WhutsHappening

Is THE WACKNESS the dopeness?

1994 is a year I can just barely remember. I mostly have images in my head now, random memories of smells or sights or pleasures long gone. I was 13. It was a simpler time for me, long before bills or jobs or cell phones or e-mails. Mix tapes. Grassy afternoons. The good life. It is this nostalgia that drips from THE WACKNESS, greasing up the eyes of any and all who watch it and remember life 14 years ago, especially if they happen to have been a cogent kid at that time, in that special place on the brink of the technology super-era. My family got its first PC in ’95. Amazing.

I have to emphasize the nostalgia factor because without it, sadly, THE WACKNESS is little more than an enjoyable, if not slightly convoluted, coming of age story about men and the women who love and leave them.

Luke Schapiro, played by former Nickelodeon star Josh Peck, is an angst-ridden teen struggling through Manhattan at the brink of Giuliani’s gentrification, the sweeping changes that made New York into Disneyland (for better or worse). He slings herbs out of a converted ice cream cart to try and help his incompetent father and nervous mother pay the bills, a weed dealer out of necessity, not some trustafarian trying to play cool guy.

He’s just graduated from high school and he’s never been laid. Doesn’t get invited to parties, doesn’t get to have much fun. His only “friends” are his random customers, from a magical hippie Mary Kate Olsen to Stephanie (played by Olivia Thirlby, the girl who plays JUNO’s best friend in last year’s hit comedy about teen pregnancy, although in this movie her hair has been died black and frilled so she looks her Jappy NYC best) to Dr. Squires played by Ben Kingsley, her step-father as well as a psychiatrist who charges Luke an 8th of herbalz each therapy session. And most of those relationships are just the superficial dealer/consumer relationships which, while lucrative, don’t necessarily get you invited into the scene.

The background is the most beautiful part of this film. Ghetto blasters, mixed tapes, graffiti pens leaving little tags on phone booths and windows all across NYC. Luke’s favorite groups are De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest, and the soundtrack is equally iconic with Wu Tang and Raekwon thrown in for good measure among other classics. Method Man plays Percy, Luke’s Jamaican dealer who introduces him to a dope new rapper whose album Ready to Die has just come out – none other than Notorious B.I.G.’s ready to die. Beautiful.

As for the characters themselves and the plot that ties them all together it’s almost predictable. Boy becomes friend with old derelict therapist and talks to him about inadequacies with girls. Boy is allured by the hottest girl in school, the coke-sniffing teen he stares at while sitting on a rooftop watching all the other kids in his class celebrate graduation. Old man encourages him to meet women and get out in the world. Boy falls for man’s (step) daughter, said cool girl. Man tells him the girl is trouble.

When all the cool kids leave town, Stephanie runs into Luke slinging hash on the streets and decides to play around a little. While Luke thinks he’s the coolest lame kid, she posits that he’s maybe the lamest cool kid and next thing you know they’re fast friends.

They’re different people, though. He’s brooding, struggling, and living in the streets as a drug dealer, plain and simple. She has the dream life of being the most popular girl in school which leads to the biggest difference between them – she sees the “dopeness” in everything while he only sees the “wackness”. And what she sees as just a good time until the social elite return, he sees as “love”

From this point on their relationship is predictable, though it does recount another nostalgic moment for your faithful narrator: First heartbreak at the hands of a hot slut, happening around the same time in my life as it does for Luke, summer between high school and college.

But wait, it’s not all about Luke coming of age in the goldfish bowl that is adolescence. Dr. Squires, like all old men who smoke weed and are friends with young’uns, is unraveling and falling apart, as is his relationship with Stephanie’s mom, his ability to listen to everyman’s problems, his will to live, etc . . .

In the end it comes across as a muddled story of reaching maturity in young life and mid life. While these are noble goals and sometimes can come together well (think WONDERBOYS or RUSHMORE), the combination of these two is a little beyond the reach of THE WACKNESS. For Jonathan’s Writer/Directorial cinematic debut he should have streamlined it and just stuck to one lesson or the other. Combining them leaves the feeling that this movie tried to cram too much into too little.

Still it gives you something more substantial to watch than just another mainstream dick flick and I’d certainly take it over another saccharine Rom-Com, the genre that hasn’t said anything new in almost 20 years but for some reason still persists.

I leave you with this – as a dramatic film trying to illuminate the struggles with adulthood and love that punish men who are too smart and too cynical for their own good, it slips a bit. As a drawing of the age-old lesson that no man will ever completely understand the mind or the wiles of the female creature, it holds some real emotional highs and lows of first love, anguish, and awkwardness with great little moments of comedy thrown in. But as a wonderfully-rendered time capsule of a simpler life (how could we ever forget the beautiful rolling 90’s?) and a trip down memory lane for those of us who remember first hearing “Glaciers of Ice” as an impressionable little suburban teen, it’s fucking brilliant.

Pineapple Express - Nonsexual Manlove Fueled by some old-fashioned THC

So this blogazine is about experiences. Subversive experiences, of course, but experiences nonetheless. We talk about our travels and our bars and restaurants and all but maybe there's something else to life - our favorites arts, our politics, our favorite sports, all the other shit that rounds out our lifestyles. So we're expanding. You've already read Pile of Kyle's little diatribe about a few highlights in the world of athletics. So now old Unkal Ryno's gonna open up a new category about the newest films we at WH are checking out - and what a healthy derelict such as you, oh dear reader, should know going into the flick. Without further ado, here's our first rundown about the newest stoner flick Pineapple Express.

A little over a month ago I was talking to a colleague about True Romance and decided that the most interesting character, if not just the character with the most interesting point of view, was Brad Pitt’s couch-surfing stoner. Here he is, some crazy little derelict stoned to the bejesus in the middle of an all-out coke war with poor bastards getting killed left and right around him and strange characters in black suits asking him things. How would a stoner deal with such a mess if he actually got caught up in it?

I hurried home from work, threw down my suit and tie like an old used condom and talked to Katrina, the piece I picked up on Haight street a few years ago, as a preparation for the movie. I’d heard from a production agent at my work and a fellow assistant that it was good for the first 45 minutes and then it got weird. I’d heard about the mixed reviews, all the legitimate theater critics panning the flick as senseless stupidity. But I’d also heard it was the next great stoner comedy and certainly I couldn’t miss such a display.

Bec and I found ourselves back at our trusty Vista theater 10 minutes after the start time, saved by long previews and arriving just in time to see some strange flashback about a military experiment with marijuana and its non-conformist effects. And because of the state I was in it was the funniest little intro I’d ever seen if only because I was feeling everything that Evan Goldberg’s soldier character, all baked off his ass, was feeling. But if you think this movie is only about weed, you are mistaken my friend. Weed is a character in the film like Los Angeles is a character in China Town or beer is a character in Beer Fest but just like in those films, it’s actually about something else. It’s about the newest theme to dominate the American comedy screen, from Blades of Glory to Superbad, the buzzword that’s so popular Brody Jenner is about to launch a reality TV show named after it. Pineapple Expense is about “Bromance”

Seth Rogen’s Dale Denton starts the plot off with a tirade call in to a talk radio show about how you’re never really friends with your drug dealer. The awkwardness that accompanies his arrival at Saul Silver’s (James Franco) drug dispensary, a sloppy apartment where 227 is always on is a flashback to every time you’ve gone to somebody’s house to score some illicit substances and find yourself stuck trying to leave after the transaction without seeming rude. You never want your dealer to think you’re not his friend but you certainly don’t want to hang out in his flop house for longer than you have to.

The joke is that Dale’s no better than his stoner dealer, though he may think so. A chubby process server in his mid-20’s in an ugly brown suit who’s dating a high school girl, Dale makes the mistake of getting baked when he should be working, as is his modus operandi, and in the process sees the town’s top weed dealer, Ted Jones (played by a perfect Gary Cole – seriously, what’s more classic than Bill Lumbergh smoking roaches and launching a drug war?) kill an Asian competitor with the help of a corrupt cop played by none other than Rosie Perez.

Not knowing what else to do, he flies to Saul’s house and soon the two of them are on the run from angry stoner hitmen, confused cops, and Dale’s girlfriend who wants him to meet her parents.

The stoner talk is right on, from the dealer who’s smoked so much weed the simplest of thoughts seem difficult to his middleman supplier who feigns friendship and then turns his friends in because his only real concern is self-preservation. Stories are difficult, decisions are difficult, and the slight moments of clarity are usually bordered by the loss of details that seems to afflict potheads. But somewhere along the way Saul and Dale discover they have more in common than just the fact that they’re trying not to get killed. They’re addicts and derelicts, sure enough, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be friends and even more it doesn’t mean they won’t help each other out. The bromance is kindled as two people who don’t think they can be more than business associates – the dealer and his customer – can actually discover friendship. It asks what is friendship – and do you have to have your shit together to be somebody’s best friend?

It gets absurd by the end but when you’re baked what’s more entertaining than some random ninjas, loud explosions, cartoonish death and violence, and of course a bunch of cannabis-filled dialogue that reminds you how dumb we truly are when slowing down our brains to escape the pressures and boredom of life in this strange, non-sensical “society” we’ve created?

It’s not the next Rainman; It’s not even the next Superbad but seeing as it’s summertime and not every movie can be Oscar-worthy fodder for the brain, what’s wrong with a little slapstick? Sure there were a few too many nut shots and the plot isn’t necessarily a well-structured quest to enlightenment but does every movie have to be about dystopian futures for them to be considered good? I for one think no.

There’s a place for Pineapple Express and let’s just throw it in as the buddy story about what happens when a couple dysfunctionals are forced to figure out who they can trust, who they can’t, and if you fuck over your bro, do you have the gumption to redeem yourself and be there for him when he really needs you? That’s bromance, my friends. That’s Pineapple Express.