{4\/5} “Sometimes it’s right to do the wrong thing, and right now is one of those times.”<\/p>\n
The Wackness<\/strong>, released in 2008<\/p>\n I never understood the desire to do drugs. I don’t want to be someone else — I want to be myself. The friends I hang out with, I like who they are — so I don’t want them to be someone else either. I don’t seek out movies where the characters are sitting around doing drugs. So I had no particular plan to watch this movie, but a friend recommended it. I enjoyed it for its engagement with philosophical ideas of what life’s about.<\/p>\n It’s 1994 in New York. Luke is graduating from high school — he’s a nice kid who happens to be a drug dealer (we don’t see how he got started). He sees a psychologist, Dr. Squires, and pays him in marijuana. There’s a girl he likes, Stephanie, who happens to be Squires’ stepdaughter. Luke’s parents yell at each other a lot. Meanwhile, Squires and his wife don’t have much in common and they basically ignore each other.<\/p>\n It’s a movie about what’s important in life — friendship, love, music. In the summer before he heads off to college Jeff learns some things — about himself, and about the people around him.<\/p>\n Ben Kingsley (Gandhi<\/strong>) plays Dr. Squires, Josh Peck (the TV show Drake and Josh<\/strong>) plays Luke, and Olivia Thirlby (Juno<\/strong>) plays Stephanie. Kingsley, of course, totally inhabits every role he plays. The relative newcomers Peck and Thirlby do a fine job. Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Jane Adams have smaller roles. The movie was directed by Jonathan Levine (50\/50<\/strong>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {4\/5} “Sometimes it’s right to do the wrong thing, and right now is one of those times.” The Wackness, released in 2008 I never understood the desire to do drugs. I don’t want to be someone else — I want to be myself. The friends I hang out with, I like who they are — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,6,5],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-drama","tag-movie","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10540,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/10540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}