••• The International Writers Magazine: Review

Everybody Wants Some!! Director and Writer: Richard Linklater Starring Blake Jenner, Juston Street, Ryan Guzman, Wyatt Russell, Temple Baker, Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell • Sam Hawksmoor review A belated companion piece to Dazed & Confused by Richard Linklater (who gave the world Ben Affleck) we are now in 1980 in the first days before College classes begin at a Texas University.

Baseball jocks have gotten themselves a run down mansion courtesy of the local government and much alcohol will be drunk, drugs consumed and girls squirreled into bedrooms.  It’s Animal House lite and gives us rituals and behaviour that would frowned upon by safe place obsessed students today.

Luckily this is not John Belushi going crazy but a fairly sensitive observation of male bonding and freshmen hazing with much sex and booze. Glen Powell as Finnegan is the smart one channelling Ryan Gosling, he has the best role and best lines with this meathead bunch.

Everyone looks astonishingly old for their years and each student is vaguely aware that they are lucky to be there, on the team and somewhere in the back of their minds some education will have to be had.

Everybody Wants Some!! is entertaining, trivial to be sure, but a nice marker of a lost time, undeniably sexist and well performed by the cast who are a great deal more real than the super heroes you probably went to see instead.  Standout performances come from Blake Jenner who is a young ex-high school hotshot pitcher jock looking for love and Zoey Deutch playing a bright A student majoring in Drama and English and who claimed she liked the ‘quiet one in the back’ when the boys were out cruising for tail on campus.

This little movie is out there somewhere – try to see it if you can.

© Sam Hawksmoor 2016
see J&K 4Ever a story about love and survival in a post-apocalypse

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