The Wackness

After work today I went up to the Cineworld cinema to meet my Mum. The film we saw was The Wackness, directed by Jonathan Levine. The film is set in New York City over the summer of 1994 and tells the story of High School graduate Luke Shapiro (played by Josh Peck) who is enjoying, more or less (mostly less), his last summer before heading off for college. He spends most of his time wandering around the city selling marijuana from a battered old ice-cream cart, which not only allows him to make money, but also to get away from his constantly bickering arents and their increasingly perilous financial situation. His only friend is his psychiatrist Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), an ageing ex-hippy, who allows Luke to pay for his sessions with bags of weed. However, even this precarious friendship is threatened by Luke's infatuation with Squires' step-daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). It was a fun movie. It was one of those kind of typically quirky indie rites of passage films about people trying to find connection with people and find some kind of place in the world. Of course, for some people that takes a lot longer than others. I was fifteen in 1994, it still doesn't feel like that long ago. You always hear about the things that people have done by the time they reach such-and-such an age, half of which I've never done and I'm almost thirty already, which is a fact that has been bothering me throughout the past year, which I know probably sounds odd, but I really do feel like life is slipping away, which I know is a topic that I keep coming back to again and again so it probably gets pretty dull, but whatever. I think part of the reason why I like those kinds of movies about people trying to find connection and find some kind of place in the world is because I can really relate to it, like I said earlier, it takes some people a very long time to find themselves, as it were, if they ever do. Also I was a real late starter anyway, which I suppose is what comes of spending most of your teenage years and early twenties watching videos, which I have pretty much gone back to doing now.

I was watching a TV show called Room 101, a comedy chat show in which various celebrities talk about stuff that they hate in the hope of persuading the host to "banish" the items into Room 101 (named after the room which contains the "worst thing in the world" in George Orwell's novel 1984) and the guy was trying to get rid of silent comedy films, which was illustarted with a clip of Charlie Chaplin. I do find silent comedy films funny quite often, but they do seem to be easier to admire rather than really like these days. Of course tastes change really quickly, especially in comedy.