Everybody Wants Some!!

The single most pleasurable movie of all time is Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, and it achieves that status in order to try to convey what makes filmmaking uniquely magical: a sense of shared enchantment between the audience and the director, and the ecstasy of the latter pulling a heist on the former -- not (just) trickery, but the successful creation of an ornate and difficult craft. (See also The Prestige.) Everybody Wants Some!!, conversely, generates pleasure as sheer by-product of its subject matter: what it's like on your first few days on campus as a freshman in college. Because those days are glorious and orgastic, so too is the feeling of watching the film; everything that the film is interested in conveying emotionally is downstream of its loyalty to conveying earnestly, as is often the case with Linklater. The extent to which you find it legitimately a great piece of filmmaking (as everyone agrees that it's a fun time) is based solely on if you find its script earnest rather…