The 2007 film "Superbad" is remembered as many things - funny, sweet, obnoxious, lucrative. One thing it isn't remembered for, despite what the credits say, is being a Greg Mottola movie. Seth Rogen co-wrote it, and Judd Apatow produced it. As such, the film tends to get lumped in with all things Apatow. Like every director in the Apatow fraternity, Mottola was more a traffic cop, making sure the physical and hormonal chaos didn't kill anybody. The sensibility (crude, schlubby, cuddly) was Apatow's.
Adventureland
A fairly safe ride: 'Adventureland' has laughs, lust, but little edge
The film "Adventureland" means to provide a clearer sense of what "A film by Greg Mottola" means. But the forecast is "hazy with a chance of cute." It's the sort of flavorless, willfully quirky, occasionally amusing slice of suburban boredom that, for years, has given the Sundance Film Festival its soft, gooey center.
The film is set in Pennsylvania in 1987 and revolves around James (Jesse Eisenberg), a stammering, inexorably bright recent college graduate bound for Columbia University's writing program. He says he wants to write travel books as Charles Dickens did. A trip to Europe is in the offing. But his parents' sour finances leave him stuck with a job operating the games at an Adventureland amusement park managed by the sort of one-dimensional nonsense couple you'd expect Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, of "Saturday Night Live," to play.
James's awkwardness and ambivalence informs the rest of the movie's tone. Eisenberg has Albert Brooks's sense of intellectual superiority and certain young people's social insecurity. The movie puts both to the most banal ends. James finds himself caught between two of the most nubile girls on the park's payroll. Emily (Kristen Stewart) works in the games department with him. Lisa P (Margarita Levieva) is the little red Corvette of the staff. In case you missed that: Lisa P works in rides.
Stewart and Levieva represent two competing types of sexuality, indirect versus indiscreet. Stewart supplies another movie with the forlorn lust that made sense in "Twilight." The 1980s setting suits Levieva here. What Lisa P knows about carnality she appears to have learned from Whitesnake music videos. Things are complicated by the news that Emily, whom James prefers, has been having an affair with the park's hunky, older married mechanic, played by Ryan Reynolds. James is the last to know.
Mottola looses some interest ing people on the action - a cocky kid named Pete (Dan Bittner) and his socially confused sister Sue (Paige Howard), who looks older than everybody and stops hooking up with James's new friend Joel (Martin Starr) because he's Jewish; an over-caffeinated weirdo played by Matt Bush, who's so funny in those AT&T family-plan ads. Why didn't Mottola build the movie around them?
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