Director Richard Linklater has made a spiritual follow-up to his stoner comedy classic Dazed and Confused. Is it also a hit? Critic Owen Gleiberman has an answer.
More than two decades after its release, Richard Linklater’s last-day-of-high-school comedy Dazed and Confused remains one of the most passionately celebrated cult films of the indie era, and with good reason.
It caught the aimlessless of 1976 with such uncanny verisimilitude that, watching it, you often feel like you’ve stepped into a time machine.
The film has a slacker party vibe that almost any teenager who’s grown up since can relate to, and Linklater let the members of his ensemble cast sprawl and collide with such spontaneity that Dazed is still the greatest Robert Altman film that Altman never made.
If Nashville and American Graffiti had a baby, it would look like Dazed and Confused.
A less obvious reason why Linklater’s film casts such a blissed-out spell is that it may be the most democratic teen movie in history. Football players, nattering geeks, pie-eyed stoners: in the ’76 of Dazed and Confused, all mingle as if they belong together, and that’s a crucial aspect of the film’s freewheeling grace.
So when you sit down to watch Everybody Wants Some!!, an aggressively punctuated ‘spiritual sequel’ to Dazed and Confused set during the weekend before the college year of 1980 begins, it’s a shock to realise that instead of the ebullient cross-section of student life you may be expecting, the film tells the story of… 10 good-looking jocks.
Tall dudes with coiffed shaggy hair and killer grins who spend their time snapping verbal towels at each other or trying out their pickup lines at house parties and clubs.
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