Adventureland vs Zombieland
1: Zombieland has lots of zombies in it.
Adventureland has scant adventure in it.
A: 0 Z:1
2: Adventureland is a sweet romance disguised as a slightly older version of Superbad!
Zombieland is a sweet romantic comedy disguised as a zombie film.
A: 0 Z:2 (Zombieland is the better romance)
3: Adventureland stars Jesse Eisenberg.
Zombieland stars Jesse Eisenberg.
A: 0.5 Z: 2.5
4: Despite being called Zombieland, it isn’t very scary.
Whilst called Adventureland , the real adventure is the one of falling in love and growing up.
A: 1.5 Z: 2.5
5: Zombieland’s high point, the celebrity cameo, also destabilises the film.
Adventureland’s unexpected Ryan Reynolds cameo is the emotional core of the film.
A: 2.5 Z: 2.5
6: Zombieland’s celebrity cameo is remarkably funny.
Adventureland never really makes it to funny.
A: 2.5 Z: 3.5
7: Adventureland strives for some sort of cultural import.
Zombieland knows it is the most disposable film ever.
A: 2.5 Z: 4.5
8: Adventureland is predicated on reasonably smart people doing reliably dumb things to each other. Especially in love.
Zombieland is predicated on character who appear dumb being actually quite smart. Until they fall in love.
A: 2.5 Z: 5.5
9: Adventureland has Husker Du on the soundtrack.
Zombieland has Ghostbusters on its soundtrack.
A: 2.5 Z: 6.5 (this score might have been different if I was 18).
10: Adventureland is an enjoyable if slight “making friends when you do shit work” comedy.
Zombieland is a thoroughly disposable but hughly enjoyable zombie comedy.
A: 2.5 Z: 7.5
There you go, proven by science that of the two Jesse Eisenberg films with “Land” in the title released in the last few months, Zombieland is three times better than the still OK Adventureland.
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • Film • 283 views • Share/Save
Is Jesse Eisenberg running his career according to the rules of some elaborate game? It strains the laws of coincidence to star in A-land and Z-land in the same year…
Anyway, I really, really liked both films and think that you are a bit harsh on Adventureland. Possibly because you’re in indie-denial* (and anyway, while it does indeed have Husker Du and the Replacements and the Mary Chain on the soundtrack, it also has Whitesnake and Let The Music Play by Shannon, which is a great song, surely?)
Zombieland’s celeb cameo is indeed a thing of beauty, but of course even saying that much risks spoiling it.
See both, folks: just because it’s the world’s most bleeding obvious double bill don’t make it a bad thing.
*Something I’m frequently accused of.
I am probably a bit harsh on Adventureland in comparison perhaps. But it is that type of film where a fundamentally nice bloke becomes a bit of a knob and then learns the error of his ways AND STILL GETS THE GIRL. No only is this contrary to the way life works, it means that for the lions share of the film we have to watch him being a knob.
I guess I found his failings… understandable. I was ambivalent at the very least about the ending. [SPOILER] The more credible state of things is that she would’ve wanted to forget the whole bloody lot of them, and him turning up out of context would emphasise that, rather than cancel it out. But still, the rest of the film had done enough for me that I wasn’t infuriated by that moment.
(All spoilers obv) I tell you the one thing I thought was going to happen in Adventureland but didn’t, was a little bit more investigation of her parental situation. I almost thought her step-mother was really her mother that she was reacting against. It does join that batch of small town films though which are just shouting to middle America GET OUT GET OUT.
(There is also an odd sense that this feels like a sequel to Freaks & Geeks!)
Yes to both your points (Freaks & Geeks, as it happens, was one of those things people got really intense about and I only ever quite liked). I think the point, in both his and her case, was that all sorts of stuff happens in your parents’ lives that (at that age) you only actually care about as far it affects you (in retrospect, I was brutal to my parents).
Philosophical point raised: is Pittsburgh a small town? (I’ve never been). Statistically, it’s a big city, but in mentality it was a small town according to (pertinently) Lou Reed (writing from the POV of Andy Warhol):
“When you’re growing up in a small town/and you’re having a nervous breakdown/and you think that you’ll never escape it/Yourself or the place that you live”
I’m with you on Freaks and Geeks. I could see it was done well enough, but there was never enough there to blow me away or mark it out as being notably different to any other high school drama except its timescale matched that of its critical audience. It certainly went through the shopping list of high school cliché storylines quickly (party, kegger, cheating, drugs et al).
I think the difference may not be big vs small town, but rather what those towns weren’t. They weren’t New York, or in this case Europe.