Adventureland

Adventureland is a charming but overlong coming-of-age story, basically a post-grad Superbad from Superbad director Greg Mottola. It stars Jesse Eisenberg, the teenage son from The Squid and the Whale, as a hyperliterate, hyperpretentious college graduate (“I read poetry for pleasure, sometimes” is a favorite line) compelled to spend the summer of 1987 working for peanuts in a crappy Pittsburgh amusement park. Naturally, he discovers love, sex, friendship, drugs, not trusting your parents, chasing your dreams and all the rest of the trimmings from the last summer/week/night-before-adulthood genre. It has humor and heart, but like so many movies nowadays, Adventureland overburdens itself with the plotlines of insignificant characters; it’s an 87-minute movie in the body of a 107-minute movie. Kristen Stewart co-stars as the unattainable object of Eisenberg’s affections, and she makes “the Bella face” throughout the whole movie.