I've seen quite a few movies in the theater so far in 2009. Some were predictably good (Milk, Slumdog Millionaire), some were surprising (Let the Right One In), some were good but stressful to watch (The Class, Ballerina), some were old (The Goonies, An American in Paris), and some tried to be good, but failed (Twilight).
Last weekend, my sister and I saw
Adventureland.
Boy, was it gooooooood. Like, I-can't-stop-thinking-about-it-days-later-good.
There was so much right about it that it was easy to overlook the small stuff that wasn't quite right (Ryan Reynolds' casting, mainly), but basically, it broke my heart and yet made it sing anyway.
As someone who grew up 15 minutes from one of the Six Flags amusement parks, I found the storyline particularly poignant. I have countless friends who spent summers in high school and early college working there, dealing with the worst of people on vacation, making minimum wage and and hoping for something better.
It surprised me with its sincerity, the tenderness of its storyline while being unforgiving and not.... easy. Given that the director/writer is Greg Mottola of Superbad fame, I expected the humor to be a bit more raunchy, more slapstick, than it ultimately was. Most of the film actually feels uneasy, dealing as it does with that grey post-college/pre-adulthood independence time in a person's life, particularly when the plans you made didn't turn out as you expected them to.
I can't say enough good about the lead actors, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. I don't know what kind of endorsement this is, but as we were watching, my sister leaned over and said, "She has kind of a hot lazy eye." I'm not sure what happened to Twilight, because the character she plays in Adventureland isn't that much older, or that much different, than Bella. But here, she exudes a worldly, tired energy that makes her irresistable to Eisenberg's James, a post-college virgin who is a romantic at heart. The two interact with a naturalism that I found completely believable, and I wanted to see more of them after the credits started rolling.
I can only hope this film might gain the little-film-that-could momentum that something like Juno did (which I didn't like, incidentally), but I have a feeling it won't. So, go yourselves or tell a friend, but don't miss this one.