"Bouncing through the year 1987 under a cloud of weed and Lou Reed, wannabe travel essayist James suffers a reality check when his dad's demotion means that the family can no longer fund a planned European jolly with his best mate, Eric. Faced with an empty summer before studying at Columbia University, the Charles Darwin acolyte manages to bag himself a job at the titular theme park, where amusement stations are inexplicably slapped with names like the Flighing Dutchman."
"The delicious thing about this retro limbo realm of yawning-clown bins, unashamedly rigged games and Tilt-A-Whirls is the fact that almost none of its poorly paid denizens belong there. Take maintenance guy Connell for instance, played by Ryan Reynolds. He's coolly tricked everyone into believing that he once jammed with the aforementioned Velvet Underground legend; swaggering through the ice-cream and candy floss chaos like some sort of god while his admiring co-workers wave from their various vomit-stained habitats."
"While casting his knockout quasi-biopic The Social Network, film-maker David Fincher must've really dug how eventual Mark Zuckerberg portrayer Jesse Eisenberg handled being dumped on screen. A year before the award-lassoing Facebook drama, which led to an Oscar nomination for Eisenberg, the actor agonised through the dreamy foreground of Adventureland as reluctant carny James Brennan. The parallels between Fincher's and Greg Mottola's movies begin and end with their opening unceremonious separations,"
Adventureland follows James Brennan, a wannabe travel essayist who faces a ruined European trip after his father's demotion and takes a summer job at a retro theme park. The setting is 1987, saturated with weed and Lou Reed, and populated by poorly paid, out-of-place employees. James encounters romantic disappointment and a cast of eccentric coworkers, including cool maintenance guy Connell, played by Ryan Reynolds, who fabricates rock-legend credentials. The park's kitsch attractions and rigged games frame a coming-of-age mood of limbo, awkwardness, and bittersweet humor as James navigates work, relationships and adulthood before college.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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