
Though I thoroughly enjoyed Adventureland--set a grease fire in 1987 and I'd watch if only to hear "Dancehall Days" in the soundtrack--I came out feeling that it drew its female characters so thinly you could see misogyny through the ensuing rips and tears.
The film--its script, its direction and sensibility--certainly liked its male characters and the lead James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, the library-card-owner's Michael Cera) deserved it, wearing his heart so loosely on his sleeve it fell off a couple of times. In some ways, it's a fantasy piece for the underdog in all of us. The film liked underdog Joel and even liked womanizer Mike Connelly (a blank faced Ryan Reynolds--who writes a summer teen comedy without writing a scene for the stud to take off his shirt?). Connelly might be a player and the villain (the first always leading to the other in Hollywood), but never raised his voice or made threats or did anything particularly degrading to his conquests. His worst crimes were wanting it all and lying about music (which sadly remains only a summary offence conviction, despite all my lobbying efforts).
But the ladies! The two moms were unforgiving shrews who, though one had her hair and one didn't, might have been interchangeable. There was the racist Catholic girl. There was the dumb, slut Catholic girl (who seemed to be in a more satirical movie than the twee gang around her) and then there was the love interest, Em, which had Kristen Stewart playing an even blanker slate than she played as Twilight's heroine. I don't think the film hated her. She was the love interest after all. But she was such a lobotomized object-of-desire, she was well beyond the realms of likeability. We have no idea why she's attracted to James, but she is, maybe. She seems smart, but not smart enough to see that she's one in a long series of girls sleeping with the stud. She's a bad girl, but one who confronts racism like a 90s activist. Her strange behaviour comes off as something of a midway game--those pop-up gophers, perhaps--that the hero must deal with in order to keep the plot churning along. But it does seem like the behaviour of a real teenager.
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