One -- no -- TWO Good Films
You choose: A comedy ("Everybody Wants Some!!") or a tragedy ("Oslo, August 31st") for the end of summer.
For the last week of August, here are two good movies, both perched at the end of summer: One looks forward to an autumn full of prospects and potential, and the other gazes back at a spring full of regrets.
The first is “Everybody Wants Some!!” (2016, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on Hoopla, for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere), director Richard Linklater’s unofficial follow-up to his 1993 classic, “Dazed and Confused.” That film took place during the last days of high school, 1976, while “Everybody Wants Some!!” (the title is from a Van Halen song) is about the run-up to college in 1980 – specifically, the baseball team’s training period in the weeks before school starts. It’s very much a Guy Movie about the comedy of camaraderie – the pranks and rivalries and boredom and bonding – but it’s also about the way that leaving high school behind for a wider world can open the door to any number of possible new yous.
There’s very little plot – a warning to some of you and a come-on to others – but events are mostly seen from the POV of Jake (Blake Jenner), a raw-boned freshman and pitching hotshot who gets his confidence knocked down and rebuilt from his first day at the players’ dorm, which is a frat by any other name. Over the course of the film, the characters go to a disco, a country-and-western bar, a punk club, an art-student party, changing costumes and notions of personal identity as they go. “It sort of begs the question of who we are,” Jake realizes, and, well, yeah, isn’t that what college is for?
Linklater’s ironic, enlightened embrace of human absurdity is on full display here, and it punctures any macho posturing as soon as it rears its head, most spectacularly in the person of psycho-nerd pitcher Niles (Juston Street), who can get competitive over a breakfast cereal. But the cast is full of game young actors easing into their roles: Glenn Powell as a motormouthed ladies’ man, Will Brittain as a country rube, and the wondrously woolly Wyatt Russell – son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn – as the surfer-stoner pitching guru Willoughby. In one scene Willoughby holds court in a dorm room hazy with bong smoke and patiently explains to the younger players why “Fearless,” from the 1971 album “Meddle,” is the best thing that Pink Floyd ever recorded. In my 2016 review, I noted “Because he is correct, I am awarding ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’ an extra half-star.”
The women in the movie are wise, wary, and in control of their own destinies, and that very much includes Zoey Deutch – another second-gen Hollywood kid – as Beverly, a theater brat with whom Jake sparks a potentially genuine romance. That “potentially” is both the movie’s pleasure and its point. “Everybody Wants Some!!” shines late summer sunlight on that brief window in a person’s life when they know who they are but can still be anybody they want.
“Oslo, August 31st” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, 2011, for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere) is the exact opposite, a drama about man who’s used up all his lives and is wondering if there’s anybody left. As the title implies, it’s a day in the life of Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie, above), a recovering heroin addict in his 30s revisiting the city of his misspent youth and haunting old friends and places like a ghost. Directed by the gifted, observant Joachim Trier (“The Worst Person in the World”) from a 1931 novel that was previously filmed by Louis Malle as “The Fire Within” (1963), it’s a tremendously tender story in which the hero’s distance from society gives him a terrible clarity about the human condition, including his own. In my 2012 review, I wrote: “Lie, a gifted nonprofessional who appeared in [Trier’s] ‘Reprise’’ (he’s a doctor in real life), has the long, pale face of a fallen saint. He’s good at showing us Anders’s protective shell snapping shut and also the moments where hopelessness gives way to bleak humor. A scene in a cafe, the hero eavesdropping on the conversations around him as Trier’s camera gently shifts focus from table to table, is filled with a profound love and sadness for our daily banalities, the sort only an exile can appreciate.
“’Oslo’’ is filled with a variety of voices, in fact — the murmurs of the title city’s denizens and outcasts, captured with some of the same soulfulness as the overheard prayers in ‘Wings of Desire.’’ As Berlin was in Wim Wenders’s classic, Oslo is itself a character here — the source of childhood memories, the failed or compromised promise of adulthood. ‘I remember how free I felt,’’ says one of Anders’s fellow addicts of arriving in the city as a youth, ‘and then I realized how small Oslo is.’ The movie is alive to the curious grace with which we treasure our disappointments.”
It's the kind of film whose sadness leaves you feeling blessed to have experienced it – blessed to be here to experience it. If you want a pick-me-up, go with “Everybody Wants Some!!” But if you’re yearning for the kind of movie that stays with you for the long haul, here it is.
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