Respond/React: Adventureland
"Adventureland" proves that if you have talented actors give muted performances and shoot them in grainy film stock, critics will gladly overlook the cliches and illogical moments of your film. Many people seem to think that if something is low key, it can't be ridiculous. Unfortunately, "Adventureland" is indeed ridiculous and as hollow as any vapid teen dramedy. It's set in the 80's which is fitting since it is basically a typical 80's teen romance except with the contrived plotline removed.
Unfortunately, by removing the plotlines and making the characters more "real", the film loses a lot of its charm. Imagine "Some Kind of Wonderful" without the tension. Or if someone took out the plot and interesting character quirks of "One Crazy Summer." It's a bit like "Dazed and Confused" without a single memorable quote or moment. How about "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" if everyone was just randomly wandering around New York and had nowhere to be (although to be fair, I thought this was better than "Nick and Nora"). I'd say the film was on par with the Justine Bateman/Julia Roberts flick "Satisfaction" but even that was paced better. (Oh and do NOT expect anything close to "Superbad"; it's a completely different genre) I'm sure the critics also ate up the fact that the film mocked hits like "Rock Me Amadeus" and celebrated Lou Reed but it just didn't work here. It was more "Elizabethtown" than "Almost Famous".
Kristin Stewart gave a great understated performance but this film needed someone with more personality. The main love story was flimsy and the main characters had to carry it (ala Duplicity) and Kristin and Jesse just didn't do it. Granted, I'm sure for many people this lack is actually part of the charm but it didn't work for me. This film desperately needed to spread its focus onto other characters ala "Mystic Pizza" because the main love story just didn't have enough to carry the weight.
All that being said, if you just LOVED the romance movies I mentioned above (or if you liked Elizabethtown or Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, then you might enjoy this film. Or if you find understated stories to somehow be more riveting then this could be up your alley.
For the spoilery reaction, read on.
One of the biggest issues with this film is that it was a poor little rich kid story. And I mean "kid". Jesse Eisenberg's character seemed more like a senior in high school than someone who just graduated college. In fact, I thought he was a high school kid until he mentioned grad school at Columbia. Kristin Stewart is the poor little rich girl and that's basically it. She's a NYU student whose step-mom sucks and she is rebelling against her upper class upbringing. Again, she seems more like a teenager than college kid. By the time she was in college, she probably would have moved on to dating street artists or something.
On top of that, Eisenberg's character is somehow the belle of the ball. He's originally portrayed as this awkward kid but inexplicably every girl at the park seems to be all over him. The relationships have no real spark and just kind of start out because of nothing more than boredom.
And the film couldn't be any more cliched and some of the plot devices were laughable. When Eisenberg finds the bottle of liquor under the car seat and is like, "Oh it must be my dad's", I almost laughed. And you just KNEW that it would come up in the end to help Jesse get off the hook. On top of that, it has the awkward confontation, the make-up in the rain, the slutty seductress who could break the couple up, the nerdy friend and stupid/childish acquaintence, etc. There's literally nothing new to this except for the fact that they eliminated any semblance of a plot and toned everything down so that people mistook understatement for realness. I mean, this film was a character study with no depth and no arcs. It was a love story with no real tension and only sit-com level self-inflicted conflicts.
The fact that people are calling this real or insightful is just a sign of how much tone can change people's opinion. "She's Just Not That Into You" played things up for comedy but had more insight than this film even attempted to have. Even worse, some of the gags that were in the film were set-up horribly. The trailer actually did a better job editing together the jokes. In a couple of cases, I thought that a joke from the trailer was cut out of the film because the payoff had appeared. But later the scene that should have set-up the joke played out. The best example is the corndog joke. That could have been a decent running gag but they did nothing with it. And what should have been the set-up, Kristin Wiig's character leaving the dogs out all night so they went bad, comes near the end of the film. It's just poor editing.
In the end, this was another cliched woe-is-me romance that basically requires you to root for the main characters simply because they are the main characters.
