MORE OF AN EXISTENTIAL NIHILIST, REALLY: Given my current moviegoing habits and those of my co-bloggers, it's difficult to believe that a movie as up-our-alley as Adventureland has gone so long without comment. So I'll comment.
More or less all you need to know about this movie is that it's about the young love between a slightly geeky boy and the much prettier, much cooler girl, with the complications attendant to class differences (both socioeconomic and popularity status) and the girl's preexisting relationship with an outwardly more mature and confident guy. Sound familiar? Seeing this movie is like seeing a production of Romeo and Juliet. It would be nice to see something surprising, something that makes you reevaluate the material or that is visually arresting, but realistically you're just hoping that the players hit their marks, remember their lines, and die prettily at the end. After that, it's the baggage you carry in -- memories of great productions you've seen, of memorizing the balcony scene for extra credit with a teen crush, or of how shocking it was that Mrs. Miller let you see the unedited Zefferelli version in class -- that does all the work.
So, yes, Kristen Stewart both adequately and prettily conveys the requisite teennui, and Martin Starr perfectly assumes the defeated pose of a college kid who knows that he is uselessly and irrevocably overeducated, and many of the supporting players approach their stock teen roles (exuberant prankster; outcast Rush fan) with relish, and Mottola finds a nice balance between 80s indie music and the K-Tel 80s, and it was a canny decision to revisit an 80s trope by setting it in the 80s. Even the worst part of the movie, Jesse Eisenberg's manic Woody Allenish take on the insufferably pretentious protagonist, gets less irritating as the movie goes on. All that said, this is a movie for which reviews are unnecessary. You are going to enjoy this movie exactly as much as you expect to enjoy it. Me, I enjoyed it, but I'm unlikely to remember it six months from now.
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