Smells like teen spirit

Movie Review

Adventureland
DIRECTED BY: Greg Mottola
STARRING: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds
CERT: 16

“From the director of Superbad!” is a tagline that raises certain expectations and the trailers for Adventureland have very deliberately played on those. But Greg Mottola has more on his mind here than simply revisiting old territory. By all accounts based loosely on his own life, this is a more thoughtful film than Superbad and is concerned less with juvenile hilarity and clichéd rites-of-passage than it is with actually growing up.
It’s 1987 and college graduate James Brennan (Eisenberg) is off to Europe for the summer before continuing his studies at Columbia Universtity in New York. But sudden financial trouble on the parental front puts a spanner in his travel plans and if he doesn’t want his future dreams wrecked entirely, Jesse is going to have to face the horror of getting a summer job at home.
Not having much experience in the real world, the only work he can find is at Adventureland, a two-bit amusement park where he reluctantly joins the games crew – quickly learning all the devious tricks of the trade and under strict orders that nobody should ever, ever be allowed to win a giant-ass panda.
He makes friends quickly too, probably something to do with his generous stash of weed. And despite being distracted by the attentions of the vacuous, gum-chewing but very tempting Lisa P (Margarita Levieva) Jesse falls fast for a more intelligent and interesting co-worker called Em (Stewart), a troubled soul with a bad family life, who’s tangled up with the park maintenance guy Connell (Reynolds) – a musician who’s a bit of a legend around the place on account of how he once jammed with Lou Reed.
As it turns out, old tone-deaf Lou is Jesse’s favourite artist, so Connell becomes a sort of instant hero and a guide in matters of the heart. And so the triangle is complete.
There’s nothing particularly original about any of this, but it’s intelligently written and directed with a refreshing subtlety; Mottola clearly trusting that an audience can make it through a modern comedy without all of the standard vulgarity – and more shocking still, without the need to have every emotional thought spelled out.
Judd Apatow might learn something there.
The cast are a likeable bunch, too. Eisenberg (he made a very fine impression as the older son in The Squid And The Whale) makes an excellent geek (a nerd but not a complete loser – another rarity in the movies) and opposite him Kristen Stewart is perfect in a role that’s more demanding than anything she’ll get up to in the Twilight movies.
Mottola has also taken surprising care with the minor characters and the actors do the writing justice – Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig keeping it low-key as the comically dedicated bosses, Ryan Reynolds is in pleasantly subdued form as the philandering repair man and Martin Starr making a very funny mark as Jesse’s friend and fellow games man Joel – a morose Jewish atheist with a degree in Russian literature and one of the few male friends in any movie in the past five years who doesn’t make you want to slap him around the room.
There’s a great soundtrack too – with a fine running gag involving the late Falco’s famously unintelligible Rock Me Amadeus – and unlike last week’s 500 Days Of Summer, there’s nothing remotely pretentious about it.
Not even the devotion to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. That’s just unfortunate, really.

Dorian Gray
DIRECTED BY: Oliver Parker
STARRING: Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Ben Chaplin
CERT: 16

Unfortunate is one of the nicer words that comes to mind with this shoddy take on Dorian Gray – director Oliver Parker’s latest attempt to bring Oscar Wilde to the screen, having failed to set the world alight with An Ideal Husband and The Importance Of Being Earnest.
Ben Barnes plays young Dorian, who arrives in late 19th century London to claim his inheritance and has his new friend, Basil (the unfortunate Ben Chaplin), paint his portrait. Dorian wishes he could always stay as beautiful as the picture and the wish is granted. So as he indulges in a life of the maddest debauchery, he remains young and handsome, while the painting proceeds to reflect his decay.
It’s a familiar tale, but Parker’s shallow and tacky telling of it lacks anything resembling a soul – which pretty much misses the whole point of Wilde’s dark story.
And if that wasn’t unfortunate enough, there is also the spectacle of Colin Firth trying really, really hard to convince as Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian’s chief corrupting influence.
We all know that was never going to work.