So, your life must be utter shit or you wouldn't be here.
It's two o'clock in the morning. I'm tired and I have a headache. But I had to turn my laptop on and write. I just watched ADVENTURELAND; for the second night in a row. I have no idea what I want to write, I just know that I have to. This is how I know it's a great movie. When you start figuring out clever things to write in your blog midway through a film, then you know it sucks.
'Adventureland' is about being in your teens or in your early twenties, at that stage when you're trying to figure your life out whilst surviving a bullshit job and falling in and out of love. Pretty much as soon as we love movies about these topics we begin to hate them and look for something more meaningful-- just like in real life. We're young people in dead end jobs for our whole lives but we're only really open and honest about it at the beginning -- at the age the characters in this movie are portraying. We spent the rest of life being grown up, pretending we have it figured out, refusing to dance the dance of emotion and love and lust and pain. We're only reminded of how big a part of ourselves these things are when we see a piece of art like 'Adventureland.'
Don't you just love that movies like this exist? That the guy who directed SUPERBAD (Greg Mottola) can follow it up with something so understated and honest. Who'd have thought? And who'd have believed that the girl from TWILIGHT would follow it up with something like this? While we're on the subject, it's important to say: Kristen Stewart is amazing. Everyone seems to hate her now because she's in these big blockbusters and because she doesn't smile and act like a whore every time her agent forces her onto television to do promotion or every time a group of journalists interrupt her holiday abroad to see if she's still with her boyfriend. We seem to hate her for the fact that she just likes to act, just likes to do her job. But she's something special. She's great in INTO THE WILD and IN THE LAND OF THE WOMEN and she does a solid job in TWILIGHT, but it's in films like this one where you really get to see what she's capable of. And what is it she's capable of? Honesty. Subtlety. Humanity. I can't help but watch her and feel like I know her. Or feel like I knew her, like we went to school together. She knows what acting is, she knows what her job is; and she does it with a grace and skill that is rare.
But then, so does Jesse Eisenberg. What I love about him on screen, whether it's in 'Adventureland' or THE SOCIAL NETWORK is that he just knows how to be himself. And of course, actors get criticised for 'always being themselves' but people don't realize how tough that is. Most actors spend their whole careers trying to be someone else because they haven't got a clue how to be themselves. These guys know how to do it and the results are incredible. Watching Eisenberg and Stewart in this movie; we get to really see the characters, we get to really feel something real; and as a result, we get to see ourselves.
You might think you're watching a bunch of young people working at a theme park but what you're really seeing is yourself back when you worked in that store, or at that leisure center or at that bowling alley or wherever the hell it was back when you kept falling in and out of love whilst trying to figure out what the hell you were going to do with your life. This is a movie about you and it's a movie about me. It's a film that dares to be honest and dares to be small.
They struggled to market this movie. It had the 'elements' like the big actors and the hotshot writer/director -- but there was a problem: it had a story, and it had heart. How the fuck do you market something like that? The problem is, you can't. You can't market heart. If a good heart was an easy sell then all the lonely people on dating sites tonight would be out there falling in love. But it's not that easy. Good heart doesn't sell well. It's hard to recognize, and people will misunderstand it and people won't be expecting it. You have to just do it, be it, create it. Heart will find its way eventually. Films like 'Adventureland' sneak up on you when you don't expect it. They are disguised as typical studio comedies and they're generally thrown out in cinemas and swiftly dumped because no-one really knows they exist or they know they exist but have been sold some bullshit by a trailer that made the movie seem like some contrived, typical junk.
But 'Adventureland' exists. And it's a little slice of magic.Thank you, Greg Mottola.
Wait, Em -- I think, I maybe see you a little differently than-than you see yourself. Yes, I-I see the person who fucked up but I.. I also see the person who saved me from being knifed over a giant-ass-panda.
