"Everybody Wants Some!!" is a Charming Slice-of-Life from Richard Linklater

Everybody Wants Some!!
117 minutes, Rated R.

Written and directed by Richard Linklater.

Featuring: Blake Jenner (Jake), Ryan Guzman (Kenny), Tyler Hoechlin (Glen), Glen Powell (Finn), Wyatt Russell (Willoughby), Quinton Johnson (Dale), Temple Baker (Plummer), Zoey Deutch (Beverly), Tanner Kalina (Brumley), and Will Brittain (Billy Autrey).

Everybody Wants Some!! is the latest film from writer-director Richard Linklater, in some ways a follow-up to his breakthrough film, 1993’s Dazed and Confused. Both movies are set in Texas, Linklater’s home state: Dazed and Confused on the last day of school in 1976, Everybody Wants Some!! in 1980, the weekend before the Fall semester begins at the fictional Southeast Texas University. When the movie opens, we meet Jake (Blake Jenner), a freshman baseball player, cruising through the small college town with his windows open and The Knack’s “My Sharona” blaring from his radio. He’s heading to his new home, the house where all his teammates have been situated. Everybody Wants Some!! is the cinematic equivalent of “My Sharona”: it’s fast, catchy and utterly charming, but it goes on a little too long. Maybe it was the hot theater (the air wasn’t running and the theater was nearly full), but about an hour into the film I began feeling restless. Everybody Wants Some!! is joyfully conflict-free, and as such could stand to lose about 20 minutes’ worth of its two hour running time. (Aimless movies are better short.) But it’s a terrific movie on many levels, even though it’s man-centric, arguably to a fault.

Perhaps we’ve had too many movies about male friendship that completely excluded women, and perhaps there have been enough Linklater movies with excellent roles for women, that film critic Amy Nicholson is justified in her outrage by Linklater’s latest film. In her review, Nicholson scolded Linklater for making a movie so myopically focused on the guys that it forgot to have any well-defined female characters (save one, Zoey Deutch’s character “Beverly,” Jake’s love interest). Nicholson sees Everybody Wants Some!! as Linklater’s regression into an 18-year-old boy filmmaker. And she has a point: the movie is amped up on testosterone, and the guys strut around like puffed up roosters trying to win over the demure hens. (Only, the demure hens are mud wrestling in their underwear.)

But I feel torn about this film’s politics, partly because movies, like everything else, need to exist in a "both-and" world rather than an "either-or" one. I'm okay with filmmakers focusing on guys, I just want there to be as many movies about women. And furthermore, Linklater fashions such a vivid and dynamic world for us, it's hard to reject it on these grounds. When Jake arrives, he’s immediately dismissed by two of the senior baseball players who see him as a threat to their own chances at being noticed by potential scouts. His roommate, a country boy named Billy Autrey, is always on the phone talking to his high school sweetheart. “If you want to find Autrey, just follow the chord,” jokes Dale (J. Quenton Johnson), another teammate. The freshmen are essentially on a probationary period, where the older guys talk down to them when they want, and play various dumb pranks on them (like the “Impossible Situp,” which did cause me to role my eyes). But sometimes, the walls come down—usually when they’re out at the Sound Machine (a local disco) or wandering around the town looking for something to do. At other times, their relationships seem defined by mindless competition: We see one of them explode when Jake beats him at ping pong and he hurls the racket in Jake’s direction, while the other guys watch in mock horror, laughing at his outburst. Beneath the goofiness is a layer of genuine masculine aggression that’s tempered by the short memories of innocent young minds.

And when the guys are preening in the mirror, admiring their own muscle-bound frames and asses framed in their tight-fitting clothes, it feels like Linklater has actually tapped into this world in order to lovingly critique it: The guys are no less vain, no less concerned with achieving the right fashion sense, than the women they dismiss as vapid sex objects. Their ignorance is charming too, because it’s so innocent: To some degree, these guys haven’t moved past Tom Sawyer and his buddies playing pirates on the Mississippi. They just have more developed sexual appetites.

We have to look at this movie the way we look at Tom Sawyer: It’s about the nature of male homo-social activity in all its dumb, goofy weirdness, its sweaty heat, its immature, hard-headed, soft-hearted confusion. If Linklater has regressed as a filmmaker, at least he’s giving us a tale well-told, full of terrific performances: Blake Jenner, like the lead in Boyhood is the least charismatic of the bunch, only this time it’s mostly because he’s forced to be, essentially playing the straight man. Jake is a convenient character for Linklater (something Nicholson points out in her review). He’s everything Linklater needs him to be: smart, cute, talented, thoughtful, less of an ape than the rest of the guys. But Jenner’s performance is good: he’s likable, and he doesn’t put on a show like the other guys do.

Everybody Wants Some!! wouldn’t be half as good without its cast. All of them look so familiar, yet almost none of them are famous: Jenner appeared on Glee (he looks a little bit like a young Matt Dillon); J. Quenton Johnson has enough personality for three actors; I kept feeling I’d seen Wyatt Russell before (his character Willoughby is the one who introduces the other guys to grass and hippie ideas about astrology and mind-reading), only to discover he’s the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn; Temple Baker, playing another one of the freshman, might be the younger brother of Chris Pine. Baker plays the likably dumb one: he speaks with the authority of a philosopher yet has no sense. Glen Powell, playing Finn, also talks philosophy, but only to get laid. He smokes a pipe and reads Jack Kerouac (like the annoying guys in my creative writing classes), but he knows how to adapt in order to better his chances of scoring. When he learns one girl prefers quiet men, he clams up, and she jumps him.

Perhaps Amy Nicholson’s scolding is deserved. The women in this movie operate exactly as the men expect them to, but it’s possible to read this too as part of Linklater’s critique. He’s showing us fantasy rather than reality. But I agree: We do need more juicy, well-drawn roles for women. All you need to do is watch All About Eve and see what kind of movie you’ll get with three or four excellent parts for actresses.

Human Middle Finger Melissa McCarthy Cannot Save 'The Boss' From Itself

In The Boss, Melissa McCarthy is like a human-size middle finger capped with a sprig of too-perfectly coiffed red hair. She dominates every scene she’s in, but like the moronic Tammy, holding the beleaguered fast food restaurant employees hostage, she does so by force. You will laugh at me, McCarthy seems to be screaming. And many do, despite the fact that The Boss is an almost total embarrassment, save for a few well-constructed scenes. McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, celebrity CEO. The first time we see Michelle, she’s headlining some swanky financial self-help conference, where she emerges onto a glittering stage like a rock star, accompanied by dancers and belting out some wretched hip hop song. The rapping is just about as painful as all those pratfalls McCarthy stages in her pandering attempt to make us love her comedy.

Michelle is someone who’s earned the freedom to be obnoxious thanks to her immense wealth. The movie opens with scenes of young Michelle being dropped off at the orphanage, repeatedly, by various families who, like the kidnappers in “The Ransom of Red Chief,” soon regret choosing that kid. She’s that kid alright. We get three of these scenes, but nothing about them changes except the song playing in the car as Michelle is dumped back on the steps of the orphanage, the final time waving her middle finger and shouting obscenities as the rejecting parents speed off. That’s Melissa McCarthy’s lot in life: She must always play the women nobody wants, then spend the rest of the movie convincing us that her ugliness and selfishness are attractive, appealing, charmingly offbeat.

But even though the movie wants to revel in Michelle’s character flaws--The Boss relies heavily upon the conflict created by a hostile word or deed--it also wants to reform them. We can count on two things in McCarthy’s worst movies: A) That she will be almost unbearably nasty and B) that she will have to change for the better by the end.

Why this Victorian need to reform Michelle? The set-up is so obvious that we know Michelle’s problem from the start: She cannot let herself get close to others because she’s been rejected so many times. Thus, when Michelle is busted for insider trading and completely ruined, she’s forced to live with her put-upon ex-assistant Claire (played by Kristen Bell), who has a daughter named Rachel. We know why all this is happening: So that Michelle can learn THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY. Yes, family is so beautiful, if only you can find the right family; and you shouldn’t let your horrible family poison your image of the ideal family, because, FAMILY!

For a movie this bawdy (full of raucous jeers and profane outbursts and cartoonish violence) to embrace such treacly sentiments feels like a cop-out. As a writer, McCarthy doesn't seem to understand her own merits. This is the second time McCarthy deserves the blame for coughing up a bad movie vehicle. The wretched Tammy provided us with the first inklings that McCathy works better with other people’s material. She and husband Ben Falcone worked out the script for both Tammy and The Boss, and Falcone directed them both. They start with the premise that McCarthy embodies a certain brand of offensive chaos and they run with it.

McCarthy is at her best under the direction of Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Spy), who knows how to unleash her like a stick of dynamite with great comic effect. Even when they’re falling down or saying something outrageous, the characters McCarthy plays in Bridesmaids and Spy keep their dignity. They're capable women, and they aren't merely the butt of someone else's joke. And even though there's something effortlessly wicked and amusing about that look Melissa McCarthy gets on her face when she's whispering horrible threats while forcing a deadly smile, in The Boss she never overcomes the obnoxiousness of her character. 

The story of Michelle’s attempts to restore her financial greatness is promising, but it's executed poorly. Michelle creates a sort-of Girl Scouts for Profit, where the girls actually get to keep a percentage of the brownies they sell. But, when she gets too close to Claire (whose brownie recipe is responsible for the company’s success) and Rachel, Michelle sells the business to a rival CEO (and former lover) played by Peter Dinklage. She screws over her business partner all because of her pathological fear of connection and rejection. The act feels tired and meaningless, especially when we can already predict the outcome. 

The Boss fails because it doesn’t have the nerve to go all the way: It can be brassy and offensive up to a point, but only because it will self-correct in the end. The final 20 minutes, in which Michelle, Claire, and Claire’s banal love interest try to steal a contract to save their business, are a total misfire, riddled with missed opportunities and yawn-inducing clichés. It fails too because McCarthy and Falcone do not want to create a more complex character: Why can’t Michelle be both offensive and charming? Why do Michelle’s flaws have to be so easily diagnosed? When Barbara Stanwyck doesn’t reform in The Lady Eve, it’s because she’s exactly how she wants to be, and she’s managed to win her man to boot, without compromising her criminal values. The Boss demands so much from us: it shouldn’t demand that we swallow its Hallmark ending too.

With Annie Mumulo, Kristen Schaal, and Kathy Bates (who plays Michelle's mentor/sworn enemy, and adds some texture to her three minutes of screen time).

The Birdcage

The Birdcage is the 1996 remake of the French comedy La Cage aux Folles, from 1978, given 1990s Hollywood comedy treatment, and directed by Mike Nichols with middling results. The film is about two gay men named Armand and Albert (Robin Williams and Nathane Lane) who run a popular night club in South Beach, and their son, Val (Dan Futterman), the product of Williams’s singular attempt at heterosexuality. His real mom (Christine Baranski) has kept her distance from him, so the flamboyant Albert (whose popular drag persona “Starina” is a regular feature of the night club) is more like a mother to him. The film is about the mad comic hi-jinks that ensue when a gay couple tries to act straight for their son’s future in-laws, a Conservative senator (played by Gene Hackman) and his wife (Dianne Wiest).

Mike Nichols often botched comedy. Working Girl, which is touted as a classic of the 80s, never really catches fire. The Birdcage gets quite funny late in the game, but not before a series of drawn-out scenes of Armand and Albert essentially breaking up and getting back together repeatedly. (Albert becomes such a cliché that he’s totally irritating until the final act, when he steals the show.) Nichols has done good work, but his comedies have never really worked. Nichols, perhaps because he began his career with “important” films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, never found that lightness of touch that seemed a second language to the great comedy directors like Preston Sturges. Nichols’s conception of comedy is to go grandiose: Working Girl is a yuppie Cinderella. Postcards from the Edge comes closest to this lightness of touch, but it never stops straining for prestige long enough to be fun and relaxed. Even Nichols’s greatest film, The Graduate, never worked as a comedy for me: it always felt too wistful and tinged with longing and regret to be taken as a joke, no matter how hip it might have been in 1967.

The Birdcage isn’t wistful or tinged with longing, nor is it particularly hip: It’s desperately trying to be, but its conception of gay people is narrow and dated now: They’re all flamboyant emotional time bombs. Robin Williams’ character is the most reserved of the bunch (he has surprisingly few Robin Williams-y moments, and they’re short enough that they amuse rather than pander to us), and it’s strange to see him underplaying here, although it’s admittedly refreshing.

Where The Birdcage both falters and succeeds is in its casting. The cast is so good—not just Williams and Lane but Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest, Hank Azzaria as the sassy, aged-out but still tight Guatemalan houseboy, and Christine Baranski—that Nichols basically coasts on their talent. He doesn’t bother to shape the scenes, and thus the movie lies there like a wilted mint leaf under the draining Florida sun.

Some of the film’s brightest moments involve senator Hackman’s attempts to cover up his colleague’s scandalous death: The two of them served on some high-minded morality committee, but his colleague has just dropped dead in a hotel room where he was spending the night with an under-age black prostitute. The film is perceptive about hypocritical moral values and how they prevent people from really seeing each other with compassion and humanity.

Finally, in the last act, The Birdcage picks up steam. Albert, who’s been asked not to attend the dinner of the two families because of his gayness, emerges in full drag pretending to be Armand’s wife, and fools everyone. It’s a tour de force performance and this extended scene almost achieves the comic lunacy of the great screwball comedies The Birdcage partly imitates.