A Miramax release presented in association with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment of a This Is That production. Produced by Ted Hope, Anne Carey, Kimmel. Executive producers, William Horberg, Bruce Toll. Directed, written by Greg Mottola.
James Brennan - Jesse Eisenberg Em Lewin - Kristen Stewart Joel Schiffman - Martin Starr Paulette - Kristen Wiig Bobby - Bill Hader Lisa P. - Margarita Levieva Mr. Brennan - Jack Gilpin Mr. Lewin - Josh Pais Mrs. Brennan - Wendie Malick Francy - Mary Birdsong Tommy Frigo - Matt Bush Sue O'Malley - Paige Howard Pete O'Malley - Dan Bittner Mike Connell - Ryan Reynolds
Arriving with what prove to be outsized expectations for raucous humor on the basis of "Superbad," Greg Mottola's "Adventureland" unspools as a rather ordinary account of youthful summer misadventures that goes down easily thanks to a sparky cast, more than 40 pop tunes that anchor the action in the late '80s and characters who get high both on and off their jobs at a tacky amusement park. Thanks especially to the presence of leading lady Kristen Stewart in a role she filmed prior to "Twilight," the pic should spin good returns for Miramax on its March 27 release.
Based on experiences he had working at a Long Island amusement park, Mottola cooks up a passable amount of mischief to occupy the late-teen/early-20s misfits who work as ride and game operators at Pittsburgh's Adventureland in the summer of '87. Writer-director's evident stand-in is James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg of "The Squid and the Whale"), who's forced to take any summer job he can get when his European trip is dashed and his autumn date with grad school at Columbia is jeopardized by his alcoholic father's fall from grace at work.
For a Reagan-era pothead, James is a terribly serious, woefully earnest guy who offers up his SAT scores when applying for low-end summer positions. He also somehow has emerged from college still a virgin, but his saving grace as far as his Adventureland cohorts are concerned is that he's always got some weed. This makes the days go by easier, and also fuels the nights, which the gawky James surprises himself by sometimes chastely spending with the alluring but massively screwed up Em (Stewart), who works at the park only as a way of getting away from her father and unbearable new stepmother.
What James doesn't know is that Em is having a clandestine affair with older local musician and handyman Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), to whom James sometimes confesses his amorous feelings for Em. Adding further to the equation is a flirty cupcake named Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), a known virgin-for-life who nonetheless encourages James' attentions.
The set-up provides plenty of opportunity for crude humor, which Mottola indulges with abundant gags involving puking, crotch punches, drunk and stoned behavior and lax work habits. But his real interest is the navigation of dubious emotional and ethical straits by immature characters who make serious mistakes while trying to feel their way out of their unhappiness.
The filmmaker's investment in James' sudden loss of a safety net, Em's justifiable distress at home and brainy stoner Joel's (Martin Starr) fury over a one-time date's anti-Semitism is genuine as far as it goes, but little that happens here is particularly surprising, especially the occurrence of some virginity divestment at the end.
Rather offputting at first with his furrowed-brow attitude, Eisenberg's James becomes increasingly palatable as the summer progresses. Stewart impresses again with her steady, clear-eyed gaze and sense of self. Nice comic turns are put in by Starr as the Gogol-reading outcast and Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the goofball but dedicated park owners.
With the exception of the extensive song track, tech contributions are just OK.
MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 106 MIN.
Posts: 5431 | Location: "Stay Classy San Diego!" | Registered: June 15, 2006
Larry knows I am not one to judge movies I have not yet seen, but I suspect Hader and Wiig may be the only good reasons to see this movie. Maybe someday someone will give them roles worthy of their comedic talents.
Credits Release Date: Apr 03, 2009; Rated: R; Length: 106 Minutes; Genre: Comedy; With: Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
For anyone making a youth nostalgia film, it's easy enough to nail the signifiers: the clothes and the cars, the great songs (or kitsch classics), the ''casual'' references to famous news events. What's harder to catch is the mood, the vibe, the aspects of an era we didn't even know were defining until the movie revealed them. Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in Pennsylvania in 1987, and in form it's a sweetly traditional how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation romantic comedy, with Jesse Eisenberg as James Brennan, a sharp-witted, nervously sincere young man who fills up the months before he enters Columbia graduate school by working at a run-down amusement park. The place is called Adventureland (it's anything but), and once James is ensconced there, he hangs out all day long, listening to endless replays of ''Rock Me Amadeus'' as he hands out stuffed animals to lucky prizewinners and gets to know the other kids who are toiling away at this seedy wage-slave carnival. The jobs are crap, but they're all in it together, and they become friends.
So far, so conventional, except that Mottola, the director of Superbad, works with rare feeling and flow. He shows every bit as loving and pinpoint-perfect an observational eye for the late '80s as George Lucas did for the end of the greaser era in American Graffiti and Richard Linklater did for the free-ride '70s in Dazed and Confused. The movie looks as if it was shot in the Reagan era, with a darkly grubby low-tech surface, and part of its gentle magic is that Mottola knows how to bury his period references deep inside the attitudes that first enveloped them. The playing of once-nifty, now-ancient videogames is accompanied by much mock wow! chatter at their battlestar awesomeness, and when the park's resident hottie, the swaggering Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), shows up, we can see that she's modeled her entire look and boy-toy 'tude on Madonna, yet the pop star herself is never mentioned. Joel (Martin Starr), the morosely ironic literate loser of the bunch, would have been the purest of nerds in an earlier era, only now he's an indie nerd who tries to be a bit cool by declaring how uncool he is, and by smoking a pipe.
The '80s, at least at the time, appeared drenched in irony, in the jadedness of a generation whose members, schooled on John Hughes and MTV, had grown compulsive about status and image and occupying their prescribed roles. It's Mottola's funny and touching inspiration to look back and see how unself-conscious the decade now seems, from the vantage of the ''Whatever!''/Twitter era. The characters don't even hook up — they make out. And talk about making out. How innocent can you get?
Eisenberg, all grown up from The Squid and the Whale, is gangly and handsome now, but he plays James with his head slumped like a turtle (to let us know the guy doesn't realize that he's attractive), and with a percussive, head-shaking stammer that still has a note of Woody Allen in it. James is a virgin, chivalrous to a fault, and too sincere for his own good — which is what's desperate about him, and winning, too. He's still trying to figure out what his own role is. Whereas Em (Kristen Stewart), the flashing-eyed girl he befriends and starts to date (sort of), is all too good at projecting an image. She knows how to hide her troubles, of which she has plenty. Stewart, as she proved in Twilight, has a cutting sharpness that draws you right to her pale, severe beauty. She makes Em just the kind of good-bad girl a lamb like James needs to set himself free.
There are many stray pleasures in Adventureland, from Bill Hader's hilarious turn as the dumb cluck who runs the park to Ryan Reynolds' seen-it-all cool as the mechanic and resident stud who's a lot more vulnerable than he looks. And when it comes to those soundtrack gems, Mottola has perfect pitch: He makes splendid use of Crowded House's ''Don't Dream It's Over'' for its melancholy rapture, Shannon's ''Let the Music Play'' for its exhilarating throb and crunch, and a dozen others that will have you wistful for melodies you may not have even loved at the time. That said, there's a slightly predictable mildness to the movie's storytelling. Adventureland doesn't quite soar—it lopes along affectionately. But for nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart. A–
Posts: 5431 | Location: "Stay Classy San Diego!" | Registered: June 15, 2006
Originally posted by caresa: A surprisingly positive review from Variety.com: Greg Mottola's "Adventureland" unspools as a rather ordinary account of youthful summer misadventures ...little that happens here is particularly surprising, especially the occurrence of some virginity divestment at the end... tech contributions are just OK.
By Scott Foundas Tuesday, March 31st 2009 at 2:45pm
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola's Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and kneesocks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001, to participate in those analog rituals known as Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole. Drawn from Mottola's own experiences working at a ramshackle suburban amusement park, Adventureland feels at once personal and generational, a Proustian madeleine for anyone who rode the roller coaster of post-adolescence while Iran-Contra was in prime time and Wang Chung on the radio—which, I suppose, makes it more like a Proustian Astro Pop.
The year is 1987, and the place is the titular, mom-and-pop Pittsburgh fun zone, where a gaggle of college students and recent grads languidly pass the summer while planning for bigger lives in bigger cities. Self-serious aspiring travel writer James (Jesse Eisenberg) was supposed to be seeing the world, but Reaganomics trickled down to his newly demoted father, putting the kibosh on Europe (and possibly Columbia journalism school) and forcing James into the only summer job he could find. Even then, he's quickly pegged by Adventureland's proprietors (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig) as a "Games" guy—which, in the park's comical caste system, is the domain of intellectuals, introverts, and anyone else deemed unworthy of those bronzed gods and goddesses known as Ride Operators. Floating above all of this, as if in his own private aerie, is maintenance man Connell (Ryan Reynolds)—slightly older than the rest, with a carefully honed aura of Top Gun chic, a self-perpetuating legend that he once jammed with Lou Reed, and a reputation, despite the wedding band on his finger, of being the park's resident lothario.
James learns the Adventureland ropes from Joel (Martin Starr), the pipe-smoking, Plato-quoting Games guru who, in a hilariously misguided romantic overture, gives a chaste Catholic co-worker a copy of Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat as a token of his affection, insisting on the tormented Russian author's merits even after enduring her rejection. James, meanwhile, takes a more conventional approach to his courtship of arcade worker Em (Kristen Stewart), despite telling her up-front that he's a 22-year-old virgin and later borrowing a few too many moves from his main man Connell's playbook. Thus, Games guy meets Games girl; gradually comes into a new self-confidence; nearly blows the good thing he has by succumbing to the temptations of a gum-chewing, bra-strap-baring Rides vixen; and tries to put things right again, only to discover that betrayal is a two-way street.
Undeniably, Adventureland traffics in certain, perhaps inevitable clichés that have attended teen and twentysomething relationship movies since time (or at least John Hughes) immemorial. But, as he previously demonstrated in 2007's Superbad, Mottola cuts so swiftly to the underlying truth of those clichés—to the euphoria and pain of youthful rites of passage—that he leaves most other movies on the subject looking especially plastic and shallow. In its mellower, more melancholic tone, however, Adventureland even more strongly recalls Mottola's superb, Sundance-winning debut, The Daytrippers (1996), which followed a bickering Long Island family on a darkly farcical car ride into Manhattan.
The constant in Mottola's work is his marvelous hand with actors, inspiring them to invest the most minor or familiar of characters with a nuanced inner life that goes beyond what's on the page. In Adventureland, that's particularly true of Stewart, who taps into an emotional reservoir that her role in the teen vampire behemoth Twilight neither demanded nor revealed, giving Em the quiet sadness of someone who, in her early twenties, has already suffered a lifetime's worth of disappointments. So, too, does the consistently resourceful, intelligent Reynolds manage, in a few fleeting appearances, to make an almost tragic figure out of his potentially sleazy, slacker Don Juan. Like all of the ostensible adults in the film—from Em's ineffectual father and status-seeking stepmother to Hader and Wiig's Adventureland lifers—Connell may be older, but he isn't necessarily any wiser about the peculiar alchemy of finding one's place in the world.
By the standards of Mottola's previous films, both of which unfolded over the course of a single day, the season-spanning Adventureland is practically an epic, but one in which Mottola sacrifices none of his romantic poet's affection for the fleeting, ephemeral moment. Here, no detail is too small to be glazed with the amber of memory, least of all whatever happened to be playing on the radio (or MTV) when you made out with a girl, got your heart broken, or forgave a friend. To that end, Mottola and music supervisor Tracy McKnight have mined their collective unconscious for more than 40 period songs that capture the '80s in all its musical permutations—hair metal (Poison's "Here I Go Again"), new wave pop (Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus"), punk (New York Dolls' "Looking for a Kiss"), and everything else we had no choice but to listen to before iPods let us hyper-personalize the soundtracks of our lives. I've seen Mottola's movie twice, and both times, it has inspired feelings of joy, sadness, and a profound yearning for the unrecoverable past. Maybe I'm projecting too much false nostalgia onto this modest but poignant Gen-X touchstone, if not the '80s themselves. Or maybe, you just had to be there.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
LOS ANGELES (AP) - On the surface, "Adventureland," director Greg Mottola's follow-up to his hit "Superbad," looks like another good-time, raunchy romp. And it certainly has healthy amounts of partying and pranks to go along with its gross-out gags.
The 1987 amusement-park setting also allows Mottola to revel in dead-on period kitsch, from acid-washed jeans and teased-up bangs to the absurdly annoying strains of Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus," which repeatedly blares over the loud speakers. (He wrote the script based on his own experiences working at a Long Island theme park while at Columbia University in the late '80s; two decades later, he's clearly still traumatized, and understandably so.)
But "Adventureland" has more on its mind _ and its heart _ than that, as its college-age characters struggle to figure out who they are and what they want in a time of flux.
Mottola seems to be aiming for that John Hughes style of comedy: the kind that starts out with light laughs but ends up in analytical angst. He doesn't always find the right tone in trying to cover such varied terrain, but you have to admire him for trying inject some substance into what can be a predictably mindless genre.
Standing in as the Mottola figure is Jesse Eisenberg as recent college graduate James Brennan, who had been planning on a summer in Europe before heading to grad school. Instead, he ends up moving back home to Pittsburgh to live with his parents and working at the thoroughly mediocre Adventureland theme park.
His job in the games department (he would have preferred operating the rides) requires him to act enthusiastic about peddling schlocky prizes, although he learns pretty quickly that screwing with the clientele is a favorite activity of the park's veteran employees. This is also a chief source of laughs in the early going, and it gives the film a buoyant energy until it turns heavier and darker. (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are underused as the overzealous married couple who run the place.)
Eisenberg plays the same awkward but quick-witted underdog we've seen in previous films like "The Squid and the Whale," but at least that guy is brainy and likable. He shares amusing intellectual banter with Martin Starr as Joel, the pipe-smoking Russian literature expert, as well as a ridiculous romance with Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), the hottest girl at the park.
Kristen Stewart, meanwhile, merely has her typical sullen expression and low-key delivery as Em, the well-off NYU student who's only working at Adventureland to get away from her family. What James sees in her, besides her impeccable taste in music, is a mystery. But one of the realistic touches in Mottola's film is the importance of poignant tunes in its characters' lives, with a soundtrack that features The Replacements, Husker Du and Lou Reed.
Ryan Reynolds refreshingly co-stars as a bad guy, for once: a married musician who has trysts with his girlfriends in the basement of his mother's house. But Mottola seems more comfortable with the comedy than he does with the sort of drama that Reynolds' character introduces; such moments weigh down the film rather than provide it with gravitas.
It's like he's chosen the right song, but it just isn't always in tune.
"Adventureland," a Miramax Films release, is rated R for language, drug use and sexual references. Running time: 107 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
Director Greg Mottola plays old songs in new keys and strikes dissonant, unsettling notes. His Superbad was a formula teen-sex comedy written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, but it came out less like American Pie than American Graffiti with a hint of Blue Velvet—the drive to get laid existing side by side with the dread of the world where that leads. (The grown-ups were scarily unhinged.) Adventureland, which Mottola wrote, is a coming-of-age picture made strange by its setting and the graceful tremulousness of its actors. It’s 1987, and the protagonist, James (Jesse Eisenberg), is stuck in a Pittsburgh suburb with his parents between college and graduate school, working game booths in a dilapidated amusement park. Still a virgin, he falls hard for Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart), who’s secretly carrying on with Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the park’s too-cool, married fix-it guy. All the characters are old enough to live on their own but are still in the rooms they had as kids (the exception, Connell, uses his mom’s basement for trysts), and they’re chafing miserably at their dependence. Adventureland (the park) offers little in the way of liberation. The creaky rides with their deafening disco music seem adventure-free.
Adventureland isn’t funereal, though—it’s light on its unhappy feet. Eisenberg has been playing arrested heroes for a while, and he’s canny enough never to let you catch him drooping. His face is a fount of uncertainty between a helmet of curly hair and a big Adam’s apple; his skinny frame lists from side to side as if he’s unable to muster the will to show gravity who’s boss; he has to contort to conceal his erections. What makes James so fascinating (and dismaying) is his compulsive blabbing; there’s nothing too personal he won’t say with the least bit of prodding. Or no prodding. It all gushes out—his virginity, his crushes, his heartbreaks. The scenes in which he breathlessly confides in the older Connell about his dates with Em make you cringe, because his words make Connell want Em more. (The advice Connell dispenses is meant to sabotage him.) The only mystery about James is that women find him attractive instead of embarrassing, ostensibly because he’s different from all the inconstant bad boys. Mottola is smart to provide a contrasting defeatist geek, Joel (Martin Starr), who cultivates a nihilistic detachment. At least James is in the world, absurdly hopeful, taking chances.
Adventureland isn’t just a boys’ life. Many scenes incorporate Em’s perspective, and Kristen Stewart (late of Twilight) seems more alive than she did opposite the vampire hunk with the tall forehead. She doesn’t over-diagram Em’s emotions; her murk is vivid. It’s too bad Mottola writes the adult parts so on-the-nose: It’s one thing for Em to describe her stepmother as a “status-obsessed witch,” another to have the actress telegraph that description in every line. And it’s a letdown when the movie doesn’t do more with SNL’s loony minimalists Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the park’s owners. (See Wiig in Ghost Town to appreciate how uproarious a teeny-weeniest of inflections can be.)
But Adventureland hits home—at least my home. Mottola pumps up the soundtrack with music—The Replacements, Hüsker Dü—I listen to when I want that old eighties feeling. I actually have a James-like impulse to blab about my identification with the movie’s needy, overintellectualizing hero: I could feel in my bones his self-disgust as he lay on his bed in his parents’ house, alienated from their values and lifestyle yet comfortable, too. (He doesn’t have to pay rent.) What makes the movie such an unexpectedly potent little number is that Adventureland comes to stand for Stagnationland; the real roller coaster (i.e., life) is just outside the park.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
In contrast, the other major '80s film of this festival, Greg Mottola's amusement-park romantic comedy "Adventureland," is a total delight, with a winsome and terrifically textured cast who seem both like young-adult archetypes and recognizable human beings.
"Adventureland" will be released in theaters soon (by Miramax), so it isn't the moment for a full-length review. Let's just say that "Superbad" director Mottola captures the atmosphere of mid-'80s post-teenage boredom with wonderful charm and specificity. James (Jesse Eisenberg of "The Squid and the Whale") is still a virgin, but he's a bit more than your standard horny teen. In fact he's a Renaissance studies graduate planning to move to New York for grad school, until his parents' finances collapse and he's forced to stay at home in Pittsburgh. As he puts it, "Unless someone wants help restoring a fresco, I'm ****ed."
So it is that James winds up at Adventureland, a mildly seedy theme park presided over by mustachioed Bobby (Bill Hader) and his dimwit wife, Paulette (Kirsten Wiig). James' co-workers include the pipe-smoking, Gogol-reading Joel (Martin Starr); local music legend Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a slightly older guy who allegedly once jammed with Lou Reed; the self-appointed hottest girl at the park, known only as Lisa P (Margarita Levieva); and of course the tomboyish, sharp-tongued Em (Kirsten Stewart), who makes James believe it might not be such a deadly summer after all.
Of course "Adventureland" will have to appeal to a broader audience than people who actually worked at dead-end service-sector jobs in the mid-'80s. It's much more intelligent, and vastly less insulting, than your average horny-kid comedy, and I think it will do just fine. But let's say this: If you were in fact there in that era, at Adventureland or someplace like it, then Mottola absolutely nails it. The hair, the clothes, the rides in old beaters fueled by bong hits and Replacements songs. The atmosphere of total ennui that in fact fostered the outburst of DIY creativity. The Foreigner cover bands and endless-loop radio play of "Borderline" and "Rock Me Amadeus." Part of me wanted to get off Mottola's time machine and work at the game arcade with James and Joel and Em for a few weeks. And then I thought about what that would actually be like, and I realized that visiting for 90 minutes is a whole lot better.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
There's not much new on the surface of writer-director Greg Mottola's post-collegiate romantic dramedy Adventureland, unless its musical immersion in '80s indie-kid nostalgia counts: "Pale Blue Eyes," Hüsker Dü, and a noodling Yo La Tengo score for character, Crowded House and Poison for context. But though its comedic incidence of puking and ****-punching tallies an intermediate youth-follies score, the heart of Mottola's autobiographical paean to young male mortification lies in the one-on-one scenes between his able leads, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. In a witty bar dialogue, Eisenberg flounders with pseudo-confessional, haltingly Woody Allenesque bravado meant to seduce; as he dodges the issue of his virginity by declaring a past crush unworthy of the sentiments of Shakespeare's Sonnet 57, Stewart listens bemused, coolly applying her experienced upper hand: "Stop saying intercourse." He's a less confident, neuroticized variation on the John Cusack heroes of 20 years ago (proffering a mixtape of his top "bummer songs") while she seems heir to the gravitas and mystery of the fledgling Jennifer Jason Leigh. The fresh truths of their hesitant stumble through the mating dance render the movie's goofier pleasures trifling but digestible.
Adventureland again finds Eisenberg, who unsentimentally portrayed the slappable teen antihero of The Squid and the Whale, as a sexually naive Reagan-era smartass, here as newly graduated James Brennan, Oberlin '87. Stranded in his native Pittsburgh for the summer after his parents' funding of a pre-grad-school European trek falls through, he's forced to work in a game booth at the local amusement park, where mulleted ball-tossing contestants are outfoxed by the gluing of derbies onto the heads of mannequins and the warping of basketball hoops into impossible ovals. Falling quickly for fellow alt-rock misfit Em (Stewart), James plies her with a stash of pot, but insecurely foresees the familiar burn of rejection when she advises that they "go slow," little suspecting that she's the latest conquest of the park's maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds), a married, guitar-toting Casanova who sneaks his conquests off to Mom's paneled basement.
Coming off helming the Judd Apatow-produced smash Superbad, Mottola goes for more blatantly tender notes in filming his pet project, and Stewart's alienated cool chick has more lifelike insecurities and foibles than the targeted girls in that earlier cherry-popping quest. At its laziest, the script saddles the Adventureland workers with a gallery of doltish or vicious parents—Em gets an oily lawyer dad and witchy stepmother—recalling irksome traits of the John Hughes oeuvre. Standouts in support are Martin Starr as a depressive park vet and Russian Lit scholar whose morning-after gift to a big-haired makeout partner is a Gogol paperback, and Margarita Levieva as the ditzy A-Land bombshell who unexpectedly becomes James's fallback in pursuit of shedding his "scarlet V." Clowning by broom-stached Bill Hader and sighing Kristen Wiig, as the couple who resourcefully mismanage the rides and corndogs, amuses but seems imported from a different, Caddyshack-like universe; mercifully they don't hijack whole reels like Hader and Seth Rogen's cops in Superbad.
Amid the antics, loose joints, and threatening customers, Eisenberg and Stewart peak with a tearful realization of joint betrayal (before James pulls a vengeful dick move worthy of his Squid jerk). The aftermath wobbles—a rain-soaked climax in New York feels like a reconsidered ending for a cornier, brighter tale—but Mottola's stars mine an emotional adventureland of first love whenever he can't keep the action bobbing along on alt-rock classics and fluorescent summer nights.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A decent flick with stellar acting. Eisenberg and Stewart are great, especially Stewart. Wiig and Hader KILLED in the screening that I saw though. Every time they appeared onscreen the audience started giggling and every single one of their zingers was a bullseye. After each one, you couldn't hear the next few lines of dialogue because the audience was laughing so hard. Unfortunately, they are in VERY little of the film. They probably have 5-10 minutes of screentime...and after a while, you just wish the film was about them. Ryan Reynolds is miscast here. B
Grammy FYC: Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak; Black Eyed Peas, The E.N.D.; John Legend, Evolver; Paolo Nutini, Sunny Side Up; David Guetta, One Love; Kelly Clarkson, "Already Gone"; Jordin Sparks, "Battlefield"; Kings Of Leon, "Use Somebody"; Maxwell, "Pretty Wings"
MOVIE REVIEW Adventureland A fairly safe ride: 'Adventureland' has laughs, lust, but little edge By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff | April 3, 2009
The 2007 film "Superbad" is remembered as many things - funny, sweet, obnoxious, lucrative. One thing it isn't remembered for, despite what the credits say, is being a Greg Mottola movie. Seth Rogen co-wrote it, and Judd Apatow produced it. As such, the film tends to get lumped in with all things Apatow. Like every director in the Apatow fraternity, Mottola was more a traffic cop, making sure the physical and hormonal chaos didn't kill anybody. The sensibility (crude, schlubby, cuddly) was Apatow's.
The film "Adventureland" means to provide a clearer sense of what "A film by Greg Mottola" means. But the forecast is "hazy with a chance of cute." It's the sort of flavorless, willfully quirky, occasionally amusing slice of suburban boredom that, for years, has given the Sundance Film Festival its soft, gooey center.
The film is set in Pennsylvania in 1987 and revolves around James (Jesse Eisenberg), a stammering, inexorably bright recent college graduate bound for Columbia University's writing program. He says he wants to write travel books as Charles Dickens did. A trip to Europe is in the offing. But his parents' sour finances leave him stuck with a job operating the games at an Adventureland amusement park managed by the sort of one-dimensional nonsense couple you'd expect Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, of "Saturday Night Live," to play.
James's awkwardness and ambivalence informs the rest of the movie's tone. Eisenberg has Albert Brooks's sense of intellectual superiority and certain young people's social insecurity. The movie puts both to the most banal ends. James finds himself caught between two of the most nubile girls on the park's payroll. Emily (Kristen Stewart) works in the games department with him. Lisa P (Margarita Levieva) is the little red Corvette of the staff. In case you missed that: Lisa P works in rides.
Stewart and Levieva represent two competing types of sexuality, indirect versus indiscreet. Stewart supplies another movie with the forlorn lust that made sense in "Twilight." The 1980s setting suits Levieva here. What Lisa P knows about carnality she appears to have learned from Whitesnake music videos. Things are complicated by the news that Emily, whom James prefers, has been having an affair with the park's hunky, older married mechanic, played by Ryan Reynolds. James is the last to know.
Mottola looses some interest ing people on the action - a ****y kid named Pete (Dan Bittner) and his socially confused sister Sue (Paige Howard), who looks older than everybody and stops hooking up with James's new friend Joel (Martin Starr) because he's Jewish; an over-caffeinated weirdo played by Matt Bush, who's so funny in those AT&T family-plan ads. Why didn't Mottola build the movie around them?
Some characters can't even see what's in front of their eyes. Lisa P's introduction comes with a marvelous speech from Joel about the aesthetics of her backside. But it's her inexplicably silent black friend Kelly (Kimisha Renee Davis) whose apple bottom fits Joel's description to a tee. How could someone with such a fatal attraction to beautiful butts not notice hers? The movie is colorblind, but body-dumb.
I much prefer last year's "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist" to what's going on here. That film had its imperfections, but it plunged into the here and now of being young and alive and drunk and horny and confused. You could feel the crackle of energy that's missing from "Adventureland," which tries making emotional noise. Yet so much of it is so deadpan and self-consciously arch; it lazily coasts the surface of nostalgia.
In an interview from 2007, Mottola described "Adventureland," which he planned to make after "Superbad," as "indie comedy." That description epitomizes what's wrong with both his movie and most so-called indie comedies, from "Napoleon Dynamite" to "Juno," movies that neutralize life with comedy as opposed to looking for the comedy in life. Race is made safe. Sex is made safe. Feelings are neat and simple. There are no appreciable politics. The soundtracks are always excellent, and everybody is uncomfortably cool. Their hearts, minds, and souls are coated with Teflon.
These are movies that aspire more to mediocre television than to films or moviemaking. As a sensibility, "indie" shouldn't be confused with the riskier, thornier ambitions of American independent cinema, which more than ever is being elbowed to outer regions of the distribution and exhibition process by vanishing studios, yes, but also by trendy niche marketing. "Adventureland" is harmless enough, but "indie comedy" sounds like something better seen at Urban Outfitters than at a movie theater.
A positive review from THE NEW YORK TIMES (listed as a Critics Pick)...
By A. O. SCOTT Published: April 3, 2009
It’s the summer of 1987. The stock market crash is a few months off, but for James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) things have already taken a recessionary turn. His father (Jack Gilpin), a wilted, weak-chinned alcoholic, has been demoted, and the resulting financial pinch puts the kibosh on James’s rather modest postcollegiate dream of a summer in Europe followed by graduate school at Columbia. (His sights were set on journalism school, and given what his midcareer, 40-something self would be facing two decades later, it’s probably just as well he didn’t go.)
Anyway, like so many other members of a generation unfairly stigmatized at the time as slackers, James moves back in with Dad and Mom (Wendie Malick), who live in standard suburban discomfort in western Pennsylvania. Finding that a B.A. in comparative literature qualifies him for fairly little in the way of paid work, James takes a position manning the midway games at Adventureland, a sad little amusement park that serves as the employer of last resort for the area’s misfit young.
Apart from a certain gangly, nerdy charm — Mr. Eisenberg’s stock in trade, already evident in “Roger Dodger” and “The Squid and the Whale” — James doesn’t have much in the way of assets: his virginity, a bag of joints (courtesy of a preppy college pal) and a bookish naïveté, all of which you can be sure he will be rid of by the time “Adventureland” is over.
The film, written and directed by Greg Mottola (“The Daytrippers,” “Superbad”), plants its flag in thoroughly explored territory, but that familiarity turns out to be integral to its loose and scruffy appeal. Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence “Adventureland” displays.
The engine that drives most film comedy these days is the male flight from maturity. John Updike famously observed that an American man is “a failed boy.” The endless parade of movies that bear the name or show the influence of Judd Apatow (a producer of “Superbad”) blunts the tragic implication of that claim by insisting that a man is a successful boy, who gets to keep his toys and his pals even as he acquires the benefits and obligations of heterosexual monogamy. The humor in these comedies is based on various forms of sexual unease, in particular a jokey, half-panicky homoeroticism complemented by a semiterrified fascination with those oddly shaped, emotionally inscrutable creatures known as women.
The cast of “Adventureland” includes a few members of the Apatow stock company (notably Bill Hader as one of the park’s owners and Martin Starr as a nebbishy colleague of James’s with a fondness for Gogol). But in spite of this family resemblance, Mr. Mottola’s film is a relatively sober and cerebral affair, more akin to Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” than to “Knocked Up” or “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”
It’s not just that James is an intellectual with a literary bent that suggests a latter-day Woody Allen or Philip Roth hero. It’s more that his innocence expresses itself less as an anxious mystification of women and sex than as a romantic idealization of (gulp) love.
No sooner has James started at Adventureland than he is smitten — as what literature major worth his Rilke would not be? — with Em, a moody, leggy N.Y.U. student played by Kristen Stewart. Em is secretly involved with Connell (Ryan Reynolds), an older, married maintenance man who impresses his younger co-workers, male and female alike, with transparently bogus tales of hobnobbing with famous musicians. “Did you know he jammed with Lou Reed?” Back in the ’80s, wherever you went, there was always some guy hanging around who had jammed with Lou Reed, even if Lou Reed never was much for jamming.
But the drop of Mr. Reed’s name allows “Adventureland” to make heartfelt use of “Satellite of Love,” one of his loveliest songs and part of a soundtrack that runs the gamut of more or less period-appropriate sounds, from the sublimity of Hüsker Dü to the ridiculousness of a bar band covering Foreigner. Otherwise Mr. Mottola is careful not to fetishize or lampoon the 1980s with silly hairdos or too-obvious topical references.
Nor does he lean too heavily on the central romantic plot, allowing the film, true to its season of idleness and drift, to meander from one thing to another. There is some exemplary silliness from Mr. Hader and the peerless Kristen Wiig, who plays his character’s wife and business partner, but the jokes tend to be sly rather than broad, and Mr. Mottola never sacrifices tenderness of feeling for a cheap laugh. Minor characters who might have been mean, tossed-off caricatures — like the theme-park bombshell known as Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva) — are endowed with the capacity to change and surprise, almost as if they were the protagonists of their own movies.
“Adventureland” sometimes seems to lose track of just which movie it is, and its sprawling narrative encompasses some soft spots and patches of inconsistency. The worst of these comes near the end, with a failure of compassion on James’s part that seems to owe more to the demands of the plot than the logic of the character. And at times Mr. Mottola lays on the suburban adolescent malaise with too heavy a hand.
Over all, though, the smart, slightly depressive vibe feels just right — for James’s era and for our own as well. The path to adulthood is lined with disappointment, but for a young man with an open heart and a measure of self-confidence, to say nothing of a degree in comp lit, things will most likely be O.K.
“Adventureland” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A little sex and a lot of pot smoking. Ah yes, the ’80s.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
By Kenneth Turan TIMES FILM CRITIC > > > April 3, 2009 The thing to know about "Adventureland" is not just that it has goals above its station but that it actually achieves them. With the help of a talented cast led by Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart and a potent soundtrack, writer-director Greg Mottola has taken that most overdone of contemporary genres, the coming-of-age story, and made it engaging, bittersweet and even fun.
It's been more than a decade since Mottola made his independent film debut with the underappreciated "The Daytrippers," and though he's had success as a toiler-for-hire in the Judd Apatow vineyards, directing both series television and "Superbad," it's good to see him back with a noticeably well-written film that has a genuine charm to it.
That doesn't mean that "Adventureland" reinvents the wheel. The outlines of the film's first-love plot are nothing if not familiar, and trace elements of best-forgotten genre conventions like gross-out scenarios and parents who are either losers or hopeless fools still remain.
What we get instead of something completely new is a demonstration of what the genre looks like when the wheel is custom-made. Character and dialogue are more important to the film's success than its plot, and though we can see where the story is headed well before the people who are living it, "Adventureland's" recognizable satisfactions feel well earned.
Mottola has set "Adventureland" in 1987, at a time when the writer-director was himself working in a venue similar to Kennywood, the park in Pittsburgh where the film was shot. It also adds to the substance of the story that its protagonists are old enough to either be in college or actually out of it, even though by taking a job at Adventureland they are, in the words of one employee, "doing the work of pathetic lazy morons."
This is definitely not the way James Brennan (Eisenberg) expected to be spending the summer between college graduation and a fall semester at New York's Columbia Journalism School. An awkward, brainy guy who reads poetry for pleasure and has idealistically remained a virgin because he doesn't want to divorce sex from love, James thought he'd be in Europe, the home of "sexually permissive cultures," but his father's financial reverses mandate a summer job.
Making things worse, James' employment experience, highlighted by his work for the Gordian Knot, the college literary magazine, is so feeble he's "not qualified for manual labor." So off he goes to Adventureland, where the games of chance are rigged, the rides make you throw up and anyone who can walk or chew gum can get a job.
James' co-workers, played by an expert group of performers, were cast by Ann Goulder both for their acting skills and fine comic sensibilities. "Saturday Night Live's" Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play gung-ho park managers Bobby and Paulette; Martin Starr is Slavic studies nihilist Joel; Margarita Levieva is the classically desirable Lisa P; Ryan Reynolds is the park handyman Connell, handsome and married; and, finally, Stewart is the beautiful, enigmatic and very experienced Em. Though the audience, if not Em and James, will know from the first exchange of glances that something is in the air between these two, it is a tribute to the skills of both Eisenberg, excellent as the older son in "The Squid and the Whale," and Stewart, equally good as the ethereal Bella in " Twilight," that this relationship between opposites comes off as believable and attractive.
Em and James, he with his weakness for always being a beat behind life and she with her complicated emotional situation, are not obvious soul mates. But "Adventureland's" greatest strength is that it makes you see and believe in the yearning romantic potential these two see in each other. Stewart, who has a gift for investing completely in her characters, brings so much intensity to her part that she turns this nominally guy-centric venture on its head by making Em's problems the film's most compelling.
Initially "Adventureland" does seem like it gives with one hand and takes away with the other. On the plus side, its nearly 40-song soundtrack is expertly chosen to include everyone from the Replacements to the Velvet Underground, yet its determination to sporadically offer standard-issue humiliation humor is wearing. But with a cast that believed in one another and a writer-director who believed he didn't have to follow up "Superbad" with "SuperEvenBadder," "Adventureland" is the kind of adventure we could all use more of.
kenneth.turan@latimes.com
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
It is a truth of twentysomethings that if you have a crappy summer job with other twentysomethings, the way to take your mind off work is daydreaming of sex with your workmates. You are trapped there together eight or 10 hours a day for three months, right, so what else is there to make you dance to unheard melodies?
Take James. Here he is all set to move to New York, and his dad loses his job and he’s forced to take a job at a shabby Pittsburgh amusement park. All of the rides look secondhand, all of the games are rigged, and all of the prizes look like surplus. Your job is to encourage customers even more luckless than you are to throw baseballs at targets that are glued down, while inflamed with hopes of taking home a Big Ass Panda. That’s what Bobby the owner calls them when he instructs you, “Nobody ever wins a Big Ass Panda.”
Director Greg Mottola, who made the rather wonderful “Superbad,” is back now with a sweeter story, more quietly funny, again about a hero who believes he may be a virgin outstaying his shelf life. Jesse Eisenberg, from “The Squid and the Whale,” plays James, who has a degree in Renaissance studies. (The movie is set in the late 1980s and there may still be a few jobs around.) He’s out of his element at Adventureland; Bobby has to coach him to fake enthusiasm when he announces the horse- race game, where you advance your horse by rolling balls into holes. His performance reminded me uncannily of my last visit to Dave & Buster’s.
Most of the male employees in the park lust for Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), whose Adventureland T-shirt unfortunately advertises Rides*Rides*Rides. James is much more interested in Em (Kristen Stewart), who is quieter and deeper (Games*Games*Games). She’s smart, quirky, seems more grown-up than the others. A quick rapport springs up, despite her edge on James in sexual experience. She thinks he’s kinda sweet. They talk about subjects that require more than one sentence.
This romance takes fragile bloom while Mottola, also the screenwriter, rotates through a plot involving James’ friends, one of whom expresses his devotion by hitting him in the netherlands every time he sees him. We cut often to the owner Bobby and wife Paulette (Kristen Wiig), who are lovebirds and have firm ideas about how every job at the park should be performed, which doesn’t endear them to the employees because they’re usually right. Oh, and then there’s Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the good-looking maintenance man, who is married, and why am I telling you that?
As the summer lurches between deadly boredom and sudden emergencies (someone wins a Big Ass Panda), James and Em grow closer. This is absorbing because they reveal themselves as smarter than anyone else realizes. From his earlier work, I expected to like Eisenberg. What surprised me was how much I admired Kristen Stewart, who in “Twilight,” was playing below her grade level. Here is an actress ready to do important things. Together, and with the others, they make “Adventureland” more real and more touching than it may sound.
I worked two summers at Crystal Lake Pool in Urbana. I was technically a lifeguard and got free Cokes, but I rarely got to sit in the lifeguard chair. As the junior member of the staff, I was assigned to Poop Patrol, which involved plunging deep into the depths with a fly swatter and a bucket. Not a lot of status when you were applauded while carrying the bucket to the men’s room. (“No spilling!” my boss Oscar Adams warned me.) But there was another lifeguard named Toni and — oh, never mind. I don’t think she ever knew.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by pacinofan: A *** review from Roger Ebert... I was assigned to Poop Patrol, which involved plunging deep into the depths with a fly swatter and a bucket. Not a lot of status when you were applauded while carrying the bucket to the men’s room. (“No spilling!” my boss Oscar Adams warned me.) But there was another lifeguard named Toni and — oh, never mind. I don’t think she ever knew.
Now THAT'S funny, but not as funny as how these films appeal to the wistful, sepia-toned memories and nostalgia of straight critics reminiscing on the heavy burden of their virginity, which they were understandably afraid they would never lose...
A **1/2 review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...
Director Greg Mottola hit a low-comic high with Superbad, which sets up a raucous promise Adventureland doesn't even want to keep. This look at college kids working in a tacky Pittsburgh amusement park in the summer of 1987 is drawn from Mottola's own life. The writer-director blends sassy and sad in the style of his 1996 debut, The Daytrippers.
Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) subs for Mottola as James, a pothead with an unpopped cherry and the hots for Em (Twilight's Kristen Stewart), who is sneaking off with married handyman Mike (a miscast Ryan Reynolds). Eisenberg and Stewart bring delicate emotion to their roles, but their romance is recycled from musty Hollywood inventory. Aside from the Eighties soundtrack ("Rock Me Amadeus" — yikes!), the fun comes from the delicious comic twists provided by SNL's Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the park owners (these two bona fide talents deserve their own movie) and Martin Starr as a Jewish brainiac who reads Gogol and sees anti-Semitism in every first date. Adventureland throws a lot at us, but not enough of it sticks.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY Adventureland is a bittersweet, if uneven, coming-of-age comedy that captures the notion of a pivotal summer. Unlike other teen misadventures, it doesn't force laughs or push the taste envelope in outrageously new directions. But it's also not as bold or funny as director Greg Mottola's last effort, Superbad. Adventureland, a more personal and layered comedy, is content to settle for subtler laughs, knowing smiles and a few cringes.
Based on Mottola's experiences working at a Long Island theme park in the late '80s, Adventureland re-creates its era superbly. It's the summer of 1987, a time of acid-washed jeans, side ponytails and such Euro-techno songs as Falco's Rock Me Amadeus.
The tune is played for repetitive laughs in this story of college-age angst. It's blared ad nauseam over the loudspeaker at the schlocky Pittsburgh-area theme park where James (Jesse Eisenberg), a recent college grad, works for the summer. It's a bleak time for James. His European vacation is canceled. Plans to attend graduate school are iffy. His girlfriend (of 11 days) has dumped him. His summer seems doomed until he meets Em (Kristen Stewart), a fellow theme-park worker who shares his musical tastes.
Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) is excellent. His awkward admissions of sexual inexperience to the more adventurous Em may seem like way too much information. But they also feel nakedly honest and heartfelt. While other characters play teen movie archetypes — the vamp, the nerdy pal, the cheating Lothario — Eisenberg's portrayal is more nuanced. He is a carnival of complex emotions.
In contrast, Stewart plays what is becoming her trademark one-note character: sullen and low-key. She adds a tad more dimension in a flare-up at her obnoxious stepmother, but she is hardly Eisenberg's equal. Ryan Reynolds plays a slick employee. SNL's Bill Hader and an underused Kristen Wiig are a goofy couple who run the park.
Mottola, who wrote and directed 1996's The Daytrippers, crafts smart, witty dialogue. But the movie suffers in tone. While much of the story feels like a brainier John Hughes comedy, it veers into more dramatic terrain and loses focus.
While Adventureland may shift moods suddenly and meander, the highlight is Eisenberg's ability to endearingly convey gawkiness and mortification.
Posts: 27207 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
