brendan prost (brendanprost)

This movie's only serious crime is how poorly it was marketed. Don't let the trailer fool you, this is no dumbass teen sex romp. Rather a sometimes painfully realistic and very well drawn romantic drama, with laughs only as frequent as they are in real life. Greg Mottola of Superbad fame displays a knack for natural dialogue and down to earth, but original and interesting characters. All the leads are well developed, believable, motivated and instantly compelling thanks not only to the writing but the exceptionally grounded and mature performances from all the young actors. Motolla captures the nuances of young relationships brilliantly, and also does a nice of job using setting and location to set mood, a directorial technique highly reminiscent of Woody Allen. Not only is Adventureland a great drama, but it's also a really fucking cool movie. The characters are all smart, speak well, listen to cool music, wear cool clothes, do fun shit, and the soundtrack to the movie is super hip as well. This flick was a really nice surprise, definitely don't write it off for any reason.

QT is right, if Lars Von Trier had staged this instead of making it into a film, he would've won a Pulitzer Prize.

The screenplay is not only one of the best original works to be filmed in the last decade, but one of the best pieces of modern literature that I've been privy to in a long time. Discussions of the cinematic form aside, this is a perfectly built, deeply manipulative, thickly metaphoric, and ultimately hugely affecting story. The performances are across the board completely assured and very believable, despite placing the actors in, what I would deem to be, a very difficult situation to work in. Although I feel obliged to make reference to the visual design of the picture, t seems strangely irrelevant to mention it when discussing Dogville.