If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!

Cast: Josh Peck (Luke Shapiro), Ben Kingsley (Jeffrey Squires), Olivia Thirlby (Stephanie), Famke Janssen (Kristin Squires)

Written and directed by: Jonathan Levine

Release date: July 2008

A loving, messy, wistful ode to the bitter-sweet memories of New York circa94

The wackness. Rarely have I seen a move title more apt. Set in New York, during the summer of 1994, this movie is a messy, loving ode to the memories of those times. I say memories because is not a realistic or accurate portrayal. Cribbing over the details in a work like this would be entirely missing the point. It is how the director nostalgically remembers those days, while going through his high school yearbook, poring over photographs, listening to those old mix tapes. The confusion and the sunny days, drugs and Notorious B.I.G., how the adult world where you were headed for seemed so stupid and vacuous. In spite of the over-abundance of drugs and booze and f-words, ‘sweet’ is the adjective which most suits this movie.

Luke is graduating from school. He has three months of summer ahead of him. He has a job. He deals weed. From an ice-cream cart. He is invited to the parties for the dope. But he’s never invited in. In his own words, he is the most popularly unpopular guy in school. His parents are eternally squabbling. His dad has lost all his money in a bad deal and they are going to move in with his grandparents. All this merely adds to his angst and his feeling of being a loser. He visits a psychiatrist, Doc Squires, who takes his payment in quarter bags of dope. And advises him to get laid as the solution to his problems. The good doctor has screwed up his life. And he is acutely aware of it. His marriage is in shambles. He craves to be 17 again, to hook up with hippie chicks, to listen to cool gangsta rap, to get stoned. He does the last thing anyway. Way too much of it. Ben Kingsley sinks his teeth into the colourful role and let’s go with complete abandon. He lends quirky credibility to the otherwise outlandish personality.

The doctor’s step-daughter, Stephanie, is bored. She’s decided to stay back for some unexplained reason, while her friends were going off to Europe. She starts going around with Luke as he visits his clients. She decides to introduce him to sex, which almost ends up in disaster. Luke thinks he’s falling in love with her. Though he’s warned by Squires. At some level, he probably wants to experience his first heartbreak and is aware that Stephanie treats him as a barely interesting weirdo to pass her time with.

The most fascinating relationship in the movie is the friendship between Luke and Squires. In their own way, they are both outsiders. Luke needs the wacked out advice and Squires just needs to feel the hopeful self-centred misery of youth once again. Living life as an adult means you don’t have the leisure to think about what could be or what could have been. Those are the provinces of the young and the old respectively and that’s what helps Luke and Shapiro connect.

I liked the soundtrack, enjoyed the coolness oozing from every pore of this movie. And I loved the beautifully etched little moments. The characters are flawed, at times they behave in clichés. They themselves are aware of it. That doesn’t make them any less appealing. In fact, it might all sound familiar. But then, what would we do without flakes of wistfulness to sprinkle on our bitter-sweet memories.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!