greg mottola Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Maybe it's a little early to canonize a scene from a movie that came out only a few months ago, but as fall responsibilities quietly encroach on our sweaty summer abandon, it feels right to point out a scene in Adventureland that particularly reminds us of freedom, unexpected fun, and most of all romance. Thankfully, Greg Mottola's film arrived on DVD and Blu-ray this week, so we were not only able to recall it as our favorite moment in a movie filled with many memorable ones, but make sure the details weren't lost in the intervening (three) months between now and its original release.

By Erik Davis (original publication date: 1/20/09 -- Sundance Film Festival)

Adventureland is and isn't everything I expected it to be. First off, no matter what the trailer may show you, this is in no way Superbad, circa 1987 -- so get that out of your head now. Adventureland is, instead, a sometimes subtle dramedy that's more touchy-feely than it is funny. With more in common with writer-director Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers, Adventureland is a moody late-eighties time capsule whose parts explode on the screen and shoot out in several different directions before landing, together, in a pile of mixed emotions.

James (Jesse Eisenberg) is an inexperienced brainiac who's looking forward to spending his summer before college traveling through Europe. With the trip planned right down to the last penny, James is informed by his stiff parents that the nine hundred bucks he was supposed to receive as a graduation present won't be arriving in his pockets anytime soon since dad was forced to take a major pay cut at work. So, instead of discovering himself abroad, James is forced to find a summer job to help pay for his expensive Ivy League school in the fall. When his skinny frame and intellectual persona find him rejected from almost every job out there, James reluctantly takes an opening at the Adventureland theme park in the games division.

The first poster for Adventureland gives "from the director of Superbad" the lowest, smallest billing. The most recent poster puts it first and foremost, even making it more colorful than the title and, one could argue, the cast itself.

In the weeks leading up to its release this Friday, the marketing campaign for Adventureland has been slowly, steadily, understandably tweaking itself to play up director Greg Mottola's last hit teen comedy, Superbad, but ever since seeing the film, I've been convinced that those expecting something so raucous this weekend will soon find themselves shifting in their seats as they watch something that's a bit more concerned about the 'age' in 'coming-of-age' than the 'coming.' It's not a tremendously misleading sell, but rather a matter of tone, and as such, here's seven reasons why you should look forward to the film beyond thinking it's the Next Big Quotable Comedy.

Back when I saw Adventureland at Sundance, I tried to make it known that this flick wasn't Superbad, despite the fact that it's directed by the same dude (Greg Mottola) and that the studio insists on selling it as "the next Superbad". That said, I definitely do like this new red band trailer, which pokes fun at the whole red band trend by pointing out the reasons why we like to watch these foul-mouthed, R-rated promos in the first place.

And if you watch this new trailer for Adventureland, you'll get the sense that it's a straight-up comedy with silly characters and stupid one-liners. It's not that, really -- in fact, in my opinion Adventureland is more of a coming-of-age drama than it is the teen sex comedy this trailer makes it out to be. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't see it; I very much liked a good portion of Adventureland for its honesty, its subtle humor, its performances and its totally awesome 80s references (and soundtrack).

So what am I trying to say here? I guess I just don't want you all to expect one thing, because you're receiving something else. If you go in looking for Superbad, you'll be disappointed. If you go in looking for a good time ... well, I think you'll have a pretty good time. Adventureland hits theaters on March 27.

I bet you were sitting around today wondering what the director of Superbad was up to, right? That was you, right? Well, good news is Greg Mottola has been finishing up a new film called Adventureland, and based on this hilarious new trailer (which just premiered over at Rotten Tomatoes), it's got an '80s Dazed and Confused vibe written all over it ... and me likey Dazed and Confused very much.

Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig (the new comedic love of my life), Ryan Reynolds and Kristen Stewart (OMG, what's Bella doing in another film?!), Adventureland takes place in 1987and follows an awkward kid straight out of school who takes a gig at an amusement park, falls in love, meets a bunch of maniacs and walks away with some pretty valuable life lessons. I had the pleasure of conversing with Jesse Eisenberg earlier this week during the NY premiere of The Living Wake (one of the funniest films of this year, no doubt) at the Big Apple Film Festival, and he's a very cool dude ... AND a big fan of Cinematical, no less. Check out the trailer below; I'm really looking forward to this one. You?

Adventureland hits theaters on March 27th.

Well, we have some good news and some bad news to report during this glorious summer weekend. Which do you want first? Since I always pick the bad news first, we'll go with that: Apparently, Quentin Tarantino is having some trouble getting some of his potential Inglorious Bastards cast members to sign on the dotted line. Not only has David Krumholtz dropped out (and replaced by Samm Levine from Freaks and Geeks, so says AICN), but unfortunately the same has happened with Simon Pegg.

Over on his MySpace page, Pegg has told fans that he will no longer be co-starring in the Tarantino WWII flick, but will instead (and here's the good news) reunite with Nick Frost for a film called Paul (first reported wayyy back in September of 2007). This time, however, Edgar Wright will not be behind the camera, as Pegg said Superbad's Greg Mottola has taken over directing duties. Paul will follow two comic book geeks (Pegg and Frost) on some sort of road trip across America. No word yet on who'll be replacing Pegg in Bastards, though I can name more than a few Brits who'd do a bang-up job.

With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).

Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.

It's going to be hard to follow Superbad, but as we've previously learned, Greg Mottola is going to give it a try. He's already working on his third film, Adventureland, which at least has that goofy-cool compound-word title thing going on, just like Superbad. Of course, this seems to be a theme that goes all the way back to Mottola's first feature, The Daytrippers, and so the similarity can't promise that the new movie will be anything like Superbad (not that The Daytrippers was bad; it just wasn't Superbad). Then again, if Mottola really wanted to ride the Superbad train he would have tried to get Adventureland made with Judd Apatow as producer, and he probably would have cast Michael Cera in the lead. Instead, according to The Hollywood Reporter, he's got Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale), who also has a great awkwardly comic manner but is certainly underrated compared to Cera. Joining Eisenberg are two more people who had nothing to do with Superbad: Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder) and Kristen Stewart (Panic Room).

Eisenberg will star as a college graduate who has to take a job working in an amusement park rather than go on a European vacation (he should have worked at Epcott, which could have been a compromise). Stewart is a tomboy (isn't she always?) co-worker who he falls for. Reynolds' role is a bit confusing. He's apparently an aspiring rock star (too old) who is, and I quote both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety here, "the icon of cool to all the kids working at the park." Does he also work there? Is he playing a concert there? Are all the kids working at the park really that uniform? I'm not sure. Mottola wrote the presumably autobiographical script (it's set in 1987, around the time he would have graduated from college) and The Door in the Floor's Ted Hope and Anne Carey are producing. Adventureland begins shooting next month in Pittsburgh (at Kennywood?).

Just at the CalExpo yesterday, along with Governor Arnie the Barbarian, and I must say that watching a Holstein give birth was far more edifying than a lot of the movies I've seen this summer. One of the exhibits in the home-arts pavilions was a high school electronic class's exercise of retro-engineering an air-conditioner: tearing it apart and showing all the component on a blueprint.

If some of the correspondents I know had seen this, they'd ask "Why do those students hate air conditioners so much? Why couldn't they just let it alone and enjoy it?" That's the point that movie fans sometimes miss about critics: that a really good movie will only be more interesting after it gets pulled apart a little. The best pulling-apart I've seen on Superbad is at Flick Filosopher, mostly because it's a group effort.

Critic MaryAnn Johanson got to host a passel of furious fans after she wrote that she hated it. After her pan, she made the point that Superbad suggests that "the mysteries [of sex] have yet to be solved, or even broached, by anyone involved in making this movie, and must be unbroached by the audience, as well, for maximum enjoyment." In her opinion, then, Rogan, Apatow and the gang failed to pull that matter of male-female attraction apart in the movie, and just stuck with the bad behavior on the surface.

The regular readers of this critic, who is self-described as a Gen-X female New Yorker, were suddenly joined by everyone drawn in from the link in Rotten Tomatoes. There, Johanson's review had been boiled down to a lone quote, to wit: Superbad was proof Hollywood sucked. Well, the film's many defenders came out with every ad-hominem (or I guess ad-wominem) thing they could think of typing. And the back and forth about the film -- whether it was misogynistic, implicitly pro-female or whatever, turned into a much more interesting discussion of the movie than I've seen anywhere. Except, maybe, Richard Corliss's essay about the "bromance" movie of 2007. Perhaps the best comment in this long list of insults, observations and threats, is the putdown of Johanson by someone billed as "mysogynisticSUPERBADfan': "Your opinion means nothing. You write for an internet site." And then he posted it to an internet site ...

There is an old saying in Hollywood about how in many cases, overnight success actually took a heck of a lot longer than overnight. Take director Greg Mottola for example. His most recent film, the mega-hit and super-funny Superbad, ended an almost ten-year dry spell for the filmmaker, whose last feature film was The Day Trippers in 1996. During the intervening years, Mottola worked as a director in TV on shows such as Undeclared and Arrested Development, but that next feature directing gig seemed to elude him.

Fortunately, as it sometimes does, fortune smiled on the director in the form of a phone call from Judd Apatow and the offer to direct Superbad -- and that film's success is sure to lead to more work for Mottola. In fact, it already has. According to Variety, Mottola, coming off the impressive opening weekend for Superbad, has already set up his next directing gig -- the romantic comedy Adventureland, which he also wrote.

Adventureland is set in the summer of 1987, and tells the story of a recent college grad who, instead of going on his dream vacation to Europe, is stuck in a minimum-wage job at an amusement park for the summer. Convinced he's not going to have any fun, he instead ends up making new friends, finding love and gaining valuable life experience. Given Mottola's track record, I'm sure the script and the subsequent movie will be much funnier than that sounds. Casting is now underway for the film, which is expected to begin shooting later this year.