James (Jesse Eisenberg) and Joel (Martin Starr) in Adventureland.Supplied
Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming. This weekend’s special edition: films to kiss summer goodbye.
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Adventureland (Prime Video, Hoopla)
There is a certain, deep-sigh kind of sadness that creeps in toward this time of the year. The days are getting just that much shorter, the temperatures just that cooler (okay maybe not this year, but they should be), and there’s that creeping sense that the rest of the year isn’t going to feel quite as good as it does this very late-August moment. That existential nostalgia can be felt in full force with this week’s selection of streaming titles, no more so than in the 2009 comedy Adventureland. Initially marketed as some kind of sex-and-drugs romp with a slight Judd Apatow flavour, director Greg Mottola’s film is smaller, quieter and smarter than audiences might have expected. Following a group of teens and teens-at-heart in 1987 who are trying to make some cash while working at a run-down amusement park (including Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds and Bill Hader), Adventureland delivers a particularly edgy vibe of late-summer sweetness.
The Way, Way Back (Crave)
Perhaps best remembered today, if it is indeed remembered at all, for casting Office sweetheart Steve Carell in a rare bad-guy role, The Way, Way Back should be recalled as the movie that will make you fall in love with Sam Rockwell. In full Bill “Meatballs” Murray mode here, Rockwell plays Owen, the sage mentor to a 14-year-old kid named Duncan (Liam James) who frequents the water park where he works one long summer. (Carell is the abrasive boyfriend of Duncan’s mom.) Co-director Nat Faxon and Jim Rash would go on to score big by writing the 2011 George Clooney dramedy The Descendants, but it’s The Way, Way Back that hits hardest.
Moonrise Kingdom (Prime Video, Crave)
Ever since his debut Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson had wistfulness nailed down cold. So it was only a matter of time until he made a film about summer camp and the unique melancholy that young participants cycle through every season. But this being an Anderson picture, “summer-camp movie” is such a light-touch way of describing the many deep yet soft layers to Moonrise Kingdom. As much a glorious romance as it is a deadpan comic triumph, the film is one of the director’s most rewatchable productions – and marks perhaps the last great on-screen performance of Bruce Willis.
Wet Hot American Summer (on-demand, including Apple TV, Store)
Nina Hellman, Molly Shannon and Judah Friedlander in the Netflix original series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp.Saeed Adyani
A very different entry in the cinematic summer-camp canon, David Wain’s surreal 2001 masterpiece about the goings on at the 1980s Camp Firewood has, by this point in its storied legacy, outgrown the “cult classic” label. I mean, can a film still be considered offbeat if it inspired not one but two Netflix series? However you want to classify it, Wet Hot American Summer remains a true litmus test of audiences’ comic sensibilities: Either you’re onboard with its glorious self-aware silliness from the get-go, or you’re sent screaming from the room the minute that a group of counsellors (including Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks and Bradley Cooper) take a “trip into town” that escalates from innocent hijinks to crude drug abuse in remarkably quick fashion. All that, plus H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers) voices a can of talking vegetables.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Netflix, Crave)
There’s no camp or amusement/water park in this 2008 rom-com, but there is a profound sense of summer as the season of not only loss but renewal. Opening with a sad-sack musician (Jason Segel) getting dumped by his famous actress girlfriend (Kristen Bell), Forgetting Sarah Marshall balances the mourning that comes with escaping any relationship with the bright, sunny possibilities of new romance. It doesn’t hurt that much of the film takes place at an impossibly beautiful Hawaiian resort, nor that the script by Segel and director Nicholas Stoller is acutely hilarious. If you have to say so long to the summer with one film, then best to do so with a movie that treats the possibility of a “happy ending” with seriously funny commitment.