willoughby or McConaughey's Wooderson) they realize this all too well and refuse to let go. Linklater finds the humanity in every single person. This is a movie about baseball jocks that couldn't be less about "jocks" in that unsubtle sense.