An exclamation mark at the end of any title can often betray a sort of are-we-having-fun-yet? eagerness; two of them, as in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (eOne, 15), suggest positively deranged levels of pep. Yet even as it surfs the antic party scene of American college life circa 1980, there’s a sauntering, Zen-infused calm to the film that feels almost melancholic. Many have deemed it a pure nostalgia exercise, a film that treats its gaggle of pretty, randy fratboys and their retrograde social and sexual beliefs with uncritical, honey-dipped affection.
Yet the film is more complicated: it may be rooted in one highly specific era, as opposed to the time-lapse exercises of Boyhood and the Before Sunrise trilogy, but it extends Linklater’s fascination with people as inchoate beings. The camera participates in its characters’ short-sighted revelry while exposing many of the personal stumbling blocks that could betray them when they’re no longer princes of the universe – or at least of the baseball diamond. Linklater also looks upon the puppyish, peach-skinned beauty of these college athletes in a way that no jockish campus jaunt of the 80s would have done: a celebratory gaze, in one sense, but laced with awareness that this too shall pass. In the course of this alternately lovely and leery romp, at least one of those exclamation points curls into a question mark.
No punctuation is aggressive enough for Green Room (Altitude, 18), a seismically nasty exercise in bloody backwoods horror that confirms all the ruthless technical strengths director Jeremy Saulnier demonstrated in Blue Ruin – with, sadly, none of that film’s human texture. Pitting punk rockers against neo-Nazis in a confined, effortfully grisly fight to the death, it works up some efficient cat-and-mouse tension upfront yet runs out of complicating factors – for its characters and narrative alike – even before the halfway mark.
Among the year’s most ambiguously compelling documentaries, Author: The JT Leroy Story (Dogwoof, 15) digs under the hoax of Leroy, the nonexistent West Virginia hustler-novelist who briefly became the toast of the New York literary scene. Affording his outed inventor, Brooklyn writer Laura Albert, the chance to tell her side of this “myth”, Jeff Feuerzeig’s film is a feast of bizarre anecdotal detail – yet never fully questions its own questionability in taking the word of a famously unreliable narrator. Approach with fascination and caution in equal measure.
Neither fascinating nor especially dangerous – despite the seemingly risky promise of an Afghanistan conflict comedy – Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Paramount, 15) is a jaunty diversion, starring a game Tina Fey as a green war correspondent plunged into the maelstrom of Kabul. There’s a pleasingly acidic edge to some of the fish-out-of-water antics that ensue, but the film treads conservatively around any hot points of political or cultural interest. Pair it up with A Hologram for the King (Icon, 12) for a curious double bill of American civilians dazed and confused in the Middle East: starring Tom Hanks as a beaten-down businessman attempting to secure a major contract in Saudi Arabia, Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Dave Eggers’s novel retains a sense of the author’s skewed, semi-sweet whimsy, but its more probing philosophical questions mostly lie decoratively on the surface.
On the streaming-only front, Mubi.com once more comes to the rescue of a fine film overlooked by UK distributors. Spanish director Carlos Marques-Marcet’s tender, ruefully romantic debut 10,000 Km must rank among the most poignant painfully observed depictions of that most increasingly prevalent of modern relationship dramas: long-distance dating. Artfully volleying viewers between Los Angeles and Barcelona, as it charts how a migrant artist and her left-behind boyfriend sustain their compromised intimacy, the film illustrates and negotiates the space between them with novel, non-gimmicky use of webcams and phone screens. It’s altogether rather special: while dealing with eternal human desires, it’s the rare film that feels wholly 21st century in its construction.
