The preview for this movie made it out to be all silly teenage comedy, fart jokes and nut-punching and the like. In reality, this movie is a painful but sincere coming-of-age story with a heavy dose of nostalgia; there is a good deal of nut-punching, but it‘s tastefully done.
The main character, James, has just graduated from college in Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s and planned on spending his summer touring Europe, but due to Those Tough Economic Times (as opposed, obviously, to These Tough Economic Times), he must instead get a summer job. Turns out all he’s qualified to do is work at a run-down amusement park, where the main qualification seems to be wearing a park t-shirt and not giving away giant-ass pandas, even at knifepoint. Of course, over the summer he falls in love with a girl, fucks it up, but then gets her back. Oh, spoiler alert (in case you’re that person who’s NEVER EVER seen a movie before and didn’t figure this out in the first 5 minutes).
Blah blah blah, that’s the predictable part. The part I didn’t expect is how the flawed characters and semi-tragic situations evoked an overwhelming sense of nostalgia about similar events in my own past. Maybe it helps that I actually did spend one of the worst summers of my life working at an amusement park (I made $3.35 an hour!), but Tilt-A-Whirl experience is not necessary to get something out of the movie. It’s hard not to watch James and his friends being underwhelmed by the paths their lives have taken and not remember when you first started to realize that what you were told in grade school is not true - anybody can’t be president, after all.
I resent this movie for making me think about all the stupid shit in my long-ago youth that I wish I hadn't done.
No comments:
Post a Comment