The sweet and sour of Eighties and Nineties nostalgia. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

IN Adventureland a garish amusement park is a metaphor for hormone-addled teen angst and youthful wonderment. Greg Mottola’s auto-biographical coming of age story is no Superbad sequel however, but a work of delightfully bittersweet nostalgia. Thematically the film traces the genre’s well worn path. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) plans to travel to Europe for the summer of 1987, but is forced to find a job at Adventure following his father’s redundancy. Working at the park is a host of suburban archetype social misfits and the elusive Em (Kristen Stewart), who becomes an object of affection and confusion. All this is of course played out to fist-pumping power-pop soundtrack.

In modern cinema the 1980s is often treated as the punch line. Mottola’s feat is to present it as irony free and unselfconscious. Even as he exploits summer-of-love movieland clichés – the geek and the hot girl – he demonstrates an affinity for the awkwardness of youth, imbuing his characters with a painful vulnerability. In a Judd Apatow-Paul Weitz universe the film’s hard drinking rockstar-jock (Ryan Reynolds) would be clown-prince – in Adventureland he is as broken down as the titular amusement park.

Kristen Stewart is already a star – I know this because I saw her on the cover of a women’s magazine this morning. Her restrained performance here proves she is much more than a vampire-grabbing headline. Martin Starr is also noteworthy as a Russian literature reading oddity. However it is Jesse Eisenberg that steals the show. He plays Brennan as a somewhat precocious nerd but not quite a loser. Following his turn in The Squid and the Whale he is certainly an actor to watch – and like that film Mottola is savage in his indictment of parental absenteeism.

Adventureland may not dispense the laugh-out-loud moments of Superbad-vulgarity – despite its fair share of body fluids and alcohol fuelled lapses – but in its compassionate treatment of youthful inelegance it delivers.


ONE HUNDRED and fifty. Dunbar’s number – coined by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar – is a theoretical maximum number of people with whom any of us can maintain stable social relationships. It’s a term increasingly used when discussing the advent of online communities, in which users vie for thousands of friends, tens of thousands of followers and millions of viewers.

In Ondi Timoner’s (Dig!) Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary We Live in Public, the cause and effect of social networking is explored through the eyes of Internet trail-blazer Josh Harris.

Who, you ask? As the film’s opening caption explains, “This is the story of the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”

Raised by a television set and the cast of Gilligan’s Island, it seems inevitable that Harris would come to embrace a virtual existence. Recognising the full potential of the web before most others, in 1993 he formed the dot.com company Pseudo, which was amongst the first online providers of streaming video channels. Unfortunately for Harris his vision outstripped the technology curve. Pseudo made him millions, then the bubble burst.

Throughout the nineties Harris brazenly prophesied a time in which the Internet would become our preferred choice for media; an age in which people would bare every intimate detail of their lives online. These twin obsessions led him to develop the turn-of-the-millennium ‘art project’ Quiet.

A sort of mad precursor to Big Brother, the Quiet project invited a group of New York bohemians into an underground bunker – replete with guns, alcohol and open showers – in which their every movement was filmed. With a perverse inevitably the participants started to go insane. Authorities eventfully intervened.

Apparently not satisfied with the results, Harris turned the camera on himself and his then girlfriend. The Orwellian weliveinpublic.com would become a cheerless endorsement of Dunbar’s theory – we watch their relationship fracture as it increasingly becomes played out for the approval of online followers.

In many ways a snapshot of a society on the cusp of change, it’s Harris that makes this documentary a truly fascinating – if at times a draining and uncomfortable – experience. There’s something disquieting about a man who meets investors dressed as a sad clown, who uses friends as lab rats and writes of failed romances as art projects.

Where is the mad Internet-prophet Josh Harris today? The answer to that is as unpredictable as the man himself.

See also:
» Ondi Timoner on We Live in Public