Everybody Wants Some!!

2017 comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A baseball team enjoys their time together in the weekend leading up to the first day of their college fall semester.

Look at those exclamation marks! Linklater's ballsy! I mean, sure something like Boyhood could be considered ballsy, but is it ballsier than going to studio executives and saying, "I don't want just want exclamation mark at the end of my movie title. I demand two!! I'm getting two exclamation marks or I'm walkin'!!"

I bet he was inspired by DeCoteau with A Talking Cat?!? or Neil Breen with I Am Here. . . .Now.

Curious, I just looked it up to see if it has a name. It's apparently called "multiple exclamation marks," which is disappointing. I mean, a question mark and an exclamation mark together is called an interrobang. So that gets a cool name, but two exclamation marks is just "multiple exclamation marks." I don't know if two question marks on either side of an exclamation mark has a name, and I'm not going to look it up because I know I'll be bummed to find out that it isn't called a DeCoteau. And if a four-period ellipsis is not called a Breen, I will stop using all punctuation marks entirely as a form of protest.

That title led me to believe that I'd get some Gucci Crew II on the soundtrack, but this takes place in the first year of the 80s or last year of the 70s depending on who you ask and how pretentious they are. You do get some hip hop, however, and I'm not sure how believable it is that a group of white college students and one black student in Texas are going to know every word of "Rapper's Delight." Stick around during the credits, by the way, because the actors get a chance to rap again, and it's delightful.

I've never felt whiter than I do right now, by the way. I just referenced people rapping and called it delightful.

That "Rapper's Delight" song comes early in the movie, a sing-a-long while the characters are riding in a car and checking out girls or something. So that's not a spoiler. Actually, I'm not sure there's anything I can say that would spoil this because there's really not a plot. It's a series of non-sequitur sequences that blend together to characterize this crew. Individually, they aren't well-defined characters. They're like a little more than a dozen guys who all live in the same house and sort of become one goofy character. They're raunchy and obnoxious, the type of people I don't think I'd want to be around in a public place for too long, but at the same time, I kind of wanted to be one of these guys and engaging with other guys (and gals in late-70s jeans) the way they were.

Linklater really has a way of creating this nostalgia even though I never had any experiences like these characters and don't even really believe that these characters could actually exist. Well, at least they couldn't all exist in the same time and place like this. It's really a neat trick he does as a writer/director.

One character says, "We came for a good time, not a long time." That's a perfect description of the whole thing. The movie and its characters exist in a very specific time and place, one that can never exist again. And although I can see some people being annoyed by their antics and unrealistic banter or underwhelmed because of the film's lack of depth, I think it's at least a pretty good time.