Ö÷²¥´óÐã

Mark:

Thanks, for the excellent movie update....

=Dennis Junior=

She isn't 'doing good', she's 'doing well'. Remember Mark, you're not an American.

I saw this film last week on dvd (region 1). God only knows why this has got such a late release in the uk. I really enjoyed it, and was surprised at how good the character development and narrative was. I was completely drawn in to the story and when I saw that there only 20 minutes left I wished it was longer (normally the reverse is true). Also, to see genuinely intelligent witty characters in a film about teenagers that were not painfully pretentious was very refreshing.

I heard your review and while I agree with your assessment that the performances were excellent, especially the actress who played Em, I disagree that the film seemed particularly real or believable on a number of grounds: one, the main character, even in the eighties, could never possibly have hoped to save up enough money to go to a fancy school like the one he expects to attend in the movie with that terrible summer job. The contrivance of the summer's supply of Marijuana seemed goofy and was awkwardly used to maneuver characters into situations that allowed for rather limp payoffs later in the film; this provoked and then ignored the always nagging sense that Mr. Eisenberg was simply being used for a good time. Having Ryan Reynolds be shown up as a liar was something I could have done without. I thought the Em character was remarkably under-written; the stuff about the dead mother didn't begin to cover whatever was going on with her, though her remarkable, fascinatingly sharp and pained performance suggested some true deep ache--this in my opinion only made things worse because I wanted real insights, not the completely unbelievable banal romantics we were served up at the end. The actress who played the luscious Lisa P brought a vibrancy and intelligence to the part which is usually played as a treacherous sexy bimbo--I wanted more from her as well, something that really lit the screen up. The movie, I thought, had all the usual cliches but tastefully muted. The effect was therefore rather sludgy and false. The characters' sense of entitlement, because it's barely acknowledged, struck me as particularly, peculiarly strange and annoying, like the dreadful characters in Lost in Translation. The scene in New York, with its soft-focus eroticism, was an embarrassment; this kid needed to be taught a lesson, not rewarded!

I'm finding movie clips during the radio show more and more annoying now- especially ones like Adventureland. About 80% of that clip was background noise- which doesn't translate well over the radio or with static images...