James Brennan, a young college graduate, ready for a grand summer of fun and freedom finds out that his parents can no longer pay for his trip to Europe and he’s forced to get a summer job. Having no prior work experience, he has little choice but to take a job at the local amusement park under low wages and menial, boring tasks.
Brennan quickly overlooks his disdain when he meets Em (Twilight’s Kristen Stewart), an intriguing, hypnotizing, and promiscuous coworker. Brennan moves into a semi-serious relationship with her, marketing himself as a sensitive, caring guy not interested in just “getting laid,” which would be more believable if the culmination of the film didn’t lead to him finally achieving non-virgin status.
But the emotional upheaval and inter-relational work drama all felt very real and offered an authentic contrast for the hormone-driven adolescents working at the amusement park from the clean-cut fun it usually represents to the kids who go there. The entire premise of the film was comedic and engaging, and Director Greg Mottola completely captured the caught-in-midst-of-summer setting, placing the audience in a quirky, carefree diegesis that created perfect chaos when the emotional stakes of the characters took a devastating turn.
The bulk of the film kept close to the run-down amusement park, but the camera always gave the audience something new and visually stimulating in this idiosyncratic world of former-glory. It was clear that Mottola’s semi-autobiographic story gave him great insight from previous experience, but sometimes the narrative felt focused more in re-lived nostalgia as opposed to engulfing the viewer in present-day (however present one could be in a film set in 1987) trials, hysteria, forgiveness, and love.
Three.
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