Review: Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

* * *
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Tyler Hoechlin

Late in Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!!, the hero worries (as much as anyone in a film this laid back can be said to "worry") that he and his teammates might look like poseurs, having spent the weekend drifting in and out of various scenes around their college campus, going to a disco one night, a country and western bar the next, a punk show, and an interactive performance party put on by art students. His companion can only shrug. Isn't that what they're at college for? To try out different hats, free from the confines of their parents' homes and their adolescent identities and without being loaded down with all the responsibilities of adulthood, and see what fits. Though never as deep or poignant as Linklater's Boyhood or Before Midnight, nor quite as much fun as Dazed and Confused, to which this film acts as a spiritual sequel, Everybody Wants Some!! makes for a nice, gentle diversion, a film that is well-equipped to entertain even if it's not all that memorable.

Review: Waking Life (2001)

* * * *
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Wiley Wiggins

He can't always tell whether or not he's dreaming. At times he believes he's woken up, but as he goes about his business he picks up a clue that what he's experiencing isn't real and he's right back where he started, drifting from one philosophical conversation to the next. Richard Linklater's Waking Life is a film about dreams which aims to replicate the feeling of dreaming, submerging the viewer in a realm of deep, existential questions explored in a free flowing style, going "nowhere" but touching on everything. With its incredibly talky screenplay, loose narrative structure, and rotoscoped animation, Waking Life is a film that probably sounds like an acquired taste, the kind of exercise that only a film buff could love, but approached with an open mind, it's a film that I reckon can be embraced by any kind of viewer it's so engaging and utterly engrossing.

Review: Boyhood (2014)

* * * *
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater

I remember hearing about Richard Linklater's ambitious plan to film a movie over the course of a decade, allowing the actors to age naturally on screen as the story is being told, shortly before it started filming back in 2002 and thinking that it sounded like an incredibly interesting idea, but wondering how he would get around the gimmick inherent in the premise. The answer, as it turns out, was to make the film as if there is no gimmick at all, allowing each segment to exist within its own time without having those points in time become in any way the focal point. Boyhood is not a series of snapshots about what life was like in 2002 and then 2003 and then 2004, etc.; instead it manages to capture the rhythm of the steady flow of time as we grow and change during its course, ensuring that the story feels whole rather than like a series of pieces put together. Boyhood is a film that not every filmmaker could have pulled off with such grace, and Linklater makes it look and feel effortless. This movie is a masterpiece, plain and simple.