BEFORE: This probably is NOT the film that's been on my list the longest (that would be the 1941 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", but it was starting to feel like it. It's definitely been on the list for over a year, just because it seemed nearly impossible to link to. I know I had to pass on it during last year's back-to-school films, because despite having a large cast, it just didn't connect to anything else.
But, I've found that if I wait long enough, and pay attention to the opportunities that come my way, eventually everything seems to find its place. So Blake Jenner carries over from "The Edge of Seventeen", and I move from a high school film to a college-set film. Makes sense, right? (I thought maybe Blake Jenner was part of that famous Jenner/Kardashian family, but he's not. He's just a guy from Florida who's an actor, and he was on "Glee" for a few seasons.). And then I've got another link lined up to get me to the next set of films - three films with Zoey Deutch, two with Dave Franco, 2 with Juliette Lewis, 3 with Ellen Page, 2 with Sandra Oh, 5 with Samuel L. Jackson and I'll be ready for October to start. (Umm, those chains all overlap, so really, it's just 12 films left in September, then I should have a 4-day break before horror movies start.)
And this year there are a couple of new school-based films that don't seem to fit, like "Higher Learning" and "Thirteen", but maybe with proper planning I can get to them next year. I just have to keep my eyes open.
THE PLOT: In 1980, a group of college baseball players navigate their way through the freedoms and responsibilities of unsupervised adulthood.
AFTER: I'm serious about this, this film really resisted all of my attempts to link it into my chain - I know Richard Linklater might like using relatively unknown actors, but this was ridiculously difficult. I'm starting to wonder why I still bother to do this, I'm the only person I'm aware of who can't seem to watch a film unless it shares an actor with two other films. I can't seem to stop, it's become a compulsion, but I guess I'll have to stop when (eventually) my linking possibilities dwindle down to nothing, or I run out of movies, or I stop when I can't go any further, or it's no longer fun. But for now it's still the engine that drives my routine.
I can't say that I know much about college level sports - like I have so many questions about them that I don't know how to answer. For example, they're already playing college football, and didn't the college year just start? So how can the teams already be playing? Did they practice during the summer, and if so, doesn't that kind of suck for the players, since they don't get the summer off? Then what happens in February after all the bowl games are over, is that when the players go to class? Because if they're on the road all fall semester, they probably miss a lot of classes - ah, who am I kidding, if they can play football they're probably not taking any serious classes, right? I don't see how they can practice, play games AND study for exams, it doesn't seem possible. Or for that matter, fair to the other students who are there to learn. Then what happens if someone has an athletic scholarship, but then they get injured and can't play any more? Do they lose their scholarship, and do they then have to start paying tuition, or else leave college?
The college athletes seen in this film are a Texas college baseball team, but their season doesn't start until February, so they take classes (sort of) in the fall, but also do a lot of partying and some practicing, when they can work that around their partying schedule. (You'd think it would be the other way around, but apparently not.). I'm going to declare this film serves a dual purpose for me, it's both a college film AND a baseball film. Though we only see one or two practices and zero ball games, for that matter there's only a few minutes of anyone attending classes. It's very shrewd to depict the two days BEFORE classes start so we can see a maximum amount of partying, drinking and hooking up in the now-classic year of 1980.
That's got to be an inside joke about older actors appearing in college movies, when it's implied that one of the college ball players might possibly really be in his 30's, right? Just wondering.
I had a bit of a hard time getting into the rhythm of this film, I think it's because they introduced so many characters so quickly at the start of the film, and initially it's hard to tell them all apart, since they sort of become this endless wave of bad 70's porn-staches and very similar mullets. But eventually there were enough individual quirks to start telling all these dude-bros apart. There's the guy that looks like a scruffy McConaughey, the stocky guy, the psycho guy with glasses, and so on. Wait, they have names, too? Jeez, that probably would have helped if I could only have cared enough to learn some of them. (Which leads to a question - can the young actors in a Linklater film be thought of as a bunch of McConaughey wannabes? or McCon-abees?)
The IMDB has a pretty good list of the 1980's songs and arcade games in the film that didn't really exist in the year this film took place, so there's no reason for me to repeat them here, but the list is quite extensive. It's called research, people, do your research!
This film reminds me that I'm getting very close to the end of the alphabet in my quest to replace all of my cassette tapes with digital files - I'm still on the letter "T" but right after George Thorogood and just one U2 album, it'll be time to download some Van Halen. Then all that remains will be Vanilla Fudge, The Who, Warren Zevon and ZZ Top. I can still finish before the end of the year.
Also starring Zoey Deutch (last seen in "Dirty Grandpa"), Glen Powell (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Tyler Hoechlin (last seen in "Road to Perdition"), Ryan Guzman, Wyatt Russell (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson, Will Brittain, Juston Street (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Forrest Vickery, Tanner Kalina, Austin Amelio, Michael Monsour, Jonathan Breck (last seen in "W."), Dora Madison Burge, Sophia Ali, Justin Alexio, Tory Taranova, Jessi Mechler, Devine Bonnee, Kaleb King.
RATING: 5 out of 10 episodes of "The Twilight Zone" on Betamax
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