A Couple of Thoughts on The Wackness

After its win of the Audience Award at Sundance, The Wackness has come through onto the general market with a reasonable amount of steam and its business has thus far been pretty good. Having watched the movie last night, and generally having a pretty good time with it, I wanted to point out a little point about its marketing or at least, the journalistic marketing it is gathering during its release.

As I say, I enjoyed the film quite a bit, the only really jarring moments for me came with the constant shouting of it being 1994 in Guiliani’s New York. You get heavy-handed references to Kurt Cobain, Notorious BIG and literally an unstoppable steam of mentions of Guiliani and his cleaning up of the city. After a while, it gets really annoying. There are other flaws with the film but they aren’t the purpose.

Consider this. The marketing of the film is lazily tagging it as ‘This Year’s Juno‘. Now this is lazy on a whole boatload of levels as the phrase latches on to this simply being another story about teens with its own dialogue and a film coming off the back of a decent Sundance reception. This is all just lazy and poor marketing for the film. But think about it. This film is male-dominated and features its key character falling in and out of love, having sex and generally finding things out about himself to be set up for life to come. Juno, a female-centred film, has its main character become pregnant. What does that tagging of the film say about what is considered a rite of passage for a young woman these days? Teen boys get sex and drugs, teen girls get pregnant because they try out sex.