Coming of age through park life.Byline: DAVID EDWARDS ADVENTURELAND Cert 15, 107mins **** Superbad director Greg Mottola casts an affectionate eye over the 1980s with a gentle but effective comedy set in a dilapidated theme park. Part nostalgia fest, part comedy and part emotional drama, Jesse Eisenberg is angsty teenager James who takes a minimum-wage job at the Adventureland theme park in order to help pay for his college fees. There, amid the rickety rides and rigged games of Whac-A-Mole, he meets Ryan Reynolds' sex-mad handyman, a depressed Jew called Joel, the slutty Lisa P and the baggage-laden Em (Twilight's Kristen Stewart). Over one long, badly-paid summer, James makes new friends, falls in love and smokes a lot of pot. Unlike Superbad, Mottola relies not on smut smut, name for an order of parasitic fungi (Ustilaginales) and the various diseases of plants caused by them. Smuts produce sootlike masses of spores on the host. but the small things to get its laughs, from James' and Joel's awkward interactions with women to the park's officious of·fi·cious adj. 1. Marked by excessive eagerness in offering unwanted services or advice to others: an officious host; officious attention. 2. Informal; unofficial. 3. bosses. THE REEL LOWDOWN low·down n. Slang The whole truth: gave us the lowdown on what happened at the party. lowdown low (inf) n he gave me the lowdown on it → IF YOU LIKED... Juno, Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist... YOU'LL LIKE THIS. CAPTION(S): HIGH TIMES: Jesse and Joel |
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