Everybody Wants Some!! including me

Dear Stephen,

So we begin and with the strangely appropriate Everybody Wants Some!!.  You and I met freshman year of college, and although we weren’t white-straight males on a sports team, I think we can identify with some of the themes Linklater addresses and how this film fits into his body of work.  With it being springtime, and the very shallow pool of potential Oscar films among us, I thought we could discuss some of the concepts and the storytelling, which is also the category that this film, and other Linklater films, would be splashing around in.  

Linklater best films (and the ones he also writes) tend to live in two different universes, one being an anthropological deep-dive into a very specific Southern Texas (Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, and even Bernie) or a European city sometime between the past and current.  I’ll admit that I am a huge fan of the European world and more specifically Before Sunset, the second film where Jesse and Celine wander around Paris, rather than Dazed and Confused, the spiritual prequel to this film.  With that said I think EWS addresses some of the larger philosophical question of mortality, the passage of time, and the obsession with youth that many of his films look at.  

Our tour guide through this magical world of masculinity and beer-soaked South Eastern Texas is Jake(Blake Jenner), a freshman pitcher 3 days before the start of classes.  Jake, like the Before trilogy’s Jesse or Boyhood’s Mason, is overly curious, confident, and eloquent, and somewhat intellectually arrogant.  I mean the kid quotes Whitman in his love note and wrote his college essay on the connection between Baseball and Sisyphus. And like Jesse he seems to use this arrogance in his quest to conquer the fairer sex.  But that is the world of Linklater, where men compete in the simplistic hyper-macho game of knuckles as often and as aggressively as they try to out wit one another.  

The journey we travel on is not much different from similar youth driven films.  When the baseball team’s weekend escapades take us to the disco, country bar, punk show, and theatre party is it not like young Cher Horowitz pointing out the cliques in Clueless?  

The concept of nostalgia is so interesting to me in relation to this film.  On one level, it is set in a very specific time and place with the tight pants and mustaches to match.  One another, deeper level it appeals to our sense of nostalgia for being 18-21 years old.  The character of Willoughby has such a longing for this time in his life he travels from college to college masquerading as someone much younger, all in the name of not growing up.  Nostalgia also plays a role in the intended audience for the film.  I obviously can’t tell you if I would enjoy this more as an 18 year old than I do now, but it feels like a film that is intended for an audience that is older than its subjects.  If I think back to the films of our generation (both in setting and release date), Can’t Hardly Wait and Mean Girls come to mind, I don’t think I would have enjoyed or connected to the sophistication of Everybody Wants Some!! at 18 like I did to those movie at the time.   

It is a shame that the Academy does not recognize music supervision, which I thought was really fun and excellent.  I wonder if Linklater wrote specific song choices in the script.  Music was such a huge role in the lives of these characters from their expression of desires to a sense of identity.  It was in a way it was the only diversity presented in Jake’s small ecosystem.   

I think the biggest challenge of this film's promotion and award potential is how do you categorize it?  Like other Linklater films it’s not quite a comedy but definitely not a drama.  I imagine that come wintertime it will be submitted to the Hollywood Foreign Press as a comedy, which it seems like it would have a very good chance at a Golden Globe.  But looking at a more defined category, what films is it most like?  Is it a teen party romp? A study in modern masculinity? A retro baseball comedy (the best sport movies IMHO)?

So Stephen, I now pitch it to you.  Look out for the disguised scout painting a shed.  

Your Friend,

Hilary