Everybody Wants Some!!

The Eighties were not especially sex obsessed after the Sixties had broken the mould. Liberation for the ladies evened the playing field, or rather battered the futon in the back of a van on the way to a gig. Condoms were not yet obligatory in the minds of twentysomething Lotharios on the one-night-stand club circuit and gayness had yet to bend the trend, becoming too cool for school.

Guys couldn't keep it in their pants. So? What's new? Gals, on the other hand, were beginning to call the shots. That's scary. Or was.

Writer/director Richard Linklater likes the feel of nostalgia, especially adolescence in all its weird contradictions. Slacker became a film fest fave. Dazed & Confused continued the theme of eccentricity as a cover version of Lost In Plain Sight. Youth is a car crash, not as portrayed in Linklater's School Of Rock, a beautifully constructed movie, written by Mike White and played to the limit by Jack Black.

Youth has survival rituals and tracks to its tears. Treat them with respect or they'll turn round and whack you in the testicles.

Everybody Wants Some!! says it all. Or doesn't. And yet this is a male bonding exercise, closer to Animal House than The Breakfast Club, in which a college baseball team behave like sexist pigs with verbal diarrhea. It's not enough to be a tit and talk about tits and get rat arsed at every opportunity, but what's the meaning of life, what's the point of anything?

Oh, yes! Training. The ball game. Not the balls game.

Jake (Blake Jenner) is the new pitcher. He looks like Kevin Bacon during the Footloose years, seems more sensitive than the others (not difficult) and is dubbed "the quiet one in the back seat" by the only girl on campus who doesn't flirt with the idea of sporting heroes in the sack.

How will Jake integrate with these banter bucks? It is a question that stimulates another question. What's funny about testosterone-fuelled loud mouths who aren't getting any?