Knee-jerk review: "Everybody Wants Some"

1. Touted as the "spiritual sequel" to one of our favorite movies ever - Richard Linklater's 1993 masterpiece Dazed and Confused.
2. While Dazed and Confused explored a gaggle of high school students on the last day of school in 1976, this film looks at college student exploits in the three days leading up to the first day of school in 1980.  Nice symmetry.
3. Someone smarter than us coined this sort of format for TV shows like "Seinfeld" and "Friends" - the "hangout show."  The fun isn't what happens so much as watching it happen to these funny characters.
4. Seemed like smaller, limited-release movies like this would play for weeks in Los Angeles.  But here in Texas, if you don't move fast you'll never catch one.  We drove 40 minutes to see this.
5. It was worth it.
6. As we all know by now, Linklater has an ear for quirky, naturalistic dialogue and an uncanny knack for casting unknowns.
7. There's not much plot (as expected in a hangout), but it certainly feels like a documentary-like immersion in the subculture of male athletes - how they waste time, how they pursue girls, how they joke with each other.  Linklater, like the characters, played college baseball on a scholarship.  It shows.  The little details pop.
8. Some interesting background stuff here that points to the cultural transformation of the late 1970s/early 1980s music as our guys spend time pursuing girls at a disco, a honkytonk, a punk club, and a New Wave-infused house party.  The times they were a-changing.
9. Note also the way the film draws a clear distinction between the empty-headed patter of girl-chasing in the clubs and the way hero Jake has quiet, meaningful conversations with the girl he likes.
10. Glen Powell shines as psuedo-intellectual Finnegan, a part that would have gone to Owen Wilson 15 years ago.
11. Guess everyone in Texas in 1980 drank Schlitz or Lone Star.
12. The setting helps steep the story in nostalgia, but it's a familiar situation to any college student.  You may have been the big shot in high school, but now you're in a group of 10 other high school big-shots.
13. Gold star for the final visual of the movie: a teacher scrawling on the chalkboard one of the themes of the movie: "Frontiers are where you find them."  Take advantage. Carpe diem.  Yadda yadda.
14. We loved it.

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