amnesiac12001

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! is Linklater's successor to his 1993 masterpiece DAZED & CONFUSED, if only in spirit. Previously, DAZED's reputation traveled largely on the basis of perceived nostalgia, but EWS!!'s entry into this (now) diptych transforms DAZED's role as a part of a larger-scale, entirely neglected utility of the period film: anthropology.

Much has been made of of EWS!!'s eschewing of a conventional plotline as a detriment, but I argue that the meandering and static events of the film are the very point, and that a plot would actually do a disservice to that purpose. EWS!! is a forensic recreation of a 3-day period in 1980, when Linklater himself would have been playing college baseball. Linklater's own singular eidetic memory serves to restore what most period films lack: the detailed minutiae of interpersonal communication. Period films historically have been able to recapture clothing, props, hairstyles, and other fashions of a given period, but more difficult (and perhaps most difficult) is to recreate the mannerisms and speech patterns of said time and place, and Linklater does this masterfully. For myself, watching the film reminded me of things I haven't seen in social situations since I was a child but were as clear as a bell upon seeing it rendered with almost documentary authenticity. Every character (with one exception) fits the era almost perfectly, with characters such as McReynolds and Beuter seemingly brought directly out of 1980 to the future for this film.

EWS!! intends to immerse the viewer into the very time period itself as if they were a native to it. To facilitate this, Linklater avoids all stylistic photography, shooting everything with neutral or natural lighting to replicate how the people of the time would see it, and not how later generations would do so by using vintage aesthetics to imply the past seen retroactively as we might through aged photos or obsolete media (THE GODFATHER, SCHINDLER'S LIST, etc.).

EWS!! is as close as I feel to making a period film without using time-travel to get there, and the focus on the sheer mundanity of the narrative solidifies this. The film is a look back in time, not to any great historical events, but into the parts of history that get left behind: the details of an everyday life.

It gets my vote as one of the best films of 2016 and one of the best films in Linklater's oeuvre.

SUPER CAPERS is a bad film with a great idea: make a live-action superhero cartoon with nods to Looney Tunes and AIRPLANE! Unfortunately, the execution is a mixed bag that makes it hard to pin down exactly why it doesn't work.

The problem is that SUPER CAPERS is an antique: a high-concept live-action comedy for children. I mean ACTUAL children: from about 4 to 9 years old. They haven't made films like that since the 1990s, and even now, such films usually revolve around talking animals with a supporting human cast. For this reason, the film is full of jokes, homages, and gags that are straight-up rip-offs of other movies that can make it painful to watch if you're an adult who doesn't chuckle at the sight of a flux capacitor in an RV designed to look like the DeLorean.

This was the director's intention, but I didn't realize it until I heard him say so on the audio commentary. It's also the reason why the film is shot in an old-fashioned widescreen format that makes the sets look like sets, and the action fairly boring and uninteresting. The pacing is off, the editing isn't tight enough, and the acting is a tad under-rehearsed, although the cast is game and skilled enough to push through it.

All this makes for a lame movie with lots of slapstick humor that isn't as funny as it should be. But to be fair, since this film wasn't made for adults, it's kind of hard to be so critical of it. Once you take into account that it was made for kids who just wanna watch goofy stuff, it actually kinda works. The director is religious, so there's a little bit of a "message" in the film, but not to the point of proselytizing.

So the film is a rather bland and boringly unfunny film if you see it with adult eyes. But if you imagine yourself watching it as a kid in the late 80s, you can actually kind of enjoy it.

I found STORKS in the way that you're supposed to find underrated/cult classics: by accident. When it was released, I bought into the collective sigh of underwhelm that most critics expressed and that was my mistake. It's easy to understand why the critical community didn't like it: in an era where Pixar, Disney and even Dreamworks keep churning out magnificently multi-layered heart-warmers that set the bar stratospherically high, STORKS doesn't register all that well. We've been spoiled by excellence. As a result, we've lost the ability to enjoy the simple pleasures of pure entertainment.

And that's what STORKS delivers better than babies or packages: entertainment.

You might have noticed people commenting on how forced and thin the storyline is and how uneven it feels, and those complaints are accurate. The plot is extremely thin (virtually an extended sitcom-sized premise stretched into an epic road-trip format), and the story moves so quickly that it goes too far too fast with nary any breathing room to savor the experience or give the characters the tension or time to build any real catharsis or change. But the characters are so authentic to themselves that you know just about everything you need to know about them from their first scenes.

I think the main reason STORKS gets such middling reviews in print and here on IMDb is because it's an old-fashioned type of comedy: a screwball-slapstick hybrid. The emphasis on sight gags, pain-humor, and wackiness has generally been avoided in animated films as passe and vulgar--low comedy. The rapid-fire snark between the main characters of Tulip and Junior hearken back to the old Howard Hawks workplace comedies of the 1930s, which is definitely an acquired taste in the post-narrative style of humor found in kids entertainment today--where non-sequiturs and punchlines exist in a vacuum and visual comedy is derived from abstraction rather than plasticity. But the comedic energy and the variety of jokes from modern "Office"-style cringe (Pigeon Toady) to the machine-gun-speed HIS GIRL FRIDAYy-style verbal sparring (Tulip & Junior), absurdism (the wolves), post-modern meta-humor (the boy and his parents) to classical WB slapstick of yesteryear, and the film is riotously funny because of it. At the end of the day, that's what STORKS wants to be: FUNNY.

STORKS is not a great film. It's not a masterpiece like TOY STORY or UP. It won't win any Oscars and it won't be everyone's cup of tea. But there's an excellent chance that it will live on as a multi-generational favorite for the same reasons as dumb-fun-with-a-heart-of-gold treasures like SPACEBALLS, DUMB & DUMBER, THE NAKED GUN, and NATIONAL LAMPOONS CHRISTMASs VACATION:

Because you can watch it 1,000 times and it will NEVER stop being funny.

So try it out. There's a 50-50 chance you'll be among the ones who can't stop watching it.