Review of Adventureland (2009) by Douglas F — 10 Nov 2011

The concept of this film sounded promising: recent college graduate quickly becomes disillusioned when he has to resort to a shitty Amusement Park job. But it didn't really live up to the promise. The rare, flimsy, implausible instances when Jesse Eisenberg's character tries to prove his intelligence (the repeated reference to Charles Dickens for example) cannot hide the fact that this is a dumb American college drama, with all the dumb American college cliches and dumb American college characters. Guy has annoying stoner friend who gives him weed, guy gets crappy job and meets a decent smart girl, guy goes out with a vacuous hot girl but then realises she only wants to date him because he has weed, guy ultimately gets back with decent smart girl, but only after finding out she's not so smart after all... Blah blah yawn.

Oh yeah, and it's set in the 80s, but for no apparent reason. Usually when the film starts with a date appearing on the screen, it means that at some point it will switch to other eras. When it doesn't, it just seems like the filmmakers were too lazy to make the era explicit through the film itself, so they just plonk a big date at the beginning. There was absolutely no reason for that date to be there, and immediately assuming your audience is too stupid to work out when the film was set isn't a great starting point.