Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.
I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
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In this New York Times story (cleverly topped with a 600px wide still featuring Greta Gerwig in a bikini), Michael Cieply reports on Sony Pictures Classics’ plan to premiere the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead first in Austin, and then spread the film out to strategically-selected cities throughout the country before opening the film in New York or Los Angeles. Why do it this way? The implication is that Sony is hoping to benefit from positive word of mouth and blog coverage in college towns, hipster meccas and smaller cities where a recommendation from a friend carries more weight than a film review. But in order to convey that message, Cieply has to implicitly diss the publication in which his story is published. An excerpt:
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I saw The Wackness (which has its New York premiere tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival) at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever’s doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
…Read more
Baghead, which was acquired by Sony Classics towards the end of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, is getting a lot of praise for taking the elements of mumblecore–stripped down cinematography, unpolished performances, an extreme interest in the minutia of behavior at the expense of action–and ambitiously pairing them with the tropes of mainstream shlock horror. But Baghead is never convincing as a horror film, and I don’t think it needs to be, and I’m not sure it even wants to be. What it really is, is a comedy (of horrors?) about ego, which the Duplasses and their actors convince is scarier than any kind of contrived fright.
Four friends, all wannabe actors and all frustrated to different degrees by the film festival success of a pretentious cheeseball aquaintance, head to a house in the woods to hammer out a script for the project that will give them their big breaks. The gang includes Matt, a charismatic idea man; Chad, Matt’s schlubby”funny guy” friend; Catherine, Matt’s orange-tan cliche of a sometime girlfriend; and Michelle, the adorable younger woman who brings out the worst in the rest of the three.
The only one of the four who seems really committed to the careerist angle of the endeavor is Matt, with the other three seemingly going along solely as the means to advance their respective romantic agendas. Chad loves Michelle, who loves (or, at least, lusts for) Matt, who tells Chad everything is over between he and Catherine but is still clearly susceptible to her late-night advances. As each “friend”s real, purely selfish intentions become apparent, trust breaks down and each member of the quarter becomes (not unreasonably) paranoid that another is out to get them.
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