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Mood:
- TouchingCleverHumorousOffbeat
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Plot:
- Social MisfitsFriendshipStonersMisfitYouthFriendsBuddiesComing of Age more...
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Genres:
- DramaComedy
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Time/Period:
- 20th Century90s
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Place:
- New York
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Praise:
- Sundance Festival Winner
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Humor:
- Dark Humor
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Attitudes:
- Semi SeriousRealistic
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Score:
- Hip Hop
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The Wackness, 2008
English
USA
Profile of The Wackness
The mood of The Wackness is touching, clever, and offbeat. The plot centers around stoners, social misfits, and misfits. It features dark humor. The Wackness is a drama and comedy movie. In approach, it is realistic. The setting is New York. The Wackness happens in the 1990s. The musical score is hip hop. The movie is known for being a Sundance Festival winner.
Summary of The Wackness
Palpable heat, complete with sweltering lens flares, washes over the mental and emotional currents of writer-director Jonathan Levine's THE WACKNESS. As the summer months of 1994 pass in three naturally marked acts, the neon pop of a pained youth culture's graffiti art punctuates Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's New York City and its palette of washed-out darks and midtones. This part-familiar, part-engagingly new coming-of-age story suggests the Giuliani administration's "cleaning up" of the city as a metaphorical model of how not to approach the pain of living. The philosophical critique of sweeping the ugly under the rug, seeing it as nothing but a disservice to oneself, comes courtesy of the advice and attempted practice of gonzo-druggie psychiatrist Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley) and the struggle of his teenage pot-dealing patient, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck). The only way to live life, says Squires, who accepts marijuana as payments for Luke's therapy sessions, is to embrace it in all its excruciating throes.
THE WACKNESS is an appropriately self-aware dark comedy that separates itself from coming-of-age films set in earlier eras by pointing to its own genre's conventions (through blunt articulation and express devoicing, alternately) as much as it does its themes and sentiments. Peck delivers a layered performance as Luke. The laconic stoner's heavy-lidded, steely stares and draggy attempts to be cool, and his statements that sound like questions at vulnerable moments ("I got this for you, yo," he says shyly in his white-boy hip-hop intonation as he hands a gift to Squires's stepdaughter Stephanie, the girl he's fallen in love with), are belied by a natural intelligence and a growing anxiety. Incidentally, beautiful Manhattan native Olivia Thirlby (JUNO) is perfect as dream girl Stephanie. All this feverish imagery is emotionally enveloped by THE WACKNESS's ‘90s hip-hop soundtrack, which features the Notorious B.I.G. and A Tribe Called Quest.
Details
| Language: | English |
| Country: | USA |
| Release date: | 18 January 2008 |
| Runtime: | 99 min |
Cast and Crew
as Dr. Squires
as Luke Shapiro
Photos
Clips
Critics Reviews
Philadelphia Inquirer
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- by: Steven Rea
The Hollywood Reporter
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- by: Duane Byrge
Users Reviews
- 30.June.2010
- |
- by: Gabriel
- Gabriel rated this movie
0/10
- 11.October.2009
- |
- by: Sara Hatch
- Sara Hatch rated this movie0/10
