Dazed and Confused + Everybody Wants Some!

After a long, wet spring, summer seems to have finally arrived in Michigan. Kids are out of school, the weather is warm, and the longer, slower days have begun. Even though I watch movies year round, obviously, I have always associated movies with summer. Maybe because it’s blockbuster season or because it’s easier to get to the movies when my workload is lighter and the weather is nicer. 

Certain movies just feel like summer, and no two films do it better than director Richard Linklater’s sister films, Dazed and Confused from 1993 and Everybody Wants Some! from 2016. Even though they were made 23 years apart, the two movies are unified in tone and approach, and both evince a feeling of summer better than almost any other movies I’ve seen. 

 Dazed and Confused is set on the last day at a suburban Austin, Texas high school in 1976. There’s very little in the way of plot, per se, as the rambling, shaggy narrative follows close to a dozen main characters as they navigate the end of the school year and beginning of summer. Football players wrestle with whether or not to sign a pledge to not do drugs over the summer, while freshmen desperately try to escape the brutal hazing being administered by outgoing seniors. There are pervs, jocks, stoners, bullies, and wannabees everywhere, and each character is unique, fleshed out, and engaging. The film had early performances from Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Renee Zellweger, Adam Goldberg, and Mila Jovovich. What’s great about the film is how is perfectly captures the frightening and exhilarating finality and possibility of the last day, how summer just stretches out in front of you completely unmapped. You’re slightly sad to be leaving what’s become comfortable but excited by who you may become in the next year. The film also does an excellent job of conveying how terrifying and untethered adolescence can feel. It never clubs the viewer over the head with it, but you finish Dazed and Confused simultaneously glad you were a teenager once and overjoyed that you’re not anymore. 

 Everybody Wants Some! takes place during the final days of summer leading up to the first day of school at a Texas university in 1980. Like Dazed and Confused, the film doesn’t really have a central conflict but rather follows around a large ensemble of characters – in this case, members of the university baseball team as they adjust to each other as roommates and teammates, and try to meet girls and have a good time.

The period details throughout are spot on without being overbearing. The feathered hair, unironic mustaches, cars, and music all combine to transport audiences back to the waning days of the Carter administration and “Who Shot J.R.?” For those of us who lived through those days, it’s a pleasant, sometimes amusing journey back. Like Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some! features some great performances from young performers who undoubtedly will go on to bigger and better things later. Interestingly, two of the actors are children of well-known Hollywood. Zoey Deutch, who plays Beverly, the closest the film comes to a main female protagonist, is the daughter of Back to the Future’s Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch. Wyatt Russell who plays the stoner/philosopher/pitcher Willoughby is the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Both are standouts of charm in a film that’s filled with engaging performances.

Everybody Wants Some! does a good job at showing how life can be simultaneously profound and utterly mundane. At the film’s close, after a week of practicing all day and partying all night, school finally begins and two baseball players find themselves in the same class where the professor has written “Frontiers are where you find them.” Contemplating this deep thought, the two party-exhausted players promptly fall asleep as the lecture begins.

Both of Richard Linklater’s films are good natured, profane, funny, and nostalgic without being cloying. Both are a good reason to get out of the heat and enjoy a movie this summer.