Delayed Reaction: Everybody Wants Some!!

The Pitch: Boyhood was really hard. Might as well go back to something more familiar.

Is there anyone who meanders better than Richard Linklater? The Coen brother are great at building a story that ends up having no significance (Burn After Reading, The Big Lebowski, Hail, Caesar!). Cameron Crowe certainly understands how to have a relaxed pace (Almost Famous, Elizabethtown). I can't think of anyone better than Linklater at building a movie out of the events that would be skipped over in another movie though. Boyhood is essentially an anthology designed as a character study. There's not really a "plot" per se. The Before series is just a collection of conversations. Even his more traditional films (School of Rock, Bad News Bears, Bernie) aren't as concerned with the plot as you'd expect. Of course, Dazed and Confused is the obvious movie to bring up when discussing Everybody Wants Some!! It's tough to find two more similar movies in terms of pace , setting, and structure.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a damn enjoyable movie. Why it's an enjoyable movie is a little harder to answer. After all, it's as plot-light as possible. It follows a college baseball team in 1980 over the three days leading up to the beginning of the fall semester. It fits the "slice of life" category of movies where there's no central climax or story, but there are several small stories that resolve themselves in their own way all with the same characters. Those are tricky. There's less of a "safety net" for them. In a traditional film, the two big things I'm going to notice are story and character. If one struggles, the other can make up for it or distract from it. A movie like this relies entirely on the characters. If you don't want to be around these characters, this movie becomes a slog.

Linklater is great at building characters, thankfully. I don't think any character is wholly likable, except maybe Blake Jenner in the lead role: the straight-man POV character. Glenn Powell and Juston Street* are the breakout characters for me, but the bench of memorable characters is so deep that I imagine I'd get a different combination from anyone I ask who as seen it. This is my second Zoey Deutch movie in not that long. It looks like she set to start popping up everywhere pretty soon.

*It took three tries for me to not instinctively type "Jason Street".

Pretty much all the small adventures - the parties, baseball practice, ping-pong - worked for me. None overstayed their welcome. It touches on some greater concerns of the characters (I like how the talk of going pro looms over all of them) without weighing down the overall tone. Sure, the relationship dynamics fit a several-week span more than just three days, but I didn't care much about that in the moment.

Oh, and thank god that I'm lazy or else I would've never known about the retro video at the end of the credits with all the actors rapping in character. That was delightful and perfectly fit the rest of the movie.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend