Films: A Song of Good, The Wackness (Mystery Film!)

Future Screenings: A Song of Good - Mon 4/14/08, 9:30PM at the Ritz East
The Wackness - none

Quite often during the Festival, I'll choose to go see a movie based solely on when and where it's being screened. This has worked well for me in the past: the positively chilling Next Door, for instance, still haunts me two years later, and I had no intention of seeing it at all. Even the very strong Dangerous Parking from this year's festival was selected as much for convenience as it was for content. But the method doesn't always work: in fact, yesterday, it led to my first "Poor" of the festival.

A Song of Good
This New Zealand movie almost got the same table-formatted review I used for last year's Consequences. But because that movie was, without a doubt, the worst movie I have ever seen, ever, and A Song of Good was just lousy, I decided that the film wasn't worthy of a complete skewering. What I will do, however, is tell you to beware the words "black humor" or "dark humor" in the Film Festival Guide, because while sometimes (Dangerous Parking; last year's Suffering Man's Charity) you get exactly that, other times, you find yourself laughing exactly once, and it's only because an enormous dog shat on the floor. People started leaving a mere ten minutes into the movie, but I stuck around, waiting for the humor to pick up. My mistake. The utter absence of humor in A Song of Good would be forgivable if the film had anything else—other than a leading man who resembled Heath Ledger—going for it. But it doesn't. Presumably intended to be an exploration of guilt, nothing really happens after the first five minutes of the film, the whole of which can pretty much be summed up thusly: "A Kiwi cokehead, unable to afford his next fix, dons a ridiculous pink ski mask and sets off to rob his next-door neighbor. She shows up, her dress falls off, they both fall down, and he rapes her for no reason at all, other than the fact that they'd already assumed the position. He feels guilty, tries to sober up and get his life back on track, fails, and then goes over to that same neighbor's house, not to steal or to rape, but to tell her he's the one who had done so. Then he has a meltdown. Blackout. Roll credits." If that doesn't sound humorous to you, either, you'll probably understand why I tore my ballot at "1."
Festival rating: Poor

The Wackness
To the surprise of exactly nobody who (a) read Jim's "Evening with the Curators" post and (b) has access to IMDB, the festival's "Mystery Film!" turned out to be The Wackness, the Ben Kingsley comedy that made the rumor mills start to churn about a year ago when some photos of him in a phone booth, making out with Michelle Tanner Mary-Kate Olsen leaked onto the interweb. (Umm, guys? We know that's gross and all, but movies are not real life.) Anyway, The Wackness is about a pot-loving psychiatrist and his teenage dealer/patient who is in love with the former's stepdaughter. They form a close bond, go on all sorts of wacky adventures together, and even get arrested when they get caught getting high on the street. As I type this, I'm well aware of how cheesy it sounds. But rather than diving headlong into the sentimental, which would be so easy to do with these themes, we are instead treated to a very funny, very human, very, very well crafted movie with excellent performances not just by Kingsley, but by Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, and Method Man (no, really). Even Olsen, who had maybe five minutes of screen time, did a great job, thanks in great part to writer/director Jonathan Levine. The movie is smart, sharp, sometimes positively hysterical (who'd've thunk Ben Kingsley even had it in him to use the term "Pussy Chase"?), and just a little nostalgic—in a good way. Set in 1994, the not-so-distant past, The Wackness has a great soundtrack and is peppered with cultural references ("[Are you depressed] because of that Cobain guy?") that resonated well with the audience at the Prince and will likely help this movie to become an indie darling after its most assured distribution. Watch for this one, folks. It's definitely worth a viewing.
Festival rating: Excellent

Image Credit: Flickr user pedrosimoes7