Tag: Richard Linklater

Everybody Wants Some!!

Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to “Dazed and Confused” takes place in a Texas college in the ’80s.

everybody-wants-some-PosterBetween the mud wrestling, the promiscuous sex, the time spent driving around on the hunt for tail, playing ping pong and talking endlessly about baseball, there’s more than a little wish fulfillment going on in “Everybody Wants Some!!” Richard Linklater’s latest is actually more personal to him than his previous film “Boyhood,” an ‘80s throwback reflecting on his college days playing baseball in Texas.

Linklater has grown a little skeezier than usual, turning his crop of characters into raging pussy hounds, reducing the substantive female characters to just one, laying it on thick with innumerable idioms for talking about your dick, and just a little nudity for good measure. But rather than Linklater remaking “Porky’s,” he has the depth and maturity to show that the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. If college is a place where you find yourself, Linklater knows that at some point you have to grow out of this world and find a real identity.

And that combination of low-brow male bonding and high-brow soul searching make for a near perfect comedy. Like its spiritual sibling “Dazed and Confused,” the film put a stupid grin on my face.

As in “Dazed and Confused,” you immediately get a nostalgic sense of halcyon summer days. But this time the kids are heading off to college instead of high school, the time period has been shifted to the early ‘80s, and rather than the last day of high school, “Everybody Wants Some!!” starts a few days before college classes kick off. All the while, Linklater reminds us of a ticking clock to show how childhood behavior quickly slips away. And it didn’t take him 12 years to do it either.

Jake (Blake Jenner) is a new freshman pitcher for Southern Texas University’s star baseball team. The whole squad lives together in a pair of houses, and in these cramped quarters everyone has an air of royalty, competitiveness and one-upsmanship in their dirty talk. The veteran player McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) says upfront that he doesn’t like pitchers and conceitedly blocks Jake’s way into the next room. One housemate is trying to fill up a water bed, but his roommate bemoans that having sex on a waterbed is like having sex on top of another really fat woman.

Linklater’s screenplay toes the line here between winking misogyny and actual bad taste, but it regardless captures the mood and spirit of that jock, locker room culture. The characters’ various quirks and their pursuit to get laid are all in good fun. Linklater doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, and while this baseball team can still fly off the handle in their competitive nature, neither do these characters.

Part of that has to do with the fact that as much as these boys ogle girls, they’re just as much looking at each other. For an article in Vulture, Kyle Buchanan recently wondered if “Everybody Wants Some!!” might accidentally be the gayest movie of the year. The fashion in Linklater’s ‘80s Texas is all short pants, cropped baseball tees, long hair and soft colors, and the boys crimp and style with the same gusto they display on the field. They’re all superficial and a tad effeminate in their bro-ey masculinity, with one even checking out his self-proclaimed “best ass on campus” in the mirror.

They spend so much time on how they look that Linklater finds a way to ease these characters into the adults they might become. In one of his Linklaterisms, the intellectual stoner Finnegan (Glen Powell) explains to young Jake that, “You bring who you are, not what they want.” Upon striking out yet again at the disco club, the boys put on some cowboy boots and try their luck at the country bar, then wander over to a punk rock show with the band playing a moshing cover of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme. “It’s not phony, it’s adaptive.” Plenty of movies have approached coming-of-age, but rarely has trying on different hats felt this cavalier, laid back and fun.

The cast of “Dazed and Confused” included early work from Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich and Adam Goldberg, and their complex characters and performances were signs that they’d one day be stars. The cast of “Everybody Wants Some!!” is equally rich. Between stand up work from Jenner, Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell and particularly the film’s sole female character played by the luminous Zoey Deutch, it’s just a question of which one or how many will break out in the years to come.

And while “Everybody Wants Some!!” may not be the instant classic “Dazed and Confused” is, or as universal a coming-of-age story as “Boyhood,” Linklater has tapped into a time and place that many will love to revisit again and again, a smile on their face every time they do.

4 stars

Rapid Response: Slacker

Richard Linklater’s first film “Slacker” is a cinematic experiment bucking narrative or constant characters.

SlackerposterRichard Linklater was featured in a documentary with another famous director James Benning. The two were watching “Sweet Smell of Success” together, and 10 minutes before the end, as a random man speaks with Burt Lancaster, Benning made a casual joke saying, “And then we just follow that guy, right at the climax of the movie.” Linklater, who was just finishing editing “Slacker” thought to himself, “Uh oh, I just made an entire movie like that.”

And I thought nothing happened in “Boyhood“. Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”, his first film, is strictly an experiment. It bucks narrative or protagonists altogether and simply wanders around Austin, Texas observing people, life and behavior. Since 1991, Linklater has coalesced this ploy into the most honest, thoughtful, introspective and emotional cinema he’s making today, from the walking and talking romances of “Before Midnight” to the documentary hybrid “Bernie“.

“Slacker” lacks these traditional narrative devices because Linklater wanted to make a point that audiences could relate to people not on story but on personalities, moments, events and the things we experience everyday. To say nothing happens is missing the point. A lot happens in every day; it’s just a matter of choosing which details to focus on, and what those details can tell us about ourselves.

Linklater lays out his thesis right up front, making a cameo in the backseat of a cab traveling from the train station. “Have you ever had a dream,” he asks, “where everything feels so life like, but nothing happens?” That’s “Slacker” in a nutshell, but for as lazy and uneventful as the actions of his characters, Linklater doesn’t rest on his laurels, and makes pains to think of these things profoundly. “Every thought you have is a choice you make, and they all become separate realities.”

It sounds merely like college psychology quad talk at first, but Linklater then deliberately avoids telling a story to make this point. A woman is hit by a car and is lying dead in the street. Someone says to call the police and help her, but instead of hanging around and learning to find out more about the woman or what happens next, Linklater goes out of his way to follow a passerby into his home. Later, a teenager is walking to his friend’s house, and an older man starts keeping pace with him and talking his head off about conspiracy theories. He’s allowed to ramble, and rather than confront him to stop and cause conflict, the teen arrives at his destination, the two carry on with their day, and we carry on with the next couple.

“Slacker” has an undeniable rhythm to these little observations, each one so nuanced and detailed in their momentary slices of life. Some of the people are funny and awkward (one woman offers two friends Madonna’s supposed pap smear, thinking it to be valuable), others are thoughtful and philosophical (“Perhaps human beings aren’t meant to be happy. We’re always enslaving ourselves”), and others still are ironically morbid (“The next person who passes us will be dead within a fortnight”).

Linklater spends individual moments with a mentally challenged person, a hapless loser, an annoying hipster activist, a conspiracy theory weirdo, a lazy homebody, and kids who have discovered a way to get Coke out of the vending machine for free. Like “Boyhood”, these characters feel developed enough that we could spend an entire film with any one. But this is cinema, and life is endlessly more fascinating when we take the time to look around.

Boyhood

Richard Linklater filmed actor Ellar Coltrane over 12 years.

“Boyhood” isn’t a movie; it’s a time capsule. Filmed over 12 years, Director Richard Linklater has done the remarkable and captured a life in progress. It’s the themes of every adolescent, coming of age story rolled into one journey. This is a movie that you feel you can live inside, and one that feels like it could continue forever.

Linklater’s idea seems simple and high concept on paper. Let’s make a movie watching a 5-year-old age to 18. Let’s have him deal with family, childhood, puberty, life choices, romance, sex, and let’s watch it unfold in real-time. Let’s take the adolescent life lessons that come packed into a few months, weeks or a single day in movies like Linklater’s own “Dazed and Confused” or “School of Rock” and apply them over the course of a lifetime.

The remarkable challenge though is that it’s never been done. To make a single film over such a lengthy period of time, to wrangle actors year in and year out and to take the time to watch a person grow presents enormous challenges.

“Boyhood” has an uncanny sense of self and time, one in which the machinations of the movie are as unpredictable and volatile as life itself. It remarkably captures the culture and the feeling throughout the 2000s, understanding ramifications about the movie’s present, despite the impossibility of predicting their relevance in the future. Linklater remains true to his characters and is perceptive to their growth years after their lives and the culture around them have been rewritten.

There has been remarkable hype surrounding “Boyhood”, but it’s a fact that never in the history of cinema has a movie been so in tuned to how we grow, how we change and how life happens around us, simply because never before has a director devoted as much time and patience to his subjects as Linklater does here. Continue reading “Boyhood”

Before Midnight

With “Before Midnight,” Richard Linklater continues to deepen the themes in this beautiful franchise.

If there’s one thing “Before Midnight,” Richard Linklater’s powerfully moving threequel to one of the best love sagas in movie history, has to teach us about middle age, it’s that life is no longer all about you.

Linklater’s most daring addition to “Midnight” could be having two completely different characters walking and talking in tandem, not solely Jesse and Celine. The opposite was once true, and the plotless, intimate focus on just these two young lovers was what made 1995’s “Before Sunrise” so effortlessly experimental. By adding a few characters who fall into familiar conventions, “Midnight” may be the least experimental of Linklater’s trilogy, but he continues to deepen these themes and lives in ways that couldn’t have been imagined if this trilogy was preconceived. Continue reading “Before Midnight”

Side by Side: Clerks. and Before Sunrise

“Clerks.” and “Before Sunrise” are two very different films, but they’re both cult indie ’90s movies that share much in common.

“Side by Side” is a new series I hope to continue in addition to my “Rapid Response” reviews. But rather than a quick reaction to a single film, these pieces intend to take two seemingly different films, watched in succession, and find their common ground.

“I’m not even supposed to be here today!” That’s Dante’s final plea in “Clerks.” but it’s also the reason Jesse and Celine fell in love in “Before Sunrise.”

Somehow that accidental situation feels more real as a result, but still it’s a wonderful fantasy, one that shows if only things had gone as they were supposed to, it might’ve never been.

“Clerks.” and “Before Sunrise” are two very different films, one a cult comedy and the other a cult romance, and yet each is a mid-90’s indie darling that captures a gritty, down to Earth human mentality with intellectual, thought provoking, ordinary and innovative dialogue that, in all actuality, could not be more of a beautiful auteur fantasy.

Both films wear their naturalism on their sleeves. For “Clerks,” the grimy black & white and amateurish acting scream DIY instead of Hollywood, regardless of how Kevin Smith first wanted it to look. And “Before Sunrise” defiantly resists a plot; the love story is the reason they’re together, but the conversation as they do nothing but walk around and play pinball in dingy German bars is why we stay.

Clerks.

Watching the two in succession shows how even in “naturalism” there is a distinct difference in style. It would be somewhat hypocritical to think “Clerks” is the more vulgar or morbid film given how often Celine and Jesse discuss their first crushes, the certainty of death and their desperate urge to have sex in the park (twice! if you’ve seen the second one). Similarly, it would be naïve to call “Sunrise” the more inherently intelligent, as Smith models “Clerks.” loosely off “The Divine Comedy,” he deconstructs scenes and comedic expectations with ease and his character Randal plays like some Shakespearean jester appearing and interjecting wisdom and mischief into Dante’s life. Continue reading “Side by Side: Clerks. and Before Sunrise”

Rapid Response: School of Rock

I’ve got a cousin who is about 15 right now. I don’t really know what kind of music he’s into, but he’s probably at the stage I was at his age, maybe still in a mostly Beatles phase and liking other good music but not quite there yet as someone who lives and breathes it. I always wondered what kind of person I’d be if I was listening to Arcade Fire in 2004 when I was 14, so I had hoped to get him started on the right foot. Maybe I didn’t need to try and turn him into a misanthrope by giving him as much Cure, Smiths and Joy Division as I did, but the question remains: How do you get someone, either a kid or someone who is behind the curve, into loving music?

Well for one, you could show them “School of Rock.” This was a movie I had watched a lot from about the ages of 12 to 15, and I wondered if it would hold up as well now that I’m 22 and like music a little more complex than the ACDC the movie salutes. Jack Black’s Dewey Finn still lives in that “Golden Age” of meat and potatoes ’70s rock that would soon transform itself into ’80s hair metal and Spinal Tap self parody, and you could probably learn more about good music from the likes of “Almost Famous” or “High Fidelity,” which also stars Jack Black.

But the reason this is still a great movie to have on a parent’s DVD shelf for their kids is that it instills in them these exciting values of rebellion and thrashing out to epic rock without dipping into any of the cynical territory that usually goes along with it. Of course it mildly alludes to drinking, sex, drugs and violence, but those things are mostly frowned upon and afterthoughts to the idea of changing the world with a face-melting guitar solo by a 10-year-old. It maintains a sense of innocent rebellion by telling “The Man” to “step-off” by singing in very blunt terms, “I had to do my chores today/so I am really ticked off!”

Jack Black is really at the core of the movie’s good-hearted vibes, not the kids. He puts on that air of “don’t give a crap” when he first walks into the children’s classroom, but he quickly drops that act and is otherwise brimming enthusiasm and sincerity at every moment he gets to listen to these kids perform. Take that first scene where he discovers if they all can play. The scene works way too well in getting these kids up and rocking at once, but the movie doesn’t jam obvious references down your throat, and Black puts so much energy into cartoonish hand gestures and memorable one-liners (“you turn it on its side and ‘cello’ you got a bass!”) that you, nor your kids, will mind.

Black is his own vocal instrument, and he can give the idea of exciting rock while being funny doing it. Most kids today have heard shredding guitar solos on their dad’s Zeppelin albums, but they maybe shrug in ways previous generations didn’t. Black does one better by performing every bit of his own ridiculous song. Kids will remember his goofing around, not the music itself, but they’ll get the idea.

And by the movie’s end, both in the live performance on stage and in the post-credits sequence, “School of Rock” delivers everything as promised. Each of the kids, who all have their individual moments of token problems and growth, get to strut their stuff in one epic finale. It’s simple, ’70s rock, but it has the style and the attitude just right.

Bernie

Most of us have something of a bullshit detector when it comes to judging people. If they seem too good to be true, they probably are. “Bernie” is a film that always teeters on the edge of self-parody and cynicism, but it carefully tries to prove in its 98 minutes that its title character is as good and noble as he seems.

It tells the true story of a mortician (sorry, Funeral Director. Sorry again, Assistant Funeral Director) in Carthage, Texas who is one of the most loved people in town. Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) makes his work into an art, revealing his care, eloquence and theatrics in an opening scene where Bernie demonstrates to a classroom the procedure to preparing a body for casketing. Director Richard Linklater gets documentary style testimonials from Carthage townspeople, some character actors and some people who really knew Bernie, but you wouldn’t know the difference, to say just how wonderful he was.

“He had the ability to make the world feel good,” says one local. These people are essential to the portrayal of Bernie. One guy explains the difference between the regions of Texas, how you have the Dallas snobs, Austin liberals, San Antonio Tex Mex, West Texas hicks and finally the good hearted simple folk of the small town of Carthage. “In a small town, we always expect the worst, but also expect the best,” says another.

And Bernie was the best of them. The way they talk about him is so optimistically glossy, so disarming and so near ridiculous in Bernie’s humanitarian capabilities, including showing his love for the DLOL’s (Dear Little Old Ladies) and singing in church. For a while you think you’re watching a Christopher Guest movie about simpletons in the Deep South, and Linklater intentionally keeps you guessing.

Because before long, Bernie starts a relationship with Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a bitter, wealthy widow who is hated in town and eventually makes Bernie her servant. “She’d rip you a brand new, three bed, two bath asshole,” says one townsperson, a line so good that if it didn’t actually come from a real townsperson you wish it was.

She proves so controlling of Bernie that he suffers an out-of-body moment and shoots and kills Marjorie with an air rifle. He takes her money and begins donating around the community, and no one seems to notice she’s gone because she’s so disliked. Eventually Bernie is caught, and a District Attorney, Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), begins to raise all of our old questions about Bernie as soon as we start to see him as a loveable saint.

Is he gay? Is he evil? Is he putting on an act? Is he a serial killer? Is he driven crazy by his religion? Why doesn’t he have any greed, vices or flaws? Why would he hang out with Marjorie otherwise? Why does he dress and act the way he does, with a lilting voice, colorful polo shirts and a tidy haircut beneath a silly hat?

The beauty of Jack Black’s performance here is that he is disarming, innocent and likeable, and yet he’s never a caricature. This is a character ripe for satire, and the movie is always on that fine line, but Black delivers a very sincere performance.

Similarly, McConaughey has a field day with his role. His haircut and glasses belong to another decade, and here he’s even showing a touch of gray. He’s sincere in not mocking or judging Bernie either, but he makes clear he has his suspicions and his own morals to uphold. What’s one of the tipoffs in assuming Bernie’s sexuality? “And the kicker is, he always wore sandals.”

Linklater has told a really special story here by making it about character, not story at all. His blend of docu-realism and theatrical vitality in a few surprise song and dance numbers keeps us in tow, always wondering what we’re missing about Bernie but ultimately content in showing that this guy is as good as can be.

3 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Dazed and Confused

I have fond memories of the long evenings as a freshman driving or walking around with nothing to do, looking for a party and a cup of beer so we could continue to stand around at that party with nothing to do, that is until we left and continued looking to do nothing.

The cult high school stoner comedy “Dazed and Confused” is just that; it’s a film about feeling out of place, feeling drunk, feeling adventurous, feeling awkward, feeling anxious and yet feeling loved. Some would say that just about sums up the complete high school experience, and Richard Linklater does it in one night.

“I did the best I could while I was stuck in this place,” says one character near the end of the film, which is about all you can ask of a teenager, and possibly all you can ask of a teen comedy. It follows a group of incoming freshman students and incumbent seniors in the twilight hours after their last day of school. The year is 1976, the only shirt with writing on it says Adidas, the drive-in is playing Hitchcock’s “Family Plot,” every kid’s bedroom has a “Dark Side of the Moon” poster on the wall, and Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” is playing in the night club. Those were the days. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Dazed and Confused”