Butler's Cinema Scene

Emma Roberts, John Cusack

“ADULT WORLD” My rating: D (Opening March 7 at the Screenland Armour)

 97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In the skin-crawling indie comedy “Adult World,” former tweener star Emma Roberts (TV’s “Nancy Drew”) dulls up the screen as a college coed whose lack of self awareness and sense of entitlement  is so total as to be crippling.

Her Amy, a student at Syracuse University, has convinced herself that she’s a great poet. In fact, she is a ghastly poet (“…shattered wings catapult the vulva to vast oblivion…”), but nothing like a reality check gets in the way of her quest for literary greatness.

In short order she has dropped out of school and been kicked out of her parents’ home.  She gets a job clerking at Adult World, a mom & pop adult book/video store owned by a mom and pop (Cloris Leachman and John Collum, who make an early appearance and then bail) and managed by the sweet/cute/ironic  Alex (Evan Peters, Jesse Eisenberg now being too old for these parts.).

Given the setting, you might expect some “Clerks”-style satire of the whole porn thing, but  we get only a few half-hearted stabs at the store’s loser clientele (“Do you have the anti-microbial anal beads?”). Outrageous? Hardly. It it all feels very 1980s made-for-television. (Still can’t figure out what earned the movie an R rating.)

Emma Roberts

First the infuriatingly naive Amy talks her way into crashing on the sofa of a female impersonator (Armando Riesco) — because isn’t that what every suburban girl does when slumming Downtown? Then she becomes the unpaid Girl Friday of her favorite poet, the seedy has-been Rat Billings (John Cusack, unusually charmless).

Amy — still convinced of her own potential genius — wants to be his protege. Rat wants his house cleaned.

We just want something to happen that won’t make our heads hurt. Good luck with that.

I’ve no idea how several credible actors signed on to this great turkey. Perhaps they never read Andy Cochran’s cliche-crammed screenplay.  Maybe director Scott Coffey gives great meeting.  Most likely they all badly needed a paycheck.

Roberts is so freaking irritating as the self-absorbed, reality-shunning Amy that I found myself contemplating a violent revenge.  My fantasy was a lot more interesting than the movie.

| Robert W. Butler