‘You’ve got to embrace your inner strange, man. Just be weird…‘
With Dazed and Confused, director Richard Linklater captured a universal truth through the lens of High School in 1970’s America. Growing up sucks. But it’s also kind of beautiful. Dazed and Confusedspanned lots of different personalities and experiences in a way that made it feel accessible to everyone. With Everybody Wants Some, Linklater has attempted to make a spiritual sequel to his 1993 classic but with mixed results.
This time we have moved forward in both setting and age. A group of college baseball players in the 80s inhabit a world with seemingly zero problems, as they move from party to party and girl to girl. My personal dilemma is that I was not a college baseball player in the 80’s and I didn’t grow up watching films like this one.
Everybody Wants Some feels vaguely like a love letter to movies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High. That era is just not something that interests me so maybe I wasn’t the right viewer to get this movie. That being said, even if you couldn’t relate to Dazed and Confused, it was still funny and it was still interesting. Too often, Everybody Wants Some is emphatically neither, feeling even more meandering than Linklater’s recent work Boyhood, without being half as compelling.
The ridiculously handsome cast do a decent job and look like they are having a ball. I can’t say I enjoyed this movie anywhere near as much as they did though. Pretty disappointing.