Word: mottola
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...While F&F had plenty in the tank, the week's other wide release, Adventureland, just plain tanked. It finished a sad sixth. Fewer than a million patrons paid to see Superbad director Greg Mottola's reminiscence of an '80s summer he spent working in an amusement park. Apparently most of those who wanted a reverberation of their Superbad vibe stayed home and watched star Seth Rogen, who ubiquitously promoted his next-week's movie, Observe and Report, on Letterman, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live and quite possibly the Home Shopping Network...
Before Greg Mottola signed on to direct the hit comedy Superbad in 2007, he had already completed a script about the summer jobs he worked in Long Island - gigs he took for the sole purpose of saving money for graduate school. He was a night watchman at a public beach, an assistant wedding videographer and a staffer at an amusement park, managing various carnival games. The last position served as the inspiration for the new coming-of-age comedy Adventureland, which opens April 3. It's about an intellectual, awkward young man named James (Jesse Eisenberg) who spends a summer...
Adventureland, writer/director Greg Mottola's semiautobiographical ode to the languorous time just before adulthood responsibilities begin, makes you want to ditch your career (if it hasn't already ditched you), don some mildly humiliating uniform and return to the mundane summer job of your youth. Who can argue against cash flow, solidarity with a new peer group and no responsibility more strenuous than remembering who ordered the Sanka...
...including the smart, sullen one James likes, Em (Twilight's Kristen Stewart, whose grins are seldom but feel like sunshine in an Alaskan winter). Connell is James' polar opposite, a heel who relishes being a big fish in a small pond. When he first walks through the theme park, Mottola shifts into slow motion, the better to capture Connell's easy sexuality. "This is the way I roll," Connell seems to be saying, but there's a nakedness in his eyes that suggests he too is vulnerable...
...With Superbad and Daytrippers, Mottola worked within the confines of a single day to great effect. Adventureland presents the bigger narrative challenge. He wants us to feel the sticky heat of summer days and the humming thrill of the nights, but he's required to move things along, plotwise. To this end, he's made poor James a virgin who is eager to be otherwise, allowing romance to lend shape to the summer. Will he find love with Em? Or the practically mythical Lisa P? (The fact that she is not Lisa, not Lisa Peters, but Lisa P, is perhaps...