[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Everybody Wants Some: Structure Without Structure - Part 1 By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="Everybody Wants Some: Structure Without Structure - Part 1" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] This week we’re going to be looking at Richard Linklater's new film Everybody Wants Some. Richard Linklater has called this film a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. He has also referred to it as a sequel to Boyhood, his brilliantly structured (although very unusually structured) film, which basically ends right before this film begins: at the end of boyhood and the beginning of college.   Everybody Wants Some picks up the baton where Boyhood left off, and centers around a freshman baseball player who is just starting college in the days leading up to the first day of classes. And though the main character may be different from the character in Boyhood, and though the structure may be different than the structure of Boyhood, confined to a few days, rather than evolving over many years, Linklater is once again building a sprawling, multi-character journey around young kid in a different kind of family, at defining point of discovering his identity and what gives meaning in his life.   But the question remains: does Everybody Wants Some actually work?   Because Everybody Wants Some basically does nothing that a movie is supposed to do. It has virtually no plot. In fact, most of the film is simply spent watching a bunch of bros hang out. It’s built mostly around dialogue, much like a play, rather than the action and images we’re used to seeing as the primary building blocks of structure in movies. It kind-of has a discernible main character (it certainly seems to center around Jake) but the truth of the matter is, Jake doesn't really drive most of the action.   In fact, most of the structure isn't really driven at all in the way we traditionally expect, with one character chasing a particularly challenging goal against increasingly difficult obstacles. Instead, it's driven by random events like, “Let's go dancing,” “Let's go to baseball practice,” “Let's pick up some chicks.” Which feels a hell of a lot like the free-flowing structure of any respectable drunken freshman’s introduction to college, but not much like the version of that story we’re used to seeing in a movie.   The overall effect is that we’re watching (and for many people, enjoying) a film that seems to have very little structure at all. And this is not because Richard Linklater can't do structure. Because if you've seen Boyhood, you've seen a film that survives upon its rock solid structure as it jumps from year to year to year in a young boy’s life.   It's because Richard Linklater is doing a different kind of structure: he's doing a movie that feels like its area of exploration: a meditation on what it means to find meaning.   The traditional engines of structure are powered by characters pursuing strong wants against huge obstacles, conflicts that build through hot relationships, tightening the vice on your characters until things get harder and harder and harder and finally things explode.   Well this movie just doesn't do that. Instead what this movie does is this: it looks at a bunch of kids, and not the kids we want to look at: not the amazingly sweet and innocent boy of Boyhood, and not the cool hippies of Dazed and Confused, but a bunch of bros. A bunch of overly cocksure, baseball playing, chauvinistic jocks. We’re hanging out with a bunch of frat bros. And as we follow these frat bros, we’re gonna go on a journey that is not driven by plot and not dr...