Adventureland

ADVENTURELAND is a coming of age story about a guy who really really wants to be played by Michael Cera. The would-be Cera takes a job in an amusement park and has your standard coming-of-age experiences, and everything pretty much rolls along as you'd expect.

This isn't a film with big laughs or big ideas or big anything. It's just a story about a guy living through an important episode in his life. It has the feel of a fond memory, one that retains some of the prickly bits even if it has taken on a nostalgic sheen. I wouldn't go out of my way for it, but I was stuck in coach and there it was and it made two hours roll by.

I Love You, Man

I LOVE YOU, MAN, is a romantic comedy about two men. Yes, it's about two heterosexual men, but that doesn't stop it from hewing to the romantic comedy formula. That's part of its charm: this movie knows exactly what it's doing, exactly how it's subverting convention, and it's having great fun doing it.

Oh, and it's funny. Really, really funny. Laugh out loud funny.

Paul Rudd's a guy who has always gotten along better with women than men. That's a problem because, when it's time to get married, he has no close male friend - no best man. A normal guy would just choose a relative, but pay no attention to these technicalities: we're setting up a romantic comedy here! Desperate for a friend, Rudd has a meet-cute with Jason Segel (who wrote and starred in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, one of the few films that actually occupies space on my DVD rack) and asks him out on a man-date.

And there's your setup. The rest of the movie puts its characters (played by, among others, Jane Curtin, J.K. Simmons, and Andy Samberg) through the gears of the romantic comedy machine, which really serves only as a chassis on which to hang joke after joke after joke. The jokes are funny and well played, and this film kept me laughing from the opening to the closing credits.

I'm not going to write that I loved it, man. But I just did. I feel cheap.