“American Animals” is part documentary, part fictitious con job.
It’s the tale of one of the strangest robberies in history: four college students pilfering some very valuable books from the private library of Transylvania University in the early 2000s. Writer/director Bart Layton takes the audacious step of casting actors to portray the young men as they planned and carried out the heist, then intercutting this with interviews with the actual participants today, now in their 30s.
Warren Lipka (Evan Peters) is the ringleader, a headstrong athlete who doesn’t seem very interested in sports, school or much of anything. But he and dweeby art student Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) become obsessed with the idea of taking the books, valued at several million dollars. At first both think the other is serious, while they’re just playing around.
Soon it becomes clear, though, that this is more than just a passing fancy. They enlist Chas Allen (Blake Jenner), a rich doof, as their getaway driver, and Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson) as their logistics expert. They track movements, plan the timing, prepare elaborate costumes as old men and even meet up with fences to buy the hot books.
As this is all going on, the movie cuts to interviews with the real men recollecting the events we’ve just seen. They often contest the validity of the movie version, saying it’s just Hollywood hokum.
The film starts out as fun ‘n’ games, but then a strange thing happens. We start to realize these are real men who made an audacious and incredibly stupid move, and it’s still affecting their lives to this day. It was essentially an impulse decision, in long form. They became so enamored of the idea of doing this thing, they never stopped to think if they should.
Entertaining and oddly affecting, “American Animals” is less a crime story than the tale of young men who discovered themselves through a bungled heist.
Bonus features are decent, and include a deleted scene, making-of featurettes, a gallery of photo stills from production and a feature-length commentary track featuring the director and cast.
We see a lot of teenagers in the movies, but it’s almost always an ersatz version. They’re much smarter, braver, more beautiful and interesting than real teens. Not to mention, they’re generally played by actors ranging from mid-20s up to nearly AARP.
The last time I spotted a zit on the face of a movie teen, I considered it a major triumph.
Audiences are used to the chicanery and understand they’re watching Hollywood Teens, not any honest attempt to depict the real thing. That is what it is, but it does create an emotional disconnect from the people we’re watching.
“The Edge of Seventeen” is a keener and truer take on teendom than we’ve seen in a while.
Hailee Steinfeld -- actually a teenager -- plays Lakewood High School junior Nadine, who has but one friend in the world and trouble connecting to anybody else. Her widowed mother (Kyra Sedgwick) is frazzled and harried, and older brother Darian (Blake Jenner) is handsome, popular and wants nothing to do with Nadine.
Nadine likes to wear weird clothes, trade insults with her burnt-out history teacher, Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson), and fantasize about hooking up with local bad boy Nick (Alexander Calvert), whom she’s never even spoken to. She’s dorky, clever, wickedly funny and rather glorious. But she sees herself as awkward and unloved, and that’s a hard feeling to shake.
Things go from bad to worse when her best (really, only) friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), hooks up with brother Darian at a party. After an appropriate freak-out period, she’s willing to abide the episode as a one-off -- but then Darian and Krista decide to make it a permanent thing.
Seeing this as the ultimate betrayal, Nadine launches herself into a vortex of loneliness and increasingly bad behavior. She sees herself as an outcast who’s grown content with her small, stable patch of emotional turf. When that’s yanked away, Nadine feels homeless and alone.
Written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, “Seventeen” is narratively unstructured and messy, but it’s also dashingly original and full of juice. The characters behave in a way that’s consistent with their impulses rather than just to further the plot down the road.
Steinfeld is astonishingly frank and vulnerable as Nadine in a way that recalls Molly Ringwald’s better movies with John Hughes. There’s one scene where she’s peeing in a public restroom and suddenly looks up and asks God why he never gave her a break. It’s played for laughs, but also has unexpected poignancy.
Nadine’s relationship with Mr. Bruner also goes sideways from what we expect. Normally a caustic mentor type slowly warms to the youngster, but Harrelson always looks like he’d rather leave the room than bestow advice. Nadine berates him as a balding, lonely loser, and even goes so far as to offer the clichéd outcome herself: “You should date my mother!” But the movie keeps us guessing about him.
I also really liked Hayden Szeto as Erwin, a nerdy kid from school who has a huge crush on Nadine, but tries to play it off as coolly as he can – which is to say, not very much. He’s in many ways Nadine’s perfect male counterpart, trying to fake his way to social status and not fooling anyone. Like her, all he needs is to slow down, do what comes natural and don’t worry about the consequences.
You can pretty much say the same thing about teenager movies in general. Just allow the kids be kids … and maybe let them have a few pimples, too.
If you’d have told me six months ago that by the mid-point of 2016 my favorite movie would be a plotless paean to college sex, beer and rock ‘n’ roll, I’d have called you a moonbat.
But here we are.
“Everybody Wants Some!!” is writer/director Richard Linklater’s ode to his own college days in Texas, where the members of the baseball team carouse, chase girls and philosophize about their hedonistic existence. It stars a bunch of unknown actors in a true ensemble performance where no one character dominates, but something like a couple dozen each get a share of the limelight.
Set in the four days before classes start, we fellow the players roam from room to room and party to party. They drink, dance, imbibe and partake of other earthly pleasures. There really is no story, but somehow from this aromatic stew of encounters emerges a recognizable theme of young people stepping out into the world and finding themselves.
I hesitate even to name any of the cast, since pointing out one brings up other names that should be mentioned, but here goes. Finnegan (Glen Powell) and McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) are senior ball players determined to win the championship come spring, and party hard until then. One is brutish and blunt, the other a silver-tongued cad, but together they’re bona fide leaders who set the tone for the rest.
Jake (Blake Jenner) is a freshman pitcher and our entry point into the bacchanalia. He’s not so much the main character as the locus of activities; we follow him around and discover this world as he does. Zoey Deutch plays the smart, sassy woman he meets on the first day and lackadaisically pursues from there on.
Set in 1980, the movie is so effective at evoking a time and place: coming down the off-ramp of the 1970s, itself a sort of mellowing of ‘60s ideals and chaos, coupled with the upbeat energy of the 1980s and a consequence-free atmosphere before AIDS and hard drugs killed the party for good.
Essentially an unofficial sequel to Linklater’s 1993 “Dazed and Confused” breakout, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is offbeat filmmaking at its best. Grab a brew (or something harder/smellier), kick back and drink it all in.
Bonus features are a bit lacking, probably due to the film’s poor box office showing. The DVD has exactly no extras, so you’ll have to spring for the Blu-ray to get them.
This includes “More Stuff That’s Not in the Movie” -- deleted and extended scenes; “Rickipedia,” based on one character’s fount of knowledge; “Baseball Players Can Dance,” a montage of the various music scenes, “History 101: Stylin’ in the 80s,” a featurette looking at the clothes and culture of the era; and “Skills Videos,” which features some of the abilities the actors had to hone for their roles (beyond chugging, that is).
"This is one of the best days of my life ... until tomorrow." --McReynolds
My God, I just loved the hell out of this movie.
Writer/director Richard Linklater is nearly unmatched in his skill at evoking a specific time, place and mood. His 1993 breakout film, "Dazed and Confused," looked at slacker high school kids in Texas circa 1976. Actually, it didn't just examine them, but plopped us right into their midst, attuned us to their vibe, made us feel like part of the crowd.
His newest -- and, I think, best -- film fast-forwards a few years to 1980, as those kids (or ones very much like them) move on to college. "Everybody Wants Some!!" is a haze of partying, drinking, doping, dancing and sex that unexpectedly segues into mystical profundity, as young people grow up fast and start to figure out who they are, even before classes start.
It's also a sports movie, but in the same sense as "Bull Durham," in that the real action happens off the field. We never even glimpse the baseball team at Southern Texas University playing in a game, just a single practice. Yet the sport remains central to the men's identities and outlook.
If it's possible for a movie to be all about sports without actually containing any, then this is it.
This is simply one of the best executions I've ever seen in ensemble acting, both as written in the screenplay by Linklater and played by a huge group of largely unknown actors. Each of the dozen or so players focused upon comes across as distinct and authentic. Even the shy freshman who becomes the target of jokes has his moment in the sun. Even the god-like seniors have instances of shortcomings.
The film is also a tiny bit autobiographical. Linklater played college baseball himself, and knows the rhythms and cadences of the team's speech and behavior like second nature. We see how they constantly bust on each other, turn everything into a competition, chase girls with the abandon of the pre-AIDS era. Yet they're supremely self-aware of their jock-itude, to use a made-up word they would probably embrace if they heard it.
These are the cool kids, but we witness how hard they work to make it look effortless.
You want a summary of the plot? I'm not really sure there is one. Set in the four days before classes begin, we follow the team as they migrant from party to party, prowling for girls, listening to music, smoking weed and dancing to different kinds of music.
They're rock 'n' roll guys in their souls, but disco is what the ladies want to dance to, so they put on their Tony Manero shirts and tight pants and shake their groove thing at the Sound Machine club. After that venue no longer becomes viable (for reasons you'll see), they move their act to the new urban cowboy saloon, and later a punk rock concert and theater student party. They joke about changing their clothes like camouflage to fit in -- wherever there's women, beer and a good time to be had.
I'd like to introduce you to all the characters, but I'd need to start a whole other review. Hours afteward, they're still living inside my head.
Jake (Blake Jenner) is the ostensible main character, a straight-arrow type, pitcher from a small California town. After some obligatory hazing, he's quickly assimilated into the motley crew, though pitchers as a rule are made to stand apart. Their job, after all, is to make them fail at theirs.
McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) and Finnegan (Glen Powell) are the seniors who unofficially run the team, different as night and day but united in their mission to win the championship come spring, and have a good time until then. McReynolds is a genuine pro prospect, strong as a bull and twice as intense. Finnegan is the resident philosopher/philanderer, a man without a plan who can talk himself into or out of any situation -- feminine undergarments, mostly.
There's also the insufferable wacko transfer pitcher (Justo Street) rumored to have a 95 mph fastball; the hick roommate with girlfriend problems (Will Brittain); the even-keeled black guy who takes Jake under his wing (J. Quinton Johnson); and Willoughby, the resident hippie who gives spacey ruminations on telepathy, guitar chord progressions and finding your inner freak.
(It doubtless sounds better after a few deep bong hits.)
Beverly (Zoey Deutch) is the smart girl who arrives at college with a typewriter in her car trunk; she blows off the seniors' enticements but favors Jake with a compliment, which later turns into the start of something.
There's a lot more I'd like to say about "Everybody Wants Some!!", but time and space run short. I haven't even mentioned the early '70s muscle cars the players all drive, the diverse smorgasbord soundtrack of period music, the snug T-shirts with piping on the sleeves and collars that show off the lean bodies. So much to experience, and think about after.
Mostly, what I'd like to do is go see the movie again, right now.
