In everyone's life there's a summer of '42, but of course it was never as wonderful as you remember. Although Greg Mottola's Adventureland is set in 1987, that's almost incidental--it really takes place in that hazy cloud known as "the past," full of fly-by-night jobs rife with fraud and deceit, fairweather friends who sock you in the crotch, and, of course, the music that brings to mind painful experiences perhaps best left forgotten. (Funny to think that this might be the ideological inverse of another great 2009 film about memory, The Uninvited: unhealthily obsessive instead of unhealthily in denial.) The key to understanding the film, I think, lies in Falco's New Wave anthem "Rock Me Amadeus," here serving as an inescapable nightmare at the titular amusement park, where it's pumped through the sound system ad nauseam ("Can you give me an ice pick that I can just jam into my ears?"). But then the romantic confusion driving the plot unravels in a series of betrayals, and that same song becomes a damning elegy. Seems strange that the director of Superbad, an instant classic of maturity-through-childishness and nostalgia-without-precedent, should deliver something so angry and contradictory for a follow-up. Perhaps it is strange--but Adventureland is also a more honest, more personal, and, most importantly, more mature film than Superbad.

College grad James (Jesse Eisenberg, a slightly more intellectual Michael Cera) is forced to abandon a trip across Europe and relocate to Pittsburgh, whereupon he settles into employment as a carny with a pocketful of joints and the vague hope of finding true love to shed him of his virginal shame. It's a little disappointing at first that the plot, such as it is, should essentially boil down to his rather obvious choice between thoughtful, world-weary Em (Kristen Stewart) and legendary strumpet Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), something that will be familiar to any student of '80s teensploitation--and buried within that is an all-too-cursory discussion concerning the double standards in the sexual/social expectations of men and women. Yet the movie never lets you forget that these well-worn decisions are being given excruciating contemplation, decades after they've already happened, by Mottola. For something pitched as a trip down memory lane, Adventureland sure crams itself full of obsessed men, clinging to questionable victories long past.

See it first in James' father (Jack Gilpin), a failed yuppie and borderline alcoholic whom we suspect sowed his share of wild oats. Then there's the park's thirty-something maintenance man Connell (Ryan Reynolds, doing a pretty decent job in a role which feels like the natural evolution of Van Wilder), host to a number of arrested-development neuroses: married and still chasing after college girls; doting on his mother; and eternally claiming to have jammed with Lou Reed despite appearing to know nothing of the legend's work. When James' own tale of heartbreak has played out, each of these men regards him with the same sad, knowing glances--why? Ignoring the obvious autobiographical slant of the piece, Adventureland manages its greatest intrigue by refusing to tell us what's happened in the intervening twenty-two years, or to offer so much as a post-coital conclusion to its central romance. Could James have ended up like either one of his inappropriate mentors? The fact that this blast from the past has been given any amount of indulgence doesn't exactly assuage those fears, but Adventureland is ultimately about the importance, the pricelessness of personal experience--even once the relevance of "carpe diem" has passed us by and "regret nothing" has long given way to its share of regrets.

While it was crafted with a certain escapist sensibility in mind, what makes Alien Trespass so endearing is that it never forgets the apocalyptic underpinnings that drove its inspirations. As waitress Tammy (Jenni Baird) explains the dire situation to the sheriff (Dan Lauria, basically giving the same performance he gave in The Spirit), the camera prefers to focus on the secretly-unscrewed sugar dispenser he's about to empty into his coffee cup. It's easily the film's loveliest moment--the one that reminds you that, in the face of Armageddon, you're going to fight for the right to silly, human moments like this. Because it embodies that sentiment whereas this film merely rehashes it, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! remains the most vital modern take on atomic-age sci-fi, though Alien Trespass is a loving homage that demonstrates the filmmakers of the era as neither incompetent nor naïve in their comprehension of the social climate.-Ian Pugh

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Published: April 3, 2009