THE WACKNESS MOVIE REVIEW

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Yesterday I went to see The Wackness. The best way to see a movie is to suddenly decide when you walk past that you actually have enough money to go; you don’t have that 2 for one voucher on you that you were given the other day, but you do have your invalid student card which will work so you can get concessions anyway, and if you are with a buddy you can sharesies snacks so you don’t have to make a choice between pick n’ mix and nachos and can legitimately get the biggest coke EVER. 

            ‘Pineapple Express’ and the new Coen brothers movie ‘Burn after Reading’ were the trailers, so I pretty much had high expectations for the film although I kind of wished I’d just gone to see Pineapple Express, the ‘thug life’ bit in the ad was perfectly delivered and I like that guy from knocked up, hes got great comic timing too. 

            I can’t really sum it up better than this, which someone on IMDb wrote: It’s the summer of 1994, and the streets of New York are pulsing with hip-hop. Set against this backdrop, a lonely teenager named Luke Shapiro spends his last summer before university selling marijuana throughout New York City, trading it with his unorthodox psychotherapist for treatment, while having a crush on his stepdaughter.

           

            The graffiti thread used throughout is a little tenuous, it’s not about graffiti and there are two tags done in the whole film but I think this is mainly used to emphasise the ‘hip-hop NY’ idea. It is clear that they tried hard to direct and market this as a ‘cool movie’ which makes me a little bit sceptical; an obvious example is that they drafted Method Man to play the kids Jamaican dealer but his accent is so overdone you can pretty much hear his vocal chords cringing as he talks, which confirms to me that he was cast for the wrong reasons. But I liked this move, the story is good and Ben Kingsley is funny as fuck, it would have made it better if Mary-Kate Olsen was a little more awkward but I was watching her like a hawk and her acting was pretty non-eventful. I felt a mixture of happy and sad when I left the cinema and a little bit ill too because I figure if your gonna spend six pounds on a nacho combi meal you might as well spend an extra quid and supersize it.

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