Adult World

Is this a real poster? I DON'T KNOW

"When life gets hard, rise to the occasion."

I like this tagline because it is a boner joke, and really that's the kind of class and general level of discourse I like to encourage here. Welcome back, its time for more of the very best that el cine has to provide, here at The Tagline. Today's offering really spoke to me, because it concerns a fleshed out version of a stock character in a story I like to tell. It is maybe a story that is forever retold, because I don't believe for second that my experiences in the matter were unique. Let me give some background. When I was a fledgling undergraduate, still filled with hopes and aspirations, my dreams not yet rent asunder by the jagged, merciless crags of reality, I thought that it would be super cool to take a creative writing class, and actually I ended up taking several, but this story is mostly about the introductory courses. A lot of higher level creative writing courses have a kind of try out, where you submit a piece to the teacher so they can attempt to verify that your primary interest isn't like Naruto/X-Files slash fiction or something. Intro creative writing classes, the 100 level stuff? It doesn't have any of that gate keeping. What that means is that you might meet some not truly awesome authors. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that I am the world's greatest gift to the written word or anything, but I mean, some writers redefine bad. Others just define it in the same way it has been defined before. I would think and proclaim suggesting that such a person could exist at all was offensive if I had not interacted with them on at least three separate occasions (you don't get to choose who you're peer reviewing folks). ANYWAY to bring the story back around, there are certain people who you will inevitably interact with in such a class, and one of them is poet girl (also poet guy but he tends to embody a different archetype, as he is trying to emulate different individual). Poetry girl is so deep and her writing always tends to favor verse, and abstract, stream of consciousness style stuff. Everything is a metaphor nested inside of a simile, inevitably about the deep well of anguish that resides in her tormented, maybe 19-year-old soul. Somehow almost everything is about a boy she broke up with. After all, as I've established in earlier posts growing up in upper-middle class suburbia is hard.

College is super serious stuff, WHAT IS WITH THAT HAT.

Anyway, the reason I bring up poetry girl is that she is more or less the hapless protagonist of today's film, Adult World, a movie about a girl with what I believe Han Solo referred to as delusions of grandeur, and sinks a modest fortune into applying to magazines with poetry applications (I assume prose too but the kind of prose that is basically really long bad poetry). Eventually her parents decide that shit needs to stop, and that they can't subsidize her fantasy life anymore. This leads to the girl attempting to find a job somewhere, ANYWHERE that will take an undergrad with no work experience who majored in poetry. I think you can see where this is going. Eventually our hero, my PERSONAL HERO, Amy (Emma Roberts, she was also recently in American Horror Story: Coven) winds up in a porn store, where she promptly has a spazz attack and runs away, before returning to accept that this is probably the only place that will have her (after all, the nice old folks that run the place seem very charitable). In this den of iniquity, Amy meets Alex (her real life fiance, Evan Peters, also on AHS, it's nice to see him out of the gimp suit), who manages the store (which is called Adult World hence the title). She naturally is a total flake and jerk all the time, because she thinks that working in pornstore is totally beneath an artist like her, destined to do great things with the written word. Despite this exalted destiny, her car gets stolen and then she runs away from home when her parents confront her about it, and for a while lives with Rubia, who is a drag queen, which is probably a bit of a culture shock for her?

The happiest place on Earth for Dildos.

The extra dimension in this is that while she is working at Adult World Amy is also stalking sort of/not really famous anymore writer Rat Billings, who she looks up to as a kind of role model. He is the sort of person you would probably idolize if you were an idiot with terrible taste, which is to say he is a pretentious arse-bag who nonetheless is justified in his abuses of Amy, who is totally ridiculous. Due to her persistence, Rat decides to seize the day and have Amy be his domestic slave, while spouting whatever off-hand nonsense will keep her satisfied, and promising to eventually read her work, which... I mean he does I guess. The form is I guess pretty typical, in terms of narrative arc, but the details of the plot are actually fairly novel, and I enjoy any story that is about an entitled 20-something getting dragged down into the weirdness with the rest of us. Emma Roberts is also a likable lead despite playing a spastic idiot, or perhaps because she is playing a spastic idiot. Evan Peters is great because Evan Peters is always great, except when he is a serial killer rape ghost. Some people would probably think he was great then too, but I mean I guess that's a personal opinion. John Cusack mostly seems to be in the movie just so he has something to do with the afternoon. He feels about as involved in the film as his character is in Amy's life, and I'm not sure if that makes his performance bad or brilliant.

Don't let her near your guitar!

Ultimately the movie was entertaining, and also it had dildos in it, so really it's hard to imagine what kind of objections you could have to watching it. There's even a blow up doll that goes "OOHH YEAHH" in what can only be described as a husky man voice, and I think that's what we've all been waiting for in a movie. It isn't on Netflix (yet I'm going to say, I think it might find its way over there eventually) but if you can find a way to see it I think you'll really get a kick out of it. Also I want to note that Amy's ultimate career is I think the noblest thing one can do with the written word. Alsoalso Did you know that Emma Roberts was arrested in Canada in a domestic dispute with Evan Peters? That's... quite the relationship they must have. He didn't press charges though, which is I guess how you know it's true love? I don't know, I was just reading her bio and they were thoughtful enough to include that. 

That's all for today folks! Join me next week for Spiderman 2, of course I'd see it eventually come on man.