domino harvey wrote:I don't share Gregory's criticisms of the role of women (though the early leering POVs are unnecessary, I agree), who are game and shown to be just as capable of agency within the sexual revolution's tail-end as the guys in the film-- they just aren't the focus of this men-centered movie other than as accessories, a role I don't think would be too different for the men in a gender-reversed study of the same period.
I agree as far as that goes, but that was something that dovetailed into a couple of other criticisms I had. It generally acts like a male ensemble film but there's a stunted rom-com kind of storyline there, which I understood to be the personal genesis of the film for Linklater, and the superficial treatment of the "prospective mates" as a category in the first half of the film makes that storyline for the main character less effective in the second half. And I think it would have been hard to use a potential girlfriend character to build a story arc for Jake effectively regardless of any character-development and pacing problems because neither character was all that interesting anyway even though one's the nominal protagonist.
I guess if Linklater had wanted to make the kind of movie summed up perfectly by the
end credits rap—repellent and very funny by turns—then it could have been better with no protagonist or attempt at a partially formed semi-autobiographical story arc.
Roger Ryan wrote:Gregory wrote:...after the unconvincing "Rapper's Delight" sequence...
In 1980 there were a number of guys (mostly white) in my high school who would rap along with this song or quote from it, so I had no trouble being convinced by the sequence!
Were they Texan/southern jocks who had listened to that single enough times to learn all the words? Not saying it's impossible, by any means, and it was more its execution that I found unconvincing. It seemed a bit rehearsed and calculated to be a crowd-pleasing sequence that hindered the film's creating a realistic mood of that era toward the beginning of the film and instead kind of used a singalong to try to quickly make a bro clan a relatable unit for the audience at large.
As I mentioned earlier, EWS!! is less about individuals and their interactions than it is an evocation of its era.
I can see how the setting of that era would be the main focus for a viewer like yourself who remembers it, but it seems like the individuals and their interactions have to be at least as important, and as Linklater has discussed it, the crux of the film is a central character's relationships with teammates/roommates and a love interest. It seems to try to do a lot of things at once but seemingly none of them very well.
I'd easily rather watch Richard Linklater falter or fail than most any other contender, but without taking him and his other work into account when assessing EWS!! I'd have to call it a distant cousin at best to a film like
Wet Hot American Summer, which I thought was care funnier and more cohesive than this.
