The Screengrab : mary-kate olsen

Provincetown International Film Festival Review: The Wackness

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Here’s all I knew about The Wackness going in: it won the audience award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it starred Ben Kingsley as a kooky psychiatrist, Mary-Kate Olsen had a cameo making out with the aforementioned knight of the British Empire, it had something to do with New York wigger culture and it sounded unbelievably annoying.

Happily, though, writer/director Jonathan Levine’s coming-of-age story turns out to be much, much better than the sum of its awful-sounding parts. Much of the credit goes to Levine’s clever script and vivid evocation of 1994 Giuliani-era NYC (including a pretty fly-for-a-white guy soundtrack featuring The Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Biz Markie, etc. and a startling, throwaway shot of the Twin Towers), but Josh Peck’s shy, winning and completely relatable performance as dejected teenage pot dealer Luke Shapiro is so good it withstands comparisons to Dustin Hoffman’s breakthrough role as another smart, alienated young man in Mike Nichols’ 1967 existential angst classic, The Graduate (and Hoffman never had to deliver a line like “I’m mad depressed, yo” and somehow make it work).

Kingsley takes the Mrs. Robinson role here, chewing a fair amount of scenery as Peck's older foil, a pothead shrink who trades dimebags for 50-minute therapy sessions, urging Shapiro to seize the day, then turning hostile when he realizes the young man would rather seize his stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby).

Thirlby (Ellen Page’s BFF in Juno) is a wised-up, sexually precocious object of desire, and her chemistry with Peck is palpable as she urges Shapiro to quit focusing on the wackness of life and embrace the dopeness. For her part, Mary-Kate Olsen’s cameo as a stoned nympho hippie is relatively unobjectionable (and pretty funny in a meta way if you consider how recently she roamed the streets of the same but very different city as one of the squeaky-clean, family-friendly stars of the big stinky tweener bomb New York Minute). Famke Janssen, Method Man and Jane Adams also turn in reliably solid (if unexceptional) performances in minor roles.

Related Stories: Sundance Roundup: Day 3, Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal, Reports Actual Facts About Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Guest

Sundance: The Final Roundup

Scott Von Doviak — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:51:00 GMT

It’s all over except for the long lines at security in the Salt Lake City airport. The awards were handed out last night by a jury featuring Quentin Tarantino and Marcia Gay Harden, and the top honors went to a couple of politically-charged pictures that flew under the radar for most of the festival. The grand jury prize for drama went to Frozen River, writer-director Courtney Hunt’s film about two women smuggling immigrants across the Canadian border. The top prize for documentaries went to Trouble the Water, about New Orleans families struggling in the aftermath of Katrina.

But that’s not all. As Kenneth Turan notes, awards were handed out like Halloween candy this year, with top audience prizes going to The Wackness and Fields of Fuel. Other notable recipients include American Teen (for dramatic directing), Man on Wire (for world documentary) and Choke (special jury prize for ensemble cast). Over at Slamdance, a documentary about a Neil Diamond cover band (Song Sung Blue) was the big winner.

In addition to its award, The Wackness picked up a distributor. Per the Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures Classics will ensure that you get the opportunity to watch Ben Kingsley and Mary-Kate Olsen swapping spit.

And on that note, that’s a wrap for this year. Let’s hit the slopes!

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 3

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

So far no good on the Dramatic Competition front — which is a bit of a bummer, since those are the movies I came here to see, for the most part. I must confess that I didn't even last halfway through buzz magnet The Wackness, which expends most of its creative energy in its title, leaving writer-director Jonathan Levine with nothing to do but find jokes predicated on our knowledge that we're no longer living in 1994. ("Does this have anything to do with Kurt Cobain?" asks Ben Kingsley's pothead shrink of a patient.) Apparently, Kingsley makes out with an Olsen twin after I hit the exit; somebody more tuned into the zeitgeist than myself will have to explain why this is a big cultural event. Other Competition titles are such well-intentioned mediocrities that badmouthing them feels like kicking an injured dog, and word on Good Dick, which I was planning to see this afternoon, is so toxic that I'll likely wind up defecting to some obscure foreign film.

On the other hand, this year's documentaries continue to impress, and I say that as someone who much prefers fiction to nonfiction when it comes to cinema. Slingshot Hip Hop, an energetic portrait of the burgeoning Palestinian rap scene, features a bevy of great music and spotlights a truly sobering irony: In a genre that thrives on collaboration — name any significant hip-hop single of the last few years that doesn't include the word "Feat." — it's hard to create and sustain a movement when you're not permitted to travel ten short miles to meet the peers who've inspired you.

Even more politically trenchant is the articulate policy debate called Secrecy, which tackles what is arguably the key question of the information age — namely, how do we reconcile freedom and security? Directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss don't attempt to hide their belief that the U.S.'s government's increasing obsession with classification does more harm than good, and is being used today primarily as a means for the executive branch to avoid accountability. To their credit, however, they also give ample screen time to former CIA and NSA employees, who make a strong case for the opposing viewpoint — so strong, in fact, that I left the movie feeling as if the problem might be inherently insoluble. Like many expository docs, Secrecy sometimes feels more like an animated book than a movie, despite attempts to jazz things up via animated interludes and a propulsive score; you can't help but feel as if the surface of this enormous subject has barely been scratched. But much more than last year's bizarrely overpraised, in-case-you-missed-several-years-worth-of-the-news compendium, No End in Sight, this evenhanded act of advocacy is required viewing for the hundreds of millions of us who have consented to be governed.

Sundance Roundup: Day 3

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Today’s Sundance buzz is all about Sir Ben Kingsley making out with one of the Olsen twins in a phone booth. No, it’s not the aftermath of a particularly out-of-control Park City bash – just a scene from The Wackness, in which Kingsley plays a psychiatrist who trades his services for weed and hooks up with another of his dealer’s clients, played by Mary-Kate Olsen. Per the Associated Press, Olsen “said she'd been worried about pulling off Kingsley's hairpiece during filming but pronounced the make-out session ‘fun.’” Good to know.

Unknown director Amy Redford was on hand for the premiere of her film The Guitar yesterday. Her father, a fellow named Robert, said all the right things to the Salt Lake Tribune. “She will probably have a rougher time than anybody…She did it on her own.”

We told you yesterday’s hot ticket would be Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and sure enough, the Weinstein Company has swooped in and purchased the international rights to the documentary. Domestic rights remain available if you’re interested.

Or maybe you just want to look at the pretty people. Entertainment Weekly’s photo gallery includes Mary-Kate snuggling with Colin Farrell. Sorry, Sir Ben.