Adventureland

By David Vicari

Greg Mottola previously directed the hysterical and raunchy Superbad. His follow up, Adventureland, isn’t a retread, but a personal, sometimes bittersweet comedy-drama about yesterday and young love. Don’t let that make you think it is all schmaltzy and sentimental, because it’s not. In fact, it’s often very funny.
Mottola fictionalizes his own experiences of working at a theme park after college in 1985 and pushed them up two years to 1987. The main character here is recent college graduate James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), who, out of desperation, gets a summer job at the local Adventureland amusement park. He gets stuck working the games, which, apparently, isn’t as cool as working the rides. The unhappiness with the job immediately takes a backseat when James gets all goo-goo eyed over co-worker Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart).  However, the object of James’ affection is a complicated girl, so their relationship isn’t an easy one. By the end, the movie does kick into romantic fantasy mode, which is a little bit of a letdown, but this is still a thoughtful piece of work.
I guess longing for more isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I liked what I got with Adventureland, but I would have liked more of it. Mottola develops such a rich tapestry of characters that I wanted to see more of them. I wanted more about Martin Starr’s sarcastic Jewish literary nerd. I wanted to know more about handyman Ryan Reynolds’ domestic life. And I definitely would have liked more scenes with Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the couple that runs the amusement park. These two supply most of the movie’s big laughs.
    The two leads are very good – Eisenberg can play the shy, awkward young adult as well as Michael Cera, and Stewart perfectly encapsulates that really cool yet totally hot chick you think you might have a chance with. It’s sad that she is contracted for at least two sequels to the awful Twilight. Oh well; at least it’s a good payday and will afford her to do more smaller, meaningful movies like this one.
    Superbad was clearly one of the best comedies of 2007, and although it is only April, I will say that Adventureland may possibly go down as one of the best of this year. It’s not quite as gut-busting as Superbad, but Adventureland makes up for that in poignancy.

The Class

By David Vicari

    Winner of the 2008 Palme d’Or at Cannes and Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, The Class, from France, peers into the classroom with a sense of truth we hardly ever see on screen from the Hollywood factory. This is no cookie-cutter Dangerous Minds, where the teacher finally gets through to all the students in the classroom and all is well and joyous in the world. No, The Class shows the complexity and frustrations of the teacher/student relationship. This documentary-style movie is based on the autobiographical novel “Entre Le Murs” (“Between the Walls”) by François Bégaudeau. In the film, Bégaudeau plays a version of himself – a schoolteacher named Francois Marin, who teaches French to kids in a low-income Parisian neighborhood. Playing the 15- to 16-year-old students in his classroom are non-professional actors. Director Laurent Cantet (Human Resources, Time Out) spent a year filming these kids as they improvised much of their scenes. The results are amazingly real…and quite affecting.

Gomorrah
By Karl DeMolay

    Matteo Garrone deftly directs Gomorrah, which is based on five stories from the novel of the same name by Roberto Saviano. Much of Gomorrah is shot in and around a crumbling housing project that, in establishing shots, resembles a rotting labyrinthine pyramid. The very structure of the film’s slums serves itself as a visual metaphor for the Camorra crime institution in Naples. It’s a bureaucratic shuffle, rivaling a large capitalist corporation, differing only in method. Their products are drugs, extortion, and toxic sludge (okay; not so different from the corporations). Their version of corporate takeover involves shameless acts of extreme violence. The film begins with a riveting sequence of tanning machines and surprisingly graphic murder, which might lead one to think that they were moving headlong into a Scorsese-like bloodbath. You’d be wrong though. Gomorrah is a very patient film, clearly influenced by the early Italian Neo-Realists, and also has elements that remind one of the gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville. Garrone shoots in a documentary style, transitioning between his storylines with utmost patience. If you do not realize the scope of the Camorra’s activity in nearly all facets of commercial and communal life in and around Naples, the connection between the stories may seem unclear. But that is the objective of the picture, showing just how entrenched the Mafia has remained in parts of Italy. In a world saturated with “charming” mob movies, Gomorrah emerges as a gangster epic with flair. With its no nonsense documentary style, and slowly escalating violence it feels like a unique addition to the genre. Gomorrah is sure to split, maybe even downright annoy audiences looking for something more conventional. It defies most of the genre’s clichés, and aims high with its subtle ambitions.


I Love You, Man
By Fritz Esker
   
    In this amusing film, Paul Rudd plays a man whose engagement calls attention to the fact that he has primarily female friends.  So, he begins a search for a guy friend to be his best man, eventually striking up a friendship with a charismatic slacker (Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segel). 
    Rudd and Segel have a good chemistry together that generates a decent amount of laughs, as do Rudd’s initial failed attempts to make guy friends.  However, the film sags in the middle and the plot and characters lack much in the way of an arc (films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are not movies anyone would consider plot-heavy, but they do have arcs and they’re better films because of it).  But it does recover a bit in time for its finale.
    All in all, I Love You, Man is the kind of film that’s pleasantly enjoyable enough to merit a matinee viewing or a place in your Netflix queue, but isn’t quite worth $9 on a Saturday night.
 

Man On Wire
By Fritz Esker

    Man on Wire, the recent winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary, feels like a strange combination of a heist movie, a sports movie, and a character study. But it somehow works. The documentary chronicles the 1974 stunt by French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who walked across a wire from one tower of the World Trade Center to the other (and it was illegally done, so no, there was no net below). He and his accomplices risked arrest, disguising themselves as workers to sneak into the tower so Petit could risk his life doing something most people wouldn’t even consider in their wildest dreams. However, Petit’s enthusiasm is so infectious (he’d dreamed of walking a tightrope between the towers ever since he read an article about their planned construction) that he’s easy to root for, even if most viewers will think his actions insane. And his argument about it not being tragic to risk death to live his dream does make a certain amount of sense. At roughly 90 minutes, the film breezes by and in the end, it’s hard not to shake your head and smile at Petit’s stunt.

Gomorrah
By Karl DeMolay

    Matteo Garrone deftly directs Gomorrah, which is based on five stories from the novel of the same name by Roberto Saviano. Much of Gomorrah is shot in and around a crumbling housing project that, in establishing shots, resembles a rotting labyrinthine pyramid. The very structure of the film’s slums serves itself as a visual metaphor for the Camorra crime institution in Naples. It’s a bureaucratic shuffle, rivaling a large capitalist corporation, differing only in method. Their products are drugs, extortion, and toxic sludge (okay; not so different from the corporations). Their version of corporate takeover involves shameless acts of extreme violence. The film begins with a riveting sequence of tanning machines and surprisingly graphic murder, which might lead one to think that they were moving headlong into a Scorsese-like bloodbath. You’d be wrong though. Gomorrah is a very patient film, clearly influenced by the early Italian Neo-Realists, and also has elements that remind one of the gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville. Garrone shoots in a documentary style, transitioning between his storylines with utmost patience. If you do not realize the scope of the Camorra’s activity in nearly all facets of commercial and communal life in and around Naples, the connection between the stories may seem unclear. But that is the objective of the picture, showing just how entrenched the Mafia has remained in parts of Italy. In a world saturated with “charming” mob movies, Gomorrah emerges as a gangster epic with flair. With its no nonsense documentary style, and slowly escalating violence it feels like a unique addition to the genre. Gomorrah is sure to split, maybe even downright annoy audiences looking for something more conventional. It defies most of the genre’s clichés, and aims high with its subtle ambitions.

I Love You, Man
By Fritz Esker
   
    In this amusing film, Paul Rudd plays a man whose engagement calls attention to the fact that he has primarily female friends.  So, he begins a search for a guy friend to be his best man, eventually striking up a friendship with a charismatic slacker (Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segel). 
    Rudd and Segel have a good chemistry together that generates a decent amount of laughs, as do Rudd’s initial failed attempts to make guy friends.  However, the film sags in the middle and the plot and characters lack much in the way of an arc (films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are not movies anyone would consider plot-heavy, but they do have arcs and they’re better films because of it).  But it does recover a bit in time for its finale.
    All in all, I Love You, Man is the kind of film that’s pleasantly enjoyable enough to merit a matinee viewing or a place in your Netflix queue, but isn’t quite worth $9 on a Saturday night.
 

Man On Wire
By Fritz Esker

    Man on Wire, the recent winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary, feels like a strange combination of a heist movie, a sports movie, and a character study. But it somehow works. The documentary chronicles the 1974 stunt by French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who walked across a wire from one tower of the World Trade Center to the other (and it was illegally done, so no, there was no net below). He and his accomplices risked arrest, disguising themselves as workers to sneak into the tower so Petit could risk his life doing something most people wouldn’t even consider in their wildest dreams. However, Petit’s enthusiasm is so infectious (he’d dreamed of walking a tightrope between the towers ever since he read an article about their planned construction) that he’s easy to root for, even if most viewers will think his actions insane. And his argument about it not being tragic to risk death to live his dream does make a certain amount of sense. At roughly 90 minutes, the film breezes by and in the end, it’s hard not to shake your head and smile at Petit’s stunt.