To be honest, I was a little worried when I first saw the trailer for Everybody Wants Some.  I mean sure, writer/director Richard Linklater has rarely been one to disappoint, and expectations might have been insurmountably high for me personally, considering his last film, Boyhood is maybe my favorite film of the last decade or so.  But from what I saw in the trailer, this newest endeavor from a director who’s always shown a down-to-earth sensitivity for human beings, seemed to be about a bunch of jock bro’s just bein’ jock bro’s.  Which to be fair, is not an inaccurate description of this movie, and yet somehow there’s such a deep investment in these characters and their desire to just embrace all of the freedom and excess of your first year of college, that I somehow came away kind of loving it.

Everybody Wants Some has been labeled as a “spiritual sequel” to Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed And Confused (because I guess studios are just that afraid to release a movie unless it’s some kind of sequel), but in a way it feels like just as much of a sequel to Boyhood.  Much like one of the final images in Boyhood, this film starts with a young man on the open road headed towards his first week of college, though in this case it happens to be Jake (played by Blake Jenner), and the year happens to be 1980.  Jake quickly becomes acquainted with his college’s baseball house — basically a fraternity composed entirely of the school’s baseball team, and as these jacked-up knuckleheads await the start of class (which is three days away), hijinks overwhelmingly ensue.

It’s hard for me not to marvel at how much this movie made me care about a bunch of wise-cracking jocks and their quest for poon, but I suppose this feat that Linklater slyly pulls off can be attributed to a number of factors.  For one, I think he understands the mentality of the baseball player, who can be a bit more quirky than than, say, a block-headed football goon.  Glenn Powell’s character Finnegan may be the finest example of this, as he comes off as the house intellectual, when he’s really just a guy who’s good at talking, whether anything he says has any actual meaning or not.  And I really love the way the movie taps into that kind of blind confidence, as it’s a quality that I think a lot of athletes are always bound to have, and it’s really fun to see the idiotic lengths these guys are willing to go in pursuit of being the toppest of all the top dawgs.

But maybe more than anything else, it’s just the spirit of the thing, man.  Much like the blustery confidence of its main characters, Everybody Wants Some is a movie that has a kind of energy and freewheeling comradery that’s hard not to get caught up in, as these guys more or less go from party to party making fun of each other for two hours.  But at the same time, I think the movie’s smart enough to realize that these moments don’t last forever.  There’s this underlying idea throughout everything that these guys are not always going to be able to live this fantasy of being the best at what they do and being rewarded for it, as every athlete must eventually accept that he just might not be cut out for the pro’s.

There is also an almost insane adherence to the group mentality of this movie, as it feels as though the group of guys at the heart of it are practically never separated from each other.  Which makes sense, considering that these ballplayers are all learning how to coexist as a team.  However, I did appreciate when in the movie’s second half it does eventually pay its dues to the other types of weirdos living on campus.  The baseball guys eventually find themselves going to a punk show as well as an artsy theater-people party, as they all try to make themselves fit in with these crowds that they clearly wouldn’t have given a second thought to in high school.

These scenes drive home the fact that college is a time in which to find yourself, and they do a nice job of commenting on this sort of identity crisis that tends to happen at that age, but without losing sight of the fact that this type of identity crisis can be kind of fun to get lost in.  Also, it was nice to see some representation of the kinds of kids I went to college with, since I went to an art school that was big enough to have its own sports team, which weirdly enough made the jocks at our school seem like the outcasts.  But with Everybody Wants Some, Linklater clearly knows that these kinds of labels become obsolete as you make your way into adulthood, as it’s a film filled with plenty of empathy for young people of any stripe, and also happens to be a whole lot of god damn fun at the same time.

It’s looking increasingly likely that Deadpool will become the highest grossing R-rated movie there’s ever been, so I should probably write something about it, even though it came out on Valentine’s day and we’ve already passed Easter. Will this success start a trend of R-rated movies? Yes, it already has. We’ve already been told that we’ll be getting an ultimate bummer edition of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice which is more than a half hour longer and totally hard R violent. I think the next Wolverine movie will probably go for an R as well. Basically everyone’s going to try to be cool by being more violent, except Disney, who will are quite happy with cute animals/Marvel/Star Wars, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve always thought of liking Deadpool as the comic book equivalent of being a huge Dane Cook fan. The people who like him seem to really like him, but only him, and have like zero appreciation for the actual art form. It doesn’t help that the character’s biggest champion for the last few years has been Ryan Reynolds, the Dane Cook of acting. In fact, I was downright wary of this movie. Not to a Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice degree, but the trailers didn’t do much for me and the outpouring of excitement from Reddit probably hurt more than it helped. What turned me around? Colin liked it. And Colin has little tolerance for super heroes these days.

So why would a man like Colin give a pass to a movie like Deadpool? For one, Deadpool exists to simultaneously celebrate and shit on comic book super hero movies. The timing couldn’t have been any better, with 2016’s slate of movies threatening to be a breaking point for fans who survived the various breaking points of 2014 and 2015. When Deadpool goes to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, he quickly roasts the X-Men franchise and the limited budget of his own movie. He’s aware of tropes and often tries to subvert or at least mock them when they come up. Deadpool is a character basically free of consequence, and he revels in that freedom.

Basically, Deadpool‘s more like an OK comedy movie than anything we’ve seen so far, as the jokes extend from the opening titles all the way past the end of the credits. A lot of it’s referential, and not even necessarily to comic books or super heroes. I mean, that after credits scene is mostly funny if you know about Ferris Bueller‘s after credits scene. Even that hard R violence isn’t free of the funny, as Deadpool will either mock his enemies, kill them is grotesque ways, or get himself injured in a slapstick fashion. I’m starting to describe what comedy is now, so I’ll stop and just say the somewhat immature humor landed for me more often than not, and made the whole thing worthwhile.

Frankly, I just didn’t think the potential for a character that wants to be only vulgar, violent, and very aware that he’s in a comic was that great. That leaves no room for subtlety or genuine insight, for the human connection that makes Superman, Spider-Man, or Batman stories great. Yeah, I guess if the lampshading was extremely on point, Deadpool could have been the Airplane! of super hero movies, but realistically, I was expecting maybe a Spaceballs. It was in the ballpark. A good movie, with a game cast, if not necessarily one that will be memorable for me. But to you Deadpool guys (because I know you’re all men): hey, congratulations. You made it. Please take pity on us Superman fans.

It seems like, in a somewhat modest way, jazz fusion has been making a bit of a comeback.  The most prominent evidence of this would be on Kendrick Lamar’s monumental To Pimp A Butterfly, which was given a bit of a fusion tint thanks to contributions from saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who also put out an album last year that seemed pretty great, but if I’m being honest I never finished listening to all the way through (it was fittingly titled The Epic).  Then there was also that Flying Lotus album from a year or two back that had some noticeable fusion influences, but again, because it gave into fusion’s more experimental qualities, was one I had a hard time making it through.  Luckily, here’s an album from an artist who’s taken that modern fusion sound and turned it into something that’s accessible enough that I’ve not only listened to it all the way through, but many times at that.

The Portland-based Esperanza Spalding is not someone whom I was previously aware of, because despite that fact that I am a modest jazz fan, I can’t muster up any desire to seek out what’s going on in modern jazz, even when it’s coming from someone like Spalding who apparently spit in Justin Bieber’s endless ice cream party of an existence by snatching away the Best New Artist Grammy from him back in 2011.  The heaviness of Emily’s D+Evolution‘s lead-off track “Good Lava” (which I can only assume is a dig at that dumb Pixar Lava short) is what immediately drew me into this album, since it’s one heavy load of funk.  But a lot of the album also tends to have a bit of a lighter touch, while there’s always some nice atmospheric textures in the production that keeps anything from feeling too archaic, courtesy of longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti.

I suppose the difference between this and a lot of modern attempts at resurrecting the jazz fusion sounds of the early ’70s as well as their original forbearers, is that Esperanza Spalding actually knows how to write a song.  Just from listening to what she’s doing here, you can tell that Spalding probably has a pretty firm grip on the Great American Songbook, as a lot of these tracks have that classic lovesong quality to them.  And yet, the instrumentation here (which includes Spalding’s dexterous bass-playing) is just adventurous enough that this doesn’t quite feel like some Norah Jones bullshit that middle-aged mom’s would be into.  No, instead it feels more like something the somewhat cooler middle-aged mom’s would be into.

Favorite Tracks: “Good Lava”, “One”, “Funk The Fear”

I’ve been writing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in my head ever since I got over mentally rewriting Man of Steel. By now you’ve probably read the reviews of this movie and maybe even seen it. So me telling you why it’s disappointing won’t help that much, I’d just be adding my small voice to a booming chorus. Instead, to help you understand why my heart is broken, let me tell you how easy it would have been to turn this into a good movie. I will be discussing the plot, so spoiler warning, I guess, but you’ve seen the whole story in the trailers anyway.

You start by combining the Bruce Wayne character and the Lex Luthor character into one person called Lex Luthor. He’s still allowed to have the bits of impotent, psychotic rage that Jesse Eisenberg brought to the film, but mostly he’ll be the angry, paranoid sociopath Ben Affleck played. We watch his journey as his self-importance gets decimated as he can do nothing when Zod and Superman destroy LexCorp Tower (instead of Wayne Tower) and slowly that helplessness turns into an insatiable need to prove how powerful he is, ultimately resulting in an obsession with destroying Superman.

A tragic Luthor, who starts out as a vicious, shockingly brutal vigilante? I think that fits the tone of this franchise and reinvents him in an exciting way, even though it still ends with his mania leading him to trying to kill Superman above all else. And you know what, the infamous “Do you bleed? You will.” line works as a delightfully ominous warning from a Luthor who is actually a threat. Superman movies always struggle with creating great villains, but that wasn’t the problem with Dawn of Justice. This movie’s problem was that it turned one of DC’s greatest heroes into the villain.

But the film needs Batman, right? There is a role for him in this movie too, it’s just the one that Wonder Woman was playing. In my version, it would be Bruce Wayne who’s snooping around Luthor’s business looking for information. He might even be checking out Superman too. Batman would be the no-nonsense character who avoids getting caught up in a stupid pissing match that Wonder Woman was. We would just catch glimpses of him through the film, but it would be enough to know that Batman was keenly aware of everything that was going on. Then, when Luthor is about to kill Superman with his Kryptonite spear, the Dark Knight appears and saves the day.

You see? Batman can be skeptical of Superman, even suspicious, but to actively try to destroy someone who has only saved people is just going too far. I want to see the heroes fight side-by-side, not with each other in a meaningless brawl. And so if Batman defeating Lex in isn’t enough for a finale, we can still have a big, CGI monster show up. Hell, it can even still be Zod’s reanimated body. Just instead of calling him Doomsday, we’ll call him Solomon Grundy. Since Grundy is literally a giant zombie, and a B-list villain who perfectly fits a limited, late-in-the-movie appearance. Doomsday and Superman’s death? Yeah, let’s save that for when it can actually matter.

If Zack Snyder had made this movie instead, it still wouldn’t have been perfect. It doesn’t address the dour, ominous tone of every Superman scene in the movie, or the ridiculousness of him being accused of slaughtering soldiers with a machine gun. But I see in the framework of this picture a worthy successor to Man of Steel. It just got so caught up in setting up a new Cinematic Universe it lost its way.