Weekend Preview:

Adventureland: See it.  You can check out my review here. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen Observe and Report, I Love You, Man, and Adventureland, and Adventureland is easily the best of the three. It’s also the name of my van.  I painted a solar system on the interior that glows in black-light.  It’s far out.

4 Fast and 4 Furious: Every time I criticize these turds I hear, “Whatsa matter with you, you don’t like hot cars and hot women, faggot?”  My dad aside, it’s not the subject I have a problem with, it’s that, besides the story being aggressively stupid and the acting Paul Walker-y, it’s just poorly made.  If you want to make a car chase movie, film a car chase.  Don’t keep cutting between feet on the pedals, reaction shots, and hands shifting.  It’s worse than retarded, it’s f-ing boring.  Oh, and I know the title’s supposed to be “Fast and Furious”, but blow me, you can’t just take the “the”s out of something and call it new.  It’s 4 Fast 4 Furious, and you’re an idiot if you go see it.  Now get off my lawn and pull up your goddamned pants.

Bart Got a Room: Check out William H. Macy’s awesome Jew fro, but only if you live in New York or LA.

Gigantic: See Zooey Deschanel fall in love with a hipster pussy again – but again, only if you live in New York or LA.  I’ve heard really good things about this movie, but that’s typical of anything hipster. The main thing is, they’ve seen it before you.

Adventureland, written and directed by Superbad director Greg Mottola, opens tomorrow.

Adventureland is an 80s period flick that feels like a classic 80s movie, the kind of coming-of-age films I grew up on before puberty turned me ugly and bitter at the age of 17 and a half.  It doesn’t do broad comedy as funny as Knocked Up or Superbad, but it never tries to.  Instead, it harkens back to a period of filmmaking when you didn’t have to make the audience laugh every five minutes, because you had something to keep them entertained besides laughs – charm, a compelling story, real characters, and in this particular case, a certain glowy nostalgia.   And it’s just nice to see a movie that’s more than jokey set pieces stuffed into pre-written scenes or comedians riffing on stock characters.

Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater said not too long ago, “It’s tough. Unless it’s a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, the studios aren’t interested.  The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you’re out of the league, you’re done.”

Luckily Mottola was in a unique and charmed position: coming off Superbad, a movie he directed for hire that ended up grossing $170 million worldwide on a $20 million budget.  He’d had his semi-autobiographical script for Adventureland ready to go all along, but Superbad gave him the clout to shop it around until he found someone who’d let him do it the way he wanted.  The result is a sort of indie-major, a movie made for less than $10 million with neither arthouse pretensions nor  blockbuster gloss.

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Adventureland is director Greg Mottola’s follow-up to Superbad, starring the hilariously be-Jewfro’d Jesse Eisenberg and that chick from Twilight who’s apparently some kind of moron.  I actually don’t need to tell you most of this, because if you watch the red-band trailer below, you’ll see it in title sequence.  It’s nice how they put this together – they made it more a mashup of footage that doesn’t really giveaway the plot or the jokes, just text and brief snippets that sell the movie.  It’s kind of a coming-of-age, teen sex comedy set in a theme park, based on Mottola’s own experience.  Ha, “coming of age,” I just got that.   And then I came.
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Okay, it’s not a Superbad sequel, it’s actually called Adventureland, and it’s director Greg Mottola’s follow-up to Superbad, based on his own experience working a crappy summer job at an amusement park in the 80s.  That it’s set in 1987 is apropos, considering Superbad is the most feel-good 80s style movie I’ve seen in a long time.  It wasn’t always laugh out loud funny, but it always had that sense of fun that you got in movies like Ferris Bueller or Tommy Boy, where even jokes that didn’t make you laugh still made you smile. And yeah, maybe that sounds queer, but screw you, so’s your face.

Anyway, Adventureland stars that dude with the stupid hair, the timid chick from Twilight, my love Kristen Wiig, and Ryan Reynolds, who naturally plays “the handsome cool guy”.  It must suck always getting typecast like that.

Ryan Reynolds has signed on for Adventureland, Superbad director Greg Mottola's autobiographical 80s period piece opposite unfortunately Jew-fro'd lead Jesse Eisenberg. 

The pic is set in summer 1987 and centers on an uptight recent college grad who is forced to take a degrading minimum-wage job at the local amusement park after he realizes he can't afford his dream European tour. Reynolds will play Connell, an aspiring rock star and the icon of cool to all the kids working at the park.

Man, it must be rough to always be typecast as the "supercool dude who the girls wanna bone and the guys pretend they are when they're boning."  

But we're a lot alike. See, I'm always getting typecast too, as "guy throwing real darts at an imaginary dartboard."  And that's just at the laundromat.   

Oh, and I just thought hearts and unicorns would make the picture more fun.  Was I wrong?  In your heart lies the answer.  [via RopeofSilicon]