MovieChat Forums > Adventureland (2009) Discussion > Seriously people, they're not losers, st...

Seriously people, they're not losers, stoners or punk rockers

posted 10 years ago by badtothebono
2 replies | jump to latest

At least most aren't.

He got into Columbia grad school.
She is going to NYU.
I'm not sure what that Russian Literature guy's status was.

There was pot during a summer job, but he didn't seem to be highly experienced there, and the rest of them seemed quite impressed that he had some. I'm not sure a single other character ever produced any pot.

Other than Lou Reed, I don't think anything there really qualifies as "punk". I love this soundtrack. I love a lot of these songs. It is alt, new wave, and hard rock. Lou Reed could be called the Father of Punk, but by the 1980s, never mind 1987, punk had taken a different route. To hear "punk" listen to the 1984 soundtrack of Repo Man.
Husker DU started as punk, but by 1986, when that song came out, they were not really punk anymore.
If they were trying to show "punk", they'd have used Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, or even Sex Pistols, Ramones or The Clash.
Here's one I remember, a punk band from the '80s from PA itself ... The Dead Milkmen. If they were trying to show "punk", they'd have used Bitchin Camaro by The Dead Milkmen. Now that's from the Way-Back Machine.

She was just trying to be cool & anti-social, or "emo" before there was an emo. Not punk. She went to NYU. People at NYU would be listening to Lou Reed in the mid-to-late 80s, and they'd be listening to VU & other early stuff the most. People in college listen to Lou Reed. That doesn't come even close to making them "punk".

ps: the idea that Pale Blue Eyes was on a jukebox in West Bu----ck PA was ridiculous. Not that it really matters, but huh?

[–] abominablesnowbat 9 years ago

Yeah she definitely was not punk, at least not 80s punk by any means.

But she definitely was not acting in a typical way for kids who went to NYU and such did in the late 80s.

And no, kids were not going around listening to Lou Reed en masse in HS or college in the late 80s. I don't actually recall a single kid ever having listened to Lou Reed in all of HS or college.

They kinda showed her acting like how the burnout crowd acted in 1987 which is not how all but maybe 0.00001% of the private, elite university of the Northeast crowd acted then. They might have a bit in 1977 or 1997, but no way in 1987.

He was acting a bit like a left in the 70s pseudo-hippie type which was not remotely mainstream, but it wasn't necessarily unrealistic for someone who went to Oberlin, which was a pretty thrownback school then, one of the few that was still at least half stuck in the 70s. That was a very unusual vibe for a school back then though.

She didn't dress, style, talk, act like 99.9999999% of girls in 1987. Which is perfectly fine in and of itself. There is nothing wrong with a movie focusing on different sorts. But what is totally wrong is all the reviewers and people who keep insisting that the two leads and the movie in general got the late 1980s look and vibe down, universally, better than any other recent movie, which is beyond laughably absurd.

It was very dated (or alternately partially modern in a couple of these cases, like with Lou Reed, hair, clothes on the two leads, smoking) in the interior furnishings, records instead of tapes and CDs, lack of portable music players, lack of video games, top of the class type kids smoking cigarettes like fiends, Lou Reed worshship, nothing but old cars, clothes hair and patterns of speech.

[–] StephieVee 8 years ago

I thought she was going to NYU, as in starting in the fall.