Freshman Orientation

Year: 2016

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman 

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I dug Boyhood, my first foray into the Oscarbait half of Richard Linklater’s filmography. So I was excited to check out Everybody Wants Some!!, his entry into the college movie subgenre, a personal favorite of mine. It also didn’t hurt that it featured two actors I like, one for unrecognized talent reasons (Glenn Powell, whose Scream Queens performance I determined the best of 2015) and one for… personal reasons (Ryan Guzman of The Boy Next Door). Boyhood was a slice of life narrative that said what it had to say, albeit in a very relaxed manner, so I was intrigued to see how he could follow it. Turns out, he did the exact same thing, only way more scatterbrained and self-indulgent.

Though I can’t complain about certain indulgences…

Everybody Wants Some!! details the weekend before class starts at a Texas college in 1980. We follow a baseball team living in an off-campus house, mostly via the entry point of freshman Jake (Blake Jenner), who strikes up a tentative flirtation with theater girl Beverly (Zoey Deutch). The boys that pack this film include McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), a sore-losing alpha jock; Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a laid-back stoner; and Finnegan (Glenn Powell), a fast talking  know-it-all whose faux-intellectual bravura just barely obscures his crippling self doubt. The rest of them blend together in a miasma of sun-baked testosterone. So… that’s pretty much it.

If you’re coming to a Linklater flick looking for plot, just watch School of Rock again.

Richard Linklater loves his cultural signifiers. In Boyhood, pop music and developing technology form a rich tapestry of time over which he presents his story. In Everybody Wants Some!!, he wants to remind everyone that the music scene was so very cool in 1980, wasn’t it? It’s more mix tape than movie, and the prioritization of capturing the look and feel of the period causes the rest of the story to suffer.

The truly frustrating thing about this is that so much of Everybody Wants Some!! is so good. Or at least, it has so much raw potential. The act of looking back on the movie is far more pleasurable than actually sitting through it, because it encompasses a lot of important themes about life, youth, and identity.

And weirdly, not baseball. Like, at all.

As the boys head out each night to different bars and parties trying to get some (which, as rumor has it, they all want), they view themselves as the most desirable men in the world. They play baseball. They have a future. An exciting one, not like all those future office drones around them. Only Finnegan seems aware of the bitter truth that college baseball won’t last forever. And their habit of constantly dressing up to fit the requirements of whatever bar they’re visiting that night (cowboy hats and boots for swing dancing, leather and studs for a punk club) prove that they’re just blank slates with no personality of their own. Of course, Linklater has Jake point this out in a hideously clanging piece of dialogue that smashes the subtlety to smithereens, because he really doesn’t seem to care all that much about his story.

Given this lackadaisical attitude toward the storytelling, it becomes more and more difficult to actually give a crap about the characters. If the director isn’t doing it, then why should I? Look back at my plot summary for this film. I described exactly three boys, because those are the only ones I could remember from this cast of over a dozen. I wish I could pretend Finnegan was the protagonist because Glenn Powell is the best performer and has his hands on the most interesting material, but no. We have Jake, the blandest cypher this side of a Tobey McGuire movie, and most of the cast gamely plays the wallpaper behind him.

I’ve never been this disinterested in a movie full of shirtless men.

Everybody Wants Some!! is best described as a hang-out movie, but there’s nobody here I would remotely even consider being friends with. They’re just a gaggle of hormone-addled über-morons who are nipping like chihuahuas at the heels of life. If you’re a white, heterosexual male between the ages of 25 and 45, this movie might just speak to you, but let’s be honest. Do we really need any more of these?

A word that a film reviewer should always be cautious about throwing around is “boring,” but I must honor my truth. I was bored to tears by the hedonistic antics of this motley crew, as much as I desperately wanted to be on their side. They’re unpleasant and occasionally engaging, but they’re mostly just dull as watching paint grow. I don’t need two hours with these people. I’d rather spend my time listening to the soundtrack in a dark room. And I don’t even like The Knack all that much.

TL;DR: Everybody Wants Some!! has some solid potential, but it's too dull and meandering to make it work.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 853

Deeper By The Dozen

Year: 2014

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke

Run Time: 2 hours 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Welcome back to the "Brennan's A Little Late" blog, where our current topic of discussion is Boyhood, Richard Linklater's 2014 critical darling. The film, depicting the coming of age of Texas boy Mason Evans, Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), was shot in pieces over the course of 12 years and compiled into a single narrative in which a sprawling tale of life is shown in more or less real time, as Coltrane ages, pupates, and grows before our eyes.

They might has well have just called the boy "Oscar" and gotten it over with.

As people do in life, characters come and go during Boyhood's decade and change, but at the film's center are Mason, his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), his absentee father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). Their lives are splayed out and dissected in intimate detail in front of us as Olivia cycles through a wheel of deadbeat husbands, Mason Sr. attempts to get his life together, Mason Jr. plays video games and mopes about glum philosophy, and Samantha watches Lady Gaga music videos and is generally a useless, petulant turd like most high schoolers.

No story beat really adheres to the next. Moment after moment occurs with no clear arc or progression, except for the inexorable march of time. The movie is so long that this storytelling style might have quickly become a problem, but Boyhood's frequent time jumps keep the pace brisk, turning a sprawling narrative into a series of short, pointedly unconnected vignettes.

The best thing I can say about the story and the stakes, as minimal as they may be at times, is that they avoid common tropes are unconventionally subtle for indie movie territory, largely avoiding the excesses and obscenities that other filmmakers might use, given a similar gimmick. Luckily, Linklater has proven himself as a master of low-key storytelling and ineffable patience with his Before [Whatever] trilogy, and his presence here is incalculably valuable.

In a way, his style is like... a magnifying glass that... lets us explore Ethan Hawke's face? (Captions are tough.)

But while its gestures toward innovation in storytelling are unique and precise, on the level of pure craft, Boyhood is a fairly average film. There are some long, lingering takes and impressive tracking shots that imperiously plant you in the time and place, but the cinematography generally avoids flashy tricks. It's an average looking film for an average looking life. The performances are likewise toned down and avoid grappling for attention. 

Patricia Arquette is by far the standout, bringing a magnetic gravity and realism to a woman blundering her way through life. And Ethan Hawke is no stranger to Linklater jerking him around a decade at a time, so his performance is skillful if less captivating. Ellar Coltrane does just fine (considering how hard it is to cast child actors and just pray that they improve as they age), although he isn't given much to work with besides being a gloomy teen. The weakest link is Lorelei Linklater, whose name gives the whole story away, I should think.

As a child, she demanded she be included in her father's movie, but after a couple years she grew bored of playing pretend. She finds her focus again later on as she retreats to the sidelines, but for several years she is inconsistent and shrill, actively battling against the tone of the movie. Likewise, her skin tone and hair color actively thwart the already One-Direction-biography thin pretense that the four actors involved are genetically related in any way.

How can Caucasian parents have a red son? It just doesn't make sense!

What I have described thus far is a film that's pleasant, but largely pointless. It's fun to watch time pass and marvel at the technological innovations and cultural signifiers (Harry Potter, Lady Gaga, Nintendo consoles, and Barack Obama get the biggest airtime. It's like a nostalgic treasure hunt.), but the stories themselves have no apparent link until the film's final moments, when the whole sprawling tableau lies before you in one wondrous piece.

It's no grand drama and there's no hero. There's no character arc or antagonist. There's no happy ending, nor is there a tragedy. The characters just bump into one another and, depending on the timing, stick around or don't. But that's just life, isn't it? Your ability to enjoy Boyhood as more than a series of average events lies in active viewership and contemplation about the nature of life, relationships, and aging rather than... you know, actually being an interesting story.

It's not quite as transcendently powerful as the rave reviews have been saying. And it's certainly not for everyone.

In fact, I get the sense that Mason himself wouldn't be a fan of it.

But Boyhood shows us that everybody is just as stuck in the moment and confused about the future as we are and that the mundane human experience is the thing we have most in common. If I might hazard a guess, I'd say this film only gets better as we get older. Speaking as a 20-year-old in Southern California, I'm less powerfully impacted by Boyhood's apparent randomness than, say, a middle aged father of three. But I see what the film has to say about life, the universe, and everything and haven't stopped thinking about it since I sat down to watch it. A film like that just doesn't come around every day. Even if that film is a little bit affably banal.

I certainly wish that the central figure was less of a wet mop and that the film didn't insist on making us watch Ethan Hawke playing the guitar so damn much, but the film rises above that sort of petty nonsense. Boyhood is a valuable film text for the young and old, as long as you have the patience to let it wash over you.

TL;DR: Boyhood is, from my angle, a tad too aimless, but nevertheless I am not immune to its charms.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1024