Quantcast
Channel: BuzzFeed - Latest
Viewing all 215982 articles
Browse latest View live

13 British Things That Make Australians Shake Their Damn Heads

$
0
0

We need to talk.

Drive on the left, walk on the right.

Drive on the left, walk on the right.

What the actual fuck.

Tim Tabor / Via Flickr: tim166

When the English refuse to accept your Scottish or Irish banknotes.

When the English refuse to accept your Scottish or Irish banknotes.

Via giphy.com

Latte glasses that look like this:

Latte glasses that look like this:

Is this supposed to be a joke?

Lakeland / Via lakeland.co.uk

When you taste the Cadbury.

When you taste the Cadbury.

*Converts to Galaxy*

20th Century Fox / Via giphy.com


View Entire List ›


21 Surprising Things That'll Simplify Your Life

25 Layered Cakes That Are On A Whole Different Level

'90s Song Lyrics That Are Hilariously Appropriate For Parents

$
0
0

Whoomp! There it is!

When you drop your kid off at camp for the summer:

When you drop your kid off at camp for the summer:

Arista

When your kid goes out to play without cleaning their room:

When your kid goes out to play without cleaning their room:

Maverick

When you're talking to a baby:

When you're talking to a baby:

MCA

When your kids are acting nuts and you try to get your partner to come home early:

When your kids are acting nuts and you try to get your partner to come home early:

Creation


View Entire List ›

Catch Up On The News In Just Five Minutes A Day

$
0
0

Keeping up with the news can be tough — but the BuzzFeed News newsletter will make it simple.

Mollie Shafer-Schweig / BuzzFeed

These people love starting their day with the BuzzFeed News newsletter — and once you give it a try, you might love it too. Every Monday through Friday, you'll get a smart and easy-to-digest roundup of what's going on in the news, plus the background to big and breaking stories, features and analysis from around the web, and insight from our global network of reporters. We'll keep you informed in just a few minutes a day.

Enter your email address to sign up now!

My Dream Apartment Had Everything Except A Bed

$
0
0

Illustrations by Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed

Here are some of the things I bought for my very first grown-up apartment: a glossy black enamel teakettle, an oven mitt from Anthropologie, a vintage dish towel with the 1970 calendar printed on it in German, and two large glass jars to keep cotton balls and tampons in, because I didn’t have to share a bathroom anymore and could make my everyday things Pinterest-pretty.

Here is one thing I didn’t buy: a bed, at least not in the sense that most people would recognize. But that was part of the plan.

After spending my post-college years living happily in D.C. row houses packed with roommates and hand-me-down furniture, at 28 I developed a sudden, acute craving for a space of my own. Finally, I could afford it: a 300-square-foot garden-level studio at the very edge of a gentrifying neighborhood, a brisk 17-minute walk from the nearest metro station. It was a shoebox, but it felt like one lined in fancy tissue paper, tied with a bow.

The apartment had just been renovated, and I would be its inaugural tenant. The soft mint paint in the bathroom was my favorite color. The miniature kitchen, with its shiny Ikea organization rail, filled me with the earnest belief that I could become a new person, someone who always did the dishes right after dinner, who had a place for everything and put everything in its place. The blonde faux hardwood floor tiles fit together seamlessly and looked almost real.

I would hide my bed by not having one in the first place.

I could have physically fit a bed frame into the place, sure, but then it wouldn’t have been the sophisticated apartment of a young professional in her late twenties: It would have been a bedroom with a door to the outside, and a sink and an oven in the corner. With this Lilliputian floor plan, no creative curtain or carefully situated Expedit bookcase could camouflage that. So I decided on an extreme solution: I would hide my bed by not having one in the first place.

Two years earlier, I had visited my brother and his wife in their small apartment in Japan, where I’d slept on a thin traditional mattress called a shikibuton. At night we rolled it directly onto the straw tatami floor, which had never met a shoe, and in the morning we stowed it on a special shelf. Maybe it was the jet lag, but I remembered sleeping just fine on it. After many hours of googling, I determined that it would be unorthodox, but doable — even cosmopolitan — to implement this system in my D.C. apartment.

I signed the lease, ordered a cotton and wool shikibuton from the Soaring Heart Natural Bed Company, and got ready to move into my perfect grown-up apartment, where I would sleep on the floor.

In the weeks leading up to my move, I became obsessed with decorating. On weekends I rode my bike to Room & Board, where I bought nothing but methodically examined each item on display as if I were in a museum and not an upscale modern furniture store. I watched thirtysomething couples pick out sectional sofas for homes they actually owned. I considered the merits of Parsons tables made of Minnesota steel and perused boutiques where you could buy Italian-made spatulas that had won international design awards. Even the smallest purchases were grave decisions, opportunities to announce my good taste. I had a set of matching towels and natural hand soap that smelled like geraniums. I was obviously an adult.

My friends joked about how my new lifestyle would affect my love life — "You should ask guys at bars if you can go home and sleep in their beds, because you don’t have one" — so I put the no-bed thing in my OkCupid profile. I decided it conveyed a Zooey Deschanel-like bohemian vibe, rather than outing me as a person who put her comforter on the floor.

“My friends are curious about this girl I’m going out with who lives without a bed,” a cute film student I met online told me over drinks. I was thrilled. He laughed at all my jokes, also loved Murakami, and also lived alone.

My apartment had room for just two of everything, so I splurged on what I got.

One night we cooked dinner together in my kitchen, two steps from my new dining table, four steps from my new couch, and five steps from the patch of rug where most people would put a coffee table, but which I kept clear to lay my bedroll down at night. We ate salad off the two dinner plates I had just bought at an Asian import store. They were heavy ceramic, with a beautiful deep teal glaze that faded to a lighter aqua towards the edges. I ladled soup into blue-and-white Japanese bowls and placed two cloth napkins next to them, inky blue with a hot pink, green, and yellow block print. It was like Noah’s ark. My apartment had room for just two of everything, so I splurged on what I got.

We sat on the couch, drank red wine, and talked for hours, that I-like-you energy crackling in the air. Then he kissed me. “This is the embarrassing part,” I said, and got up to open the closet door. I pulled the mattress down from its shelf, unrolled it onto the floor next to the couch, covered it with the top sheet, and put down the pillows and the comforter, trying to act like this was the most natural thing in the world. Except the mattress was sort of heavy, and I was a little drunk.

“Ta-da!” I said. “Totally normal.” He laughed and kissed me again, and in that moment, I was.

Friends and acquaintances who knew about my bed situation asked me how it actually felt to pass the night with four inches of futon mattress between my back and the hard floor. It wasn’t exactly sleeping on a cloud, but I wasn’t physically uncomfortable. I had read that it was really good for your back, like the sleep equivalent of going Paleo, which boosted my morale.

More problematic was the daily chore of rolling the mattress into a four-and-a-half-foot-wide cylinder and hoisting it onto its dedicated shelf when I was already running late for work. So was keeping the floor to Japanese standards of cleanliness. Most ground-floor apartments see their fair share of bugs, and mine was no exception. After a few months, the mattress often stayed in the closet and I crashed on my couch, the way you would after a party at a friend’s house: no sheets, curled up under a blanket, resting my head on a throw pillow.

Living alone was supposed to show the world I was a real adult, but on bad days it magnified all the ways I wasn’t.

That’s when my no-bed existence started to feel less quirky-cool and more like a dark secret that symbolized everything that was wrong with my life. On the outside, I had my shit together: a good job where I met my deadlines, said smart things in meetings, and had my own office. At first glance, my apartment seemed the same. “Your place looks like something out of Dwell!” an acquaintance said, assuming the door on the left opened into a bedroom, not a closet where my actual bed lay rolled up and stuffed onto a shelf.

The guy I’d cooked dinner with had cooled things off after a few weeks, over email. I missed the spontaneous movie nights and beers on the couch I’d had with my old housemates. I smarted when social media showed they were continuing without me — not because I wasn’t loved, but just because I wasn’t there. Perhaps worst of all, having my own apartment didn’t magically transform me into the grown-up I wanted so badly to become.

Dishes lingered in the sink. Dust stuck to the bottom of the shikibuton, when I bothered to roll it out. Streaks of pink mildew formed in my mint-green bathroom. When you live with others, you can blame a certain level of chaos on them. Living alone was supposed to show the world I was a real adult, but on bad days it magnified all the ways I wasn’t.

A girl without a bed was mysterious and sexy. A grown woman who slept on her couch was sad.

After a year and a half of enduring my minimalist bed experiment, I quit my job, rolled the shikibuton into a giant plastic bag, and loaded it into a U-Haul. I had just turned 30 and was about to start graduate school, turning the clock back on growing up. I sold most of the furniture from my studio and moved into a rented bedroom in a Brooklyn brownstone. I went to Ikea and bought a bed.

The couple I moved in with were two years younger than me, but they were bona fide adults in a way that wasn’t about having nice things, but more about knowing what to do with the things they had. They could put up floor-to-ceiling shelves on a wall, host Thanksgiving for a dozen people, and throw together a quick, nutritious dinner from the contents of their well-stocked pantry. When I walked through the door, exhausted after hours of class, Rebecca would offer me a plate and Dan would mix me a drink. When our apartment developed a mouse problem, they set and emptied all the traps. I made dessert, kept the clutter limited to my bedroom, took out the trash, and paid my rent on time. We made a home together by filling it with the right people, not the right stuff.

Last year Dan and Rebecca had a baby boy, and I moved out of our shared apartment and into the kind of real one-bedroom I coveted years ago. I still wash my dishes by hand and do my laundry down the street, but I have high ceilings, large windows, and lots of natural light. The apartment has an actual hallway I pad down each morning to put the water on for coffee, and in my New York life, that feels like making it.

I’m coming to terms with the realization that no matter what I have, I may never feel like I’ve really grown up.

In this expensive city, I know it’s an incredible privilege to have a space of my own, but it’s still one that feels relative and tenuous. On Facebook, my high school and college friends are buying condos or houses in the suburbs. They have dogs, babies, even kindergarteners. I don’t want all the things they have, at least not right now, but sometimes they make me question my own measures of adulthood.

My once-treasured expressions of grown-up good taste, the Anthropologie oven mitt and the vintage German dishrag, are faded and stained. I still use them, but I find new talismans of adulting. I pour flour and sugar into clear glass jars and put them on a little turquoise cart. I hang ivy and philodendron plants in my windows and google how not to kill them. I fall in love with a blue ceramic bundt pan made in Portugal that will make my life better in some indescribable way. But I buy it on sale, fully aware that after I bring a beautiful coffee cake to brunch, that pan will probably sit full of crumbs on my counter for days.

There’s a big box in my closet stuffed with old CDs, assorted Ikea parts, grad school notebooks, and keys to houses I haven’t lived in for years. There’s a giant blank white wall over my couch I haven’t yet figured out how to fill. I still don’t clean the bathroom as much as I should. I’m 33, and I’m coming to terms with the realization that no matter what I have, I may never feel like I’ve really grown up.

At night I lie down on my old shikibuton, which now sits on a Hemnes bed frame, under two featherbeds that keep the wooden slats from digging into my back. It’s a slightly lumpy arrangement, but for now, it feels OK.


This essay is part of a series of stories about the meaning of home.

Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed

You might also enjoy reading:

Smells Like Home

My Mother’s Homelessness Taught Us To Survive Without Being Fine

When You Grow Up In Brooklyn, Staying Is Complicated

I Found Love In A Hopeless Mess

$
0
0

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

When I met my partner’s mother for the first time, three years ago, she could still speak a little. “You’re so pretty,” she said with a grin, welcoming me into her apartment. It’s the sort of compliment I think Helen would still give to anybody if dementia hadn’t stolen her words — she’s welcoming and effusively kind. She laughs easily, even now that speaking has become too difficult. Sometimes she seems to be laughing at her own forgetfulness; other times she’s laughing at me for reminding her of something so obvious, as if to say, How could I forget that?

Helen’s one-bedroom apartment in an assisted-living facility overflowed with paintings of flowers, chintzy floral dishes, and little spiral notebooks with poppies on the cover. Her aesthetic is capital-P Pretty — if she saw something in the thrift store that looked Pretty, she bought it, covering the kitchen counters and walls with bric-a-brac. One of her prized possessions, a gilded Japanese screen with cranes carved into it, was propped up behind two floral armchairs, its hinges loose.

My partner, Andy, had told me that Helen was a hoarder, but I didn’t see any signs of it then, save the liter bottles of diet soda stuffed under the furniture. (I've changed both of their names here, for privacy). Helen showed me a few of the newer vases she’d added to her collection, each with “99¢” still scrawled on it with a waxy red crayon. I could hear hot air gushing out of the vents, cranked up much too high for the Bay Area’s autumn weather, and felt sweat prickle on my neck. I was anxious to make a good first impression, but despite the heat and the nerves, Helen instantly felt like a friend.

Dehoarding her homes has allowed me to learn things about her that she no longer has the ability to tell me.

She has curly hair, like me. We both like diet soda and romantic stories and taking care of other people. We each had shitty upbringings with scary dads, so we clawed our way out and set about building our own versions of home as fast as we could. I worked odd jobs and saved money obsessively so I could move away and start fresh in California; she enrolled in college when she was 17 and avoided marriage until later in life, a slightly unusual choice for a co-ed in the early 1960s. She met her husband at a volleyball game and they raised Andy in a sprawling white house with a heavy wooden door, set atop a hill in an industrial town across the bay from San Francisco.

Dementia had already limited Helen’s speech by the time we met, and now we communicate in a mix of pantomime and touch. She chirps and gurgles like a newborn, and, while her sounds are thick with intention, I can’t decipher what she means. Dehoarding her homes — first her apartment, as she moved from one assisted-living facility to another, and then the house where she raised my partner — has allowed me to learn things about her that she no longer has the ability to tell me. I mostly get to know her through her possessions, as Andy and I cram them into extra-large trash bags and throw them away.

On TV, hoarders are desperate and sad-eyed, with the carcasses of dead pets lurking under piles of newspaper. But Helen has always been preoccupied with beauty — if she’d been rich, she might’ve collected nicer china or clothing and been celebrated for it — and I feel guilty when I throw away her possessions. Of course, not everything Andy and I cart out of her home has sentimental value; I once opened her kitchen cabinet to discover stacks of plates covered in molding scrambled eggs and had to race outside for fresh air. Used insulin needles are strewn everywhere (always with the caps on; Helen is meticulous).

But within the mess are clues about who she was, who she still is. I discover her romantic side as I peruse the covers of her vast collection of romance novels, before piling them into the trash along with her leopard-print nightgowns. I find unfinished sudoku puzzles and recipe books, Andy’s baby pictures, her journals, her mother’s wallet with her driver’s license and keys still tucked inside.

She saved it all, and I want to save everything too, because I imagine doing so might protect her memory. What if I show her this hotel bill in her name and she suddenly remembers the vacation she was on? I find a road map of Nebraska nearby and unfold it, tracing the outline of the lake where my family camped every summer. Did she ever visit?

Within the mess are clues about who she was, who she still is.

But the house is buried in memories, and Andy is determined to dig it out, to make it the childhood home he wanted it to be. Beneath the piles of trash are surprises that raise my eyebrows even when I’m too sweaty and tired to feel excitement. Andy shows me a built-in cabinet in the breakfast nook that I didn’t know existed. I find out the walls in the downstairs bedroom, finally revealed, are painted a dark, dusky blue. Andy painted them in high school, when he stayed up late at night teaching himself to make beats. He’s discovering the house too — although he grew up in it, he’s never seen it clean.

At first I thought of dehoarding as a challenge I could muscle through. Pick up trash, add to garbage bag, haul to dumpster, repeat. It was exciting to get filthy with Andy, to hunt for a smile in his eyes when his mouth was hidden behind a dust mask. I learned to like the thrill of hurling tchotchkes into the dumpster and hearing them shatter. The sweat on the back of Andy’s neck made his hair clump together and jut out like little porcupine quills, and I’d pull off my work gloves to touch it. We made plans for how we’d paint and decorate once the whole house was clean, scrapped them, and planned again.

But months into the process, dehoarding has become a mental puzzle that feels like a nightmare, with the escape route pulling farther away the faster I run toward it. I turn every object over in my hands, wondering if it’s trash or treasure, a window into Helen’s life or an unimportant scrap of paper that she forgot about the moment she set it down. Some days it feels like we’ve made no progress at all and the house will never be empty, but we’re together and working hard and it’s all we can do.

On the day I go to pick Helen up and move her to the new facility, where she’ll receive better care, she’s ready and waiting for me. She’s dressed in a floral muumuu and a red cardigan, her hair still wet from the shower. We drive across the San Francisco Bay Bridge in silence and I steal a peek at her, wondering how long it’s been since she saw the city and what she might think of it now. Maybe she doesn’t remember that skyline, with Coit Tower poking out at one end and the skyscrapers hopscotching over each other on the hills; maybe it’s as if she’s seeing it for the first time? Andy says she remembers, but as she stares out the window, there is nothing in her expression to hint at her thoughts.

When I met Andy, he and I were both messy in the same way. We had piles of unfolded clean laundry on our couches, scraps of paper shuffled across our desks, refrigerators plastered with family photos, greeting cards, and memorabilia. Cleaning was an activity we each did when we had time, a priority that fell behind watching movies or cooking dinner together. I was raw from a recent breakup, and my home was still filled with reminders of someone who made me wonder if I could be loved, if I could ever deserve it. Andy’s apartment was a sanctuary by comparison. It’s where he taught me to make morning coffee in a moka pot and how to mix a Negroni. I watched tentacle-like wisps of cloud wrap around Sutro Tower from his window and smelled the fresh soap scent of his skin, and an inkling of hope unfurled inside me. Maybe I was home.

Andy’s hoarding started as reorganizing (although he objects when I call it hoarding, suggesting the phrase “pathological disorganization” instead). We began emptying the house, and then, one day, his own apartment wasn’t good enough, either. None of the furniture was in the right place, he said, and he’d come up with a new system to store his clothes so they wouldn’t pile up at one end of the couch anymore — in fact, the couch itself needed to be hacked up into pieces and hauled away. The dishes weren’t properly organized in the kitchen cabinets and the books were out of order on the shelves. He began tearing everything out of place and spreading it across the floor to be sorted. New containers and a new couch would need to be ordered, maybe new dishes too, and cleaning supplies and light bulbs and maybe a projector so we could screen movies against the wall.

That was two years ago. The furniture never stays in one place for long, now, and the piles of books and cardboard boxes are precarious, resulting in stubbed toes and bruises. I can’t get close enough to the window to see Sutro Tower, or open the kitchen cabinets to take down the moka pot.

I love Andy’s incorrigible enthusiasm. Whether he’s dancing or taking photos or going an hour out of his way in the rain to bring me orange juice when I’m sick, he’s always excited. But it’s also what makes him hoard — any object holds the power to radically improve his life. His belief in the magic of a new plastic organizer box or shelf system is infectious, and I lose him in the excitement, the possibilities.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

“Cleaning,” he always responds.

I wonder how I can share my life with Andy when I cannot share space with him.

But while the piles shift around the apartment, the floor never emerges. Crucial items go missing, adrift in the mess. I find an article online that says hoarders often die in fires because they can’t get outside fast enough, and afterwards I can’t sleep at Andy’s house anymore. I go back to my apartment and can’t stand even my own modest mess. After throwing Helen’s possessions away all day, I want to get rid of my things, too. I dream about ruthlessly paring down my life’s possessions to just one shirt, one pair of jeans, one dress, one cup, one bowl, one fork.

I wonder how I can share my life with Andy when I cannot share space with him. Those kids Helen always pesters me to have, patting my belly and smiling — I’m afraid of raising them in a home where they can’t walk to the bathroom without stubbing a toe or bashing an elbow on some new pile of stuff.

I stop by Andy’s apartment one night and find him waiting on the stoop for me. I cajole him into letting me upstairs, and when he finally relents and leads me up to his apartment, he struggles to force the door open against a pile of shoes and crumpled cardboard boxes. The sweet-and-sour scent of dirty dishes wafts out to meet me. He starts to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” he tells me, promising he’ll fix it. He’ll clean everything up, he says. Next month, maybe, when we finish dehoarding the house.

And, finally, we do finish the house. We have to give up doing it all by ourselves and hire professionals to help, but it happens. On the last day, Andy buys a cake for one of the dehoarders who is celebrating his birthday. Andy is like Helen — always so kind, even to strangers.

When the last bag of trash has been carted away, I suggest we bring Helen back someday. I imagine her walking in and seeing it so clean and pretty, a homecoming to a house that feels brand-new again.

But Andy shakes his head emphatically. Seeing it empty, he says, would devastate her.


This essay is part of a series of stories about the meaning of home.

Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed

You might also enjoy reading:

Home Is Where The Cat Is

Who Owns Chinatown? One Immigrant Family’s Gentrification Fight

I Pay My Own Wages For Housework



15 DIY Recipes That Are Even Better Than Takeout


16 Workouts You Can Easily Do At Home

Watch What's It Like For A Trans Woman In Russia To Undergo Transition

$
0
0

Pascal Dumont

This is Vika. She is a transgender woman who moved to Moscow from Novosibirsk in Siberia to find work, and to save for surgery that would help her body match her gender.

Pascal Dumont

Vika is the subject of a four-episode web documentary called Transmoskva by a new online platform called Coda, which brings a sustained focus to pivotal world events.

Now divorced, Vika left behind her ex-wife and son, who is now eleven. She hopes to return to Siberia to spend more time with him after she has fully transitioned.

courtesy of Vika

Vika began taking hormones when her son was only two years old. But it's only this winter that she was able to save enough money to get breast implants and facial feminization surgery.

Pascal Dumont

Surgery would allow Vika not only to more closely match her body to the gender she feels inside, but to feel safer when she's out in public.

Coda

The documentary is part of Coda's first series, called "Russia's War on LGBTQ Rights."

Coda

Transmoskva follows Vika from the time she begins preparing for her surgery to the time when she returns to her hometown to be with her family.

Coda

It reveals surprising aspects of contemporary Moscow, like when Vika visits a store that caters specifically to male-assigned people who wish to present as women.

Coda

The existence of trans support groups in Russia counters Western perception that it's an unremittingly transphobic country.

Pascal Dumont

BuzzFeed News spoke to the director of Transmoskva, Pascal Dumont, and producer Amy MacKinnon, to talk about how the documentary came about and their intentions in telling Vika's story.

Pascal Dumont

"I first met Vika when I photographed her for The Moscow Times," Dumont said.

Coda

"From the moment I met her, she seemed really confident and open. And when Coda reached out to me, Vika was willing to embark on this documentary project and have us follow her."

"Initially we wanted the film to follow several people," MacKinnon added, "but eventually they all fell through. Because of the challenges they face, it wasn’t possible to film with them. Except for Vika."


Pascal Dumont

MacKinnon also talked about the state of transgender acceptance in Russia: "The legacy of the Soviet Union still shapes a lot of the way people react here. People retreated into their families, and sheltered themselves from the outside world. There’s a spirit that as long as it’s not threatening your home, family, or immediate welfare, it's all right."

Vika's old passport photo.

Pascal Dumont

After her surgery Vika will need to go before a judge to have her name and gender changed on her passport.

Vika's current passport, which still has her birth name and gender marker.

Pascal Dumont

It's an approval process that is unpredictable because it's at the judge's discretion, but Vika hopes that her feminization surgeries will convince the judge of her credibility.

As Vika finds her path, Dumont and MacKinnon hope that she will someday feel happiness and satisfaction in her gender.

Coda

You can watch the first episode of Transmoskva below. The second and third episodes are now available on Coda, and the finale, where we learn how Vika's parents and family in Siberia react to her transition, will be available on March 17.

vimeo.com


32 Animal Purses That Are Almost As Good As A Pet

$
0
0

And best yet, no poop involved.

Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed

We hope you love the products we recommend! Just so you know, BuzzFeed may collect a small share of sales from the links on this page.

This stegosaurus clutch.

This stegosaurus clutch.

If dinosaurs still existed they'd eat me up... so I think this is a much better alternative.

Buy it from Forever 21 for $66.

forever21.com

This tiny bunny.

This tiny bunny.

With a cute pom-pom tail that just won't quit. 🐰

Get it from Amazon for $28.93.

amzn.to


View Entire List ›

The Movie That's Ready To Make "Bro" Less Of A Bad Word

$
0
0

Glen Powell, Wyatt Russell, Blake Jenner, James Quinton Johnson, and Temple Baker in Everybody Wants Some.

Van Redin / Paramount Pictures

The best player on the 1980 Texas college baseball team lovingly depicted in Everybody Wants Some is a senior named Glen McReynolds, a guy who looks like he walked right off a faded Topps card and into a keg party. Played by former Teen Wolf star Tyler Hoechlin, Glen has the bulgiest muscles, the most luxuriant mustache, and the shit-eating grin of a guy who's sure he's going to go on as a pro athlete, that his life is going to become even more sweet than it already is. He's introduced by almost caving in a kitchen ceiling with the waterbed he's been setting up in the room above. He grinds every newcomer — including freshman main character Jake (Blake Jenner) — into the dirt to establish his dominance, and he handles losing very, very poorly. He's the distilled essence of sporty douchebaggery.

Paramount Pictures

But during a lazy afternoon hang-out around the baseball team houses (a pair of much-abused buildings donated by the city to house its players), Glen proposes a bet: wielding an axe as a baseball bat, he can cut a baseball in half midair. The teammate who takes up his wager tosses the ball, and as Glen hefts the axe above his shoulder and whirls it around, the movie slows down as if — like everyone else there — it can't help but admire the easy certainty with which he pulls of this feat of strength and accuracy. Glen may be a asshole, but he's enthralling in his physical magnificence, and in that moment, you can't help but like him, even as he smirkingly offers to go two out of three.

The same could be said for most of the characters in Richard Linklater's resplendently baggy comedy, who are a collection of unapologetic bros from an era before that term was quite so loaded. They're the big men on campus, on the sports team with the best record at school; the film takes place in the three days before class starts, when they have nothing to do but spend time together before heading out to get laid. In between talking about athletics and talking about sex, they haze one another and turn everything — from knuckles to Ping-Pong — into a competition. They drift through the three rambly, story-light days over which the film exists in a cloud of booze and testosterone and, despite all of this, the end product is somehow still an experience you want to crawl inside.

Paramount Pictures

Jake, Glen, the wisecracking Finnegan (Glen Powell), the tie-dyed Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the tightly wound weirdo Jay (Juston Street), and other teammates like Roper (Ryan Guzman), and Dale (J. Quinton Johnson) are, in 2016, an almost unfathomably unfashionable slice of the student population to make a movie about. They joke about "cockgobblers" and how emasculated the only dude with a girlfriend is as they scramble to find rooms in which to bed the night's conquests. Their lives are pretty much ongoing dick-measuring contests. Only one of the characters, Finnegan, a roguish charmer, appears to have given any thought to life after baseball. They throw the kind of rowdy parties that might be incredibly fun, but at which you'd keep a really close eye on your drink.

Paramount Pictures

Everybody Wants Some has been billed as a spiritual sequel to Linklater's 1993 Dazed and Confused, one of the greatest high school movies ever made. But that 1976-set comedy laid out a whole ecosystem of queen bees and coffee shop philosophers, rebellious football players and twentysomething holdouts trolling for teenage girls. Everybody Wants Some feels, at least at first, like a follow-up centered only on the equivalent of Affleck's preening Fred O'Bannion and his pals, high-fiving over the beatings they hand out to 14-year-olds — not the misfits and the losers, but the alphas and the bullies. And then, gradually, it reveals itself to be a sort of bro reclamation project. It doesn't soften the hyper-macho atmosphere of the baseball houses, but it does drain it of toxicity by affirming the bonds underneath, built by the constant ragging.

Everybody Wants Some's Jake is the successor of Mitch, the babyfaced, half-formed hero of Dazed and Confused; he arrives at college (and the '80s) broad-shouldered and confident after what was clearly a stint as a high school A-lister. It takes a few beats to see that underneath the swagger, he's another Linklater philosopher prince, a seeker of meaning and haver of long, pot-fueled conversations. Jake's open to people, and through his eyes we see the baseball players go from a brawny blur of jocks to a group of differentiated characters shoving and elbowing their way toward being a team. Over subsequent evenings, they sample different subcultures — the disco club, the country bar, a punk show, and a theater kid party — and if their motivation is to pick up chicks, the result is a buffet of possibilities, this feeling of worlds being open to visitors, whether for a jubilant line dance to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" or a minute in a mosh pit. It suggests identity is ultimately to be tried on and possibly discarded during the self-discovery of college: Everything isn't beautiful, precisely, but nothing hurts.

Paramount Pictures

There's plenty of entitlement in assuming you'll be welcome wherever you go, but Everybody Wants Some is disarmingly forthright about how good its characters have it, with regard to their popularity, their desirability, and their privileged treatment by the school. And there's only one, lone moment that suggests there is any negative associations to being a jock: Beverly (Zoey Deutch), the winsome performing arts major who catches Jake's eye, is surprised to learn that Jake's on the baseball team, and he asks if her shock is because she expects athletes to be stupid... and that minor ding comes because she's already impressed by him. These characters are freed from present-day concerns about crippling college loans and, for that matter, the conversation about consent — the sex they have is portrayed with an idealistic enthusiasm on the part of all parties involved. College, as one character notes, is a place for equal opportunity sluttiness.

Has anyone ever loved college as much as Richard Linklater? In Dazed and Confused, it's the promiscuous paradise Don and Slater are holding out for, and it's where the last scene in Boyhood takes place, Mason going for a hike on mushrooms with his new roommate and two pretty girls, independent life sprawling out in front of him like the view. Everybody Wants Some, for all its careful vintage details — the short shorts and the soundtrack, the arcade games and the hairstyles (both head and facial) — isn't nostalgic for a era so much as it is for that particular moment in life when everything seems possible, and when classes are the least important part of school. It's a time so idyllic that at least one character overstays his welcome trying to hide in it a little longer. It's hard to fault him when the film itself has an ease that's addictively cozy, whether its characters feel familiar or far removed. They're an endearing bunch of — well, bros. In Linklater's dexterous hands, it doesn't feel like such a bad word.

14 Chocolate Chunk Desserts That'll Change Your Entire Damn Life

8 Reasons You Should Just Go Back To Bed

$
0
0

There’s nothing out there for you.

Because it's still winter.

Because it's still winter.

Haejin Park for BuzzFeed

Because all coffee does is delay the inevitable.

Because all coffee does is delay the inevitable.

Becky Barnicoat / BuzzFeed

Because it's all you were looking forward to when you were at work.

Because it's all you were looking forward to when you were at work.

Sara Pocock / BuzzFeed

Because you're an adult baby that needs to just sleep it off.

Because you're an adult baby that needs to just sleep it off.

Lizz Hickey / BuzzFeed


View Entire List ›

18 Times Animals Just Didn't Give A Fuck


Which "Grease" Character Are You Based On Your Zodiac Sign?

$
0
0

There are worse things you could do.

The Sad Grandpa Who Won People's Hearts Is Having A Cookout For Everyone

$
0
0

“He loves it,” Pawpaw’s grandson told BuzzFeed News. “He never, ever thought he would be a celebrity.”


View Entire List ›

This Guy Became A Huge Meme Because He Looks Like Vincent Van Gogh

$
0
0

OK, so he has both ears, but this is still insane.

This is Robert Reynolds.

Instagram: @rdreynoldsnyc

Last week, a guy stopped Reynolds in a Starbucks and asked him if he knew he was famous online. "I was like, 'Yeah, yeah. I know,'" he told BuzzFeed News. "I can't believe this is coming back again."

Instagram: @rdreynoldsnyc

You see, Reynolds is a big meme online because, when he sports a full beard, he looks EXACTLY like the famous painter Vincent van Gogh.

Instagram: @rdreynoldsnyc

"I remember the first time I was like, 'No, never,' but then it was all the time."


View Entire List ›

Can You Name These Disney Channel Siblings?

This Guy's Nine-Minute Video About Japan Is The Best Damn History Lesson You'll Watch Today

Viewing all 215982 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images