Adventureland

Adventureland was a lot better film than I anticipated. The summary sounds incredibly boring, which it is. There is really no excitement or anything overly engaging about the film. However, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, and the rest of the cast make for an interesting story. Their characters are really well developed and how all of them mesh together during a summer of non-fun in the 1980's is intriguing. Eisenberg and Stewart play the same exact roles they do in every single film I've ever seen them in. Eisenberg is a neurotic but witty guy with self-esteem issues and Stewart is a beautiful but troubled young woman with emotional issues. They definitely don't go outside the box for their roles but they have mastered their niche archetypes. All-in-all, this isn't the most entertaining movie around but it has a certain charm to it. The characters feel real, the music takes you back in time to a more pure era, and the story is relatable to just about everyone.

While watching this movie, it wasn't clear if this was supposed to be a comedy or a drama, so it's difficult to put this into a category. It was funny and sad, so I'd classify it as a comedy/drama.

The movie takes place in the 1980's and the main character is forced to take a job a Pittsburgh area amusement park called "Adventureland" so he can save enough money to attend graduate school. While his parents feel the job is beneath his college degree qualifications, it's the only job he can find so he takes it, and ends up working the game show booths. While working there, he meets Kristen Stewart, and they develop a romantic relationship, which takes up a large chunk of the movie. Kristen, incidentally, seems to be playing the same exact character she played in "Twilight", wounded and needy.

Based on the trailers, I was expecting something along the lines of "Superbad" but the movie was a lot closer to "Dazed & Confused", a well written period piece of the 1970's. The comedy aspect of the movie was in the interactions with his friends, parents, co-workers, and supervisors. There weren't a lot of LOL moments, but the humor is more in identifying with the characters and their lives.

I enjoyed the movie and anyone living or growing up during the 1980's will appreciate the mood & music of the film.

Do you know that feeling you get when you've been lied to about a movie. A while back when In Bruges came out, the trailers pitched the movie as a wacky, Guy-Ritche-esquire, comedy with midgets and whores. Imagine the surprise of most of the movie goers when they went to see this film, and it turns out to be a very dark comedy, written about a suicidal hit man who is know facing regret and depression in the worst vacation spot ever. This feeling of surprise can sometimes make or brake how a movie is received for some people. Most of the time the audience will walk out of the film thinking that they've been lied to just so they will have payed for a ticket and other times the audience realizes that, if the movie wasn't pitched to them as this picture that they've seen before, they wouldn't have seen the film in the first place.

This is how I felt when I left Adventureland. Let me get this out of the way, Adventureland is NOT A COMEDY. I know the trailers pitch it as one, the director says it's one, and under the genre section of IMDb it says 'Comedy. But, this film, honestly, has two jokes in it, most of them supplied by Bill "By God You're In Everything Aren't You?" Hader. I'm not saying that this film only has two jokes in it like there are a lot of jokes in here but they're not funny. I'm saying that they're are only two jokes. Yes, Adventureland was pitched to us a romantic teen comedy about a horrible summer job but instead the film is a romantic drama that focuses on 21+ year old, coping with the fact that life is in fact full of sour lemons and you need to take a horrible job because it's the only thing you can do. I too was surprised that Adventureland wasn't a comedy but once you get past that, the film is actually very enjoyable and turns out to be one of the most intimate romance films on the same scale as 'Once.'

The film centers around the double named protagonist, Brennan James. Who is a couple thousand short of the money he needs for his trip around Europe as well as the first couple months rent for when he starts going to school in NYC. His parents inform him that his dad has been demoted and he's gonna have to pay for the money himself. The only job that is still hiring is the seedy amusement park Adventureland where all of the employees do nothing but talk about how much their job sucks, smoke weed and get drunk during their shifts. Brennan-James falls in love with the smart-dangerous girl, Em. But due to his drug connections, the hot girl of the theme park starts to become attracted to him. A love triangle turns into a square, then a hexagon and soon just a big pile of mess.

The film itself could go for a very whimsical style here due to the amusement park setting but because of the directors previous works (Freaks and Geeks and Superbad) he decided to go for a super-realistic approach. I also feel like he chose to direct this drama because he wanted to expand himself as a director. The direction itself is pretty subtle, which is for the best. I was really engrossed in the script itself and I felt like any "special" work the director put in it might have taken me out of this twenty-something romance story.

The story is a very good one. This too goes for the extremely realistic approach. Watching this film I remembered all of the times I had experienced something like this with a girl and that's when I realized that the film had totally sucked me in. I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen to Brennan and Em and once their relationship hit a couple of big rocks I remembered all of the times I had nearly ruined my relationships by doing something stupid. (i.e. listening to my penis and not my brain)

I was worried about the acting at first, it has a newbie as the lead and the twilight girl as his love interest. Not to mention Ryan Renolds playing a mentor figure, one that is a couple of cockiness points away from being the one in Waiting. However the director must have worked his magic with these three because they display some of the best performances I've seen in a while. They emote, they repress, they do everything a real person does in a relationship to the degree where their characters are so well developed your rubbing your eyes in disbelief like some kind f college screwball comedy. Then again, realism seems to be the thing Adventureland seems to do be going for.

This film is trying to grab the attention of the forty-somethings that were twenty-somethings in 1980 by making the most realistic nostalgia trip I've ever seen. The costumes seem like they're right out of value village, the dialog seems like you could have said it today and the acting makes the characters seem as if they're real people.

If feel that Adventureland wasn't pitched to the audience as a dramatic look at young love during the backdrop of the late 1980's because in the latter part of this decade, the only way young people are willing to look at the 1980's is through the eyes of irony. Looking at hot new styles as stupid idiotic fashion choices. Adventureland looks past all of that and makes a film that seem to be a grown up Sixteen Candles and because of this new approach to a beaten down idea, I not only applaud this movie but recommend it to people who have been looking for something new.

'Adventureland' is a melancholy voyage into the grey zone between adolescence and adulthood, school and career, lust and relationships, frivolity and responsibility. That is to say it is not 'Superbad' and that's supergood.

Upon graduating, comparative literature major James Brennan is informed that due to his father's recent demotion (alcoholism is an implied cause), the parents will not be funding his planned and hopefully transformative European vacation. James returns to his parents' Pittsburgh home with virginity and intellectual pretensions intact.

Still planning on attending Columbia Journalism School and needing funds, James seeks summer employment and settles for a job as a game both operator at Adventureland, a local amusement park that has seen better days. He is after all a comp lit major and not even qualified for manual labor.

Of course Adventureland is more than meets the eye. We're introduced to the interior lives of park employees. Extremely powerful performances are provided by Jesse Eisenberg, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva, Ryan McFarland, and especially Kristen Stewart as James's sort of girlfriend Em.

These are not stock characters (with the exception of the ballbusting Frigo character, put here for childish laughs). The characters are emotionally and behaviorally complex. They wrestle with what it means to be young (or not so young) what it is to be in a relationship, the meaning of sex, employment, violence, drug use, fidelity, intellectualism, relationships with parents and their new spouses, the value of education. In short, what it means to be a person.

To enhance its verisimilitude, the film is mostly set to mid eighties tunes (Expose, The Mary Jane Girls, etc.). These songs are of the mid-eighties, but the film is set in 1987. It's a slight jab at the less than cutting edge nature of Pittsburghian society circa 1987. No matter, the film does not ridicule the zeitgeist. Rather, it takes seriously the emotional resonance of the sex, the music, the clothes, the hair, the ganja, the drinking, and the want to all involved (it was serious) and in so doing achieves poignancy.

The film touched me and not just because I was almost James's age living not too far from Pittsburgh in 1987, but because it addresses what it means to be on the shaky cusp of adulthood in such an honest way. A must see.

"Adventureland"- ***1/2 BY: Kevin Muller The marketing for this film is terrible, just absolutely awful. The studio is pushing this film as the next "Superbad", just because the director of that film directed this gem. The truth is, this is far different than "Superbad", besides a few gross out gags. Where that film prided itself on its crudeness and vulgarity, this film prides itself on heart and pure emotion.

"Adventureland" has the feel of teen movies both from the 80's and 90's (more the 80's though). You have a sensitive character who is still trying to figure out who he is, and by a sequence of events, falls in love and more importantly, finds his true self. What makes the movie even more appealing is that it not only doesn't treat its characters as generic stereotypes, but as humans, which makes them more appealing to the audience.

Our main character here is James (played perfectly by Jessie Eisenberg) who has just graduated college and is looking forward to his trip to Europe with his fellow pal. The trip is not only supposed to be his graduation present, but also a way to escape his recent heartbreak, due to an emotional breakup. Things unfortunately go south with his finances, which forces him to get a job at the local amusement park. There he meets some interesting people: the two owners (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), nerdy Joel (the likable Martin Starr) and the beautiful "Em" (Kristen Stewert).

James and Em quickly fall for each other, but there is one small problem, she is in a very dysfunctional relationship with Connell (Ryan Reynolds), who plays the married park maintenance guy. Reynolds, who usually adds the goofy humor to every film he is in, holds back to really give the character a deepness that I was surprised he pulled off. I thought his performance was going to be similar to his Monty character from "Waiting". I applaud the restraint that he held throughout the film, because the character could have gone down that route very easily.

What makes this film work though is that director Greg Mottola doesn't overdo any aspect of the movie. The comedy, drama, and situations are all well balanced, which makes the film feel real. As I stated before, Reynolds is grounded, as is the rest of the cast with their performances. Eisenberg, who is accused of playing Michael Cera, gives a very layered and human performance. I am sorry to you Cera fans, but the awkward and caring guy thing was around way before Cera did it. Stewert, is just perfect in this role, she gives Em vulnerability, but makes her lovable at the same time. These two give perfect performances because neither of them have all the answers and it is about the deep connection they share, not just about the sex.

Go see this film, it deserves to be seen. This is a movie that Hollywood doesn't make anymore; a sweet, smart, moving and humorous experience that hopefully starts a chain of movies like it to follow.