Review of Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) by Djalex — 20 Sep 2017

I am a Linklater fan but not a fan of this. On the + side it does leave you with a bit of feeling nostalgic for what may have happened for you in real life but only because you are saying to yourself "thats not what it was like in a punk club I the 80's" at the screen.

It has smudges of Linklater's touch that you might have wanted when you sought out this film to watch. The major problem out of many is Its full of cliches borrowed from the movies and its not based on any reality.

its like a commercial for an adolescent fantasy for what some kids older brother may have been doing in the 80's based on the bulls**t stories he overheard him tell people to impress them. At best It gives you the feeling you are watching a teen sexploitation film from the 80's that ran on hbo on a loop so you got used to it and liked it because it reminded you of when you were 12 and that film was always on.

None of the college age characters look their age. Every single woman is a babe who's purpose is to be chased for sex or is to deny sex to the men. I dont mind that their is no story because thats what linklater is able to usually pull off ( a kind of moment in time without the annoying hollywood narrative overdrive).

I can't remember a single character's name and had a hard time remembering the differences between them. It was an effort to listen to them talk about what they cared about or to care about them at all.

Every setting is a film set that has no basis in reality. If this movie was in a different genre handled by a different director these overly fake sets, settings and wardrobe could be seen as forced on purpose to make a point about Americas love for its idea of itself.

But this isn't that genre or type of film or the point at all. The poor directing, casting (not the actors performances but their obvious age discrepency) art direction, props and wardobe are not serving anything but to make a really insulated limited film in the same way a tv commercial or music video is made simply to sell one emotion and associate it with a cheap product that needs to fly off the shelves fast.

I would love to see a filmmaker who criticizes hollywood and Americas addiction to its fake narratives about itself make a response to this type of cliche factory that is Everybody Wants Some. What would it be like if Paul Verhoven made this film with these same terrible choices the way he did with Starship Troopers to mock hollywood while making hollywood, thereby, both succeeding in the genre while simultaneously mocking it and the audience for buying into it.

Or it would be great to see a dark response to this cliche filmmaking with a film by Michael Haneke or Von Trier showing the destructiveness of these boring cliches being forced down our throats over and over.

Everybody Wants Some has a few charms if you do the work to extract them from its horrible media cliches. This film is not nostalgia for anything that can be believed to have happened in real life its simply a post card from bad 80's movies about bad 80's college movies and it feels like a commercial about that post card.

Shallow dead pop with little entertainment value in dialogue, sequences or events of any kind.