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.

Twilight

If you're a fan of the _Twilight_ books, you're gonna love this movie. If you haven't read 'em, you're going to be like me, asking the women in the room, "Why did she do that? What's going on with that guy?" "Why do they care about this?"

See, it isn't that TWILIGHT left me on the outside because I'm not a member of its target demographic. TWILIGHT left me on the outside because it assumed I've read the book. Since I haven't, I couldn't understand why the heroine seemed so bummed out: she had a father who loved her, lived in a cool house, and made friends easily. Further, I couldn't understand what she saw in the mousse-haired vampire with whom she's paired in biology class. Werewolf Guy seemed cool, and he could rebuild an engine. Jock Guy seemed nice enough, and he wasn't a threat to drink her blood by the pale moonlight. I mean, really, why would any woman want to be with a man who spends more time on his hair than she does?

There are many more questions that TWILIGHT fails to answer. For example: why are its vampires dressed so fashionably? I've only been around for 40 years, and I've already lost interest in fashion: give me khakis and an oxford on the East Coast, jeans and a T on the West, and I'm good to go. After a century, you'd think that TWILIGHT's undead would have roughly the same fashion sense as the far more entertaining vampires of NETHERBEAST INCORPORATED. At the very least, they could get jobs, a la NETHERBEAST. I mean, really, I know that vampires are damned, but an eternity of high school biology seems like cruel and unusual punishment even for the eternally forsaken.

But, hey, if thinly veiled parables about the excruciation of celibacy are your bag, or if you happen to own stock in a grooming products company, you might enjoy TWILIGHT. Two out of three of the adults in my room did.