Don't Want To Know...
...If You Are ≤ Lonely
Movies being what they are today, I've lowered my standards to the point where if a decent enough soundtrack is thrown in, I'm there. It's like hanging out in a car and listening to someone's C-90 mix tape. A very large car with an auto-reverse deck. The visuals and any accidentally good writing are a bonus. I look for those perfect marriages of scene and song, like a half-naked Phoebe Cates emerging from a pool to Moving In Stereo. Up until that moment, it had been a song about depression and alienation--shoegazer before shoegazer knew what to call itself. Now it's a trip to Amerasian Fantasyland.
Adventureland is one of these films, and the music is the star. The whole thing is a giant product placement ad for late 80s college radio (which is different from late 80s music--I believe the songs released between '85 and '90 here are actually in the minority). The shirts. The posters. LP covers placed in improbably camera-friendly ways, even if they'd been mostly supplanted by CDs by then. Talking about mix tapes. Playing mix tapes. Disco scenes. Roadhouse scenes. The music is revered (maybe too much so), but at least it isn't appropriated, like Adam Sandler latching onto otherwise wonderful songs and creating feature length movies around them every other month. Leave it to him to ruin How Soon Is Now?
Luckily, it isn't overly concerned with its own cleverness, like say, High Fidelity--think Pretty in Pink with more smarts and nihilism and a story just as forgettable.
4.5 Stars for the nostalgia trip and the line "And yet he retains his chapeau."
Movies being what they are today, I've lowered my standards to the point where if a decent enough soundtrack is thrown in, I'm there. It's like hanging out in a car and listening to someone's C-90 mix tape. A very large car with an auto-reverse deck. The visuals and any accidentally good writing are a bonus. I look for those perfect marriages of scene and song, like a half-naked Phoebe Cates emerging from a pool to Moving In Stereo. Up until that moment, it had been a song about depression and alienation--shoegazer before shoegazer knew what to call itself. Now it's a trip to Amerasian Fantasyland.
Adventureland is one of these films, and the music is the star. The whole thing is a giant product placement ad for late 80s college radio (which is different from late 80s music--I believe the songs released between '85 and '90 here are actually in the minority). The shirts. The posters. LP covers placed in improbably camera-friendly ways, even if they'd been mostly supplanted by CDs by then. Talking about mix tapes. Playing mix tapes. Disco scenes. Roadhouse scenes. The music is revered (maybe too much so), but at least it isn't appropriated, like Adam Sandler latching onto otherwise wonderful songs and creating feature length movies around them every other month. Leave it to him to ruin How Soon Is Now?
Luckily, it isn't overly concerned with its own cleverness, like say, High Fidelity--think Pretty in Pink with more smarts and nihilism and a story just as forgettable.
4.5 Stars for the nostalgia trip and the line "And yet he retains his chapeau."