BRIGSBY BEAR

BRIGSBY BEAR is a heartwarming dark comedy that melds NAPOLEON DYNAMITE with ROOM and BE KIND REWIND!  It's  about a young man called James (Saturday Night Live's Kyle Mooney) who is returned to his family after being abducted as a child and raised by a couple of kranks. He struggles to adjust to reality and misses the cocooned world he lived in, most specifically the fake TV show his fake dad (brilliantly/manically played by Mark Hamill) created called Brigbsy Bear.  James is shocked that no-one else is ingrained in the TV shows mythos but with the help of a friendly cop (Greg Kinnear) and his newfound high school friends, he manages both to recreate the show and come to a kind of emotional acceptance of his past. 

The film is laugh out loud funny and goofy and features a truly brilliant cameo from Hamill. But beyond that I found it to be a particularly insightful and wry take on modern internet fuelled fandom, and the kind of "fake nostalgia for an unremembered 80s" that South Park so brilliant satirised with its "memaberries" plot line. James watches old shows on meticulously labelled VHS tapes and discusses them in online forums with fake friends his fake parents made up. He even has fake faded fan T-shirts. The way in which the school kids who didn't grow up with Brigbsy take to him also speaks to the current way in which new generations get immersed in a self-consciously old-school lo-fi pop cultural past. 

BRIGSBY BEAR has a running time of 97 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film played Sundance, Cannes and London 2017. It opened earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, and earlier this month in the UK and Ireland.

THE WACKNESS - a goofy story about stoned losers

THE WACKNESS moves at the lackadaisical langurous pace of the stoners it portrays. Essentially, it's a coming-of-age movie, dressed up as original thanks to its early 1990s setting and its cast of narco losers. For all that, it's still as charmingly goofy as its hero, and despite the occasional ennuis, who doesn't love a story about a broken heart. Josh Peck plays Luke Shapiro, a resourceful kid who sells weed to the popular kids and frets about his parent's financial difficulties. When all the cool kids leave town for the summer he gets his chance with a bored popular girl called Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). She is genuinely charmed by the guy - as is the audience - and they hang out - but everyone knows it won't last. Shapiro is shepherded through this pivotal experience by his similarly messed-up shrink come client, Dr Squires, who happens to be Stephanie's dad. Squires is basically an infantile pot-head with a failed marriage to a similarly messed up wife (Famke Janssen). The overall message seems to be that life is harsh and messy and that you have to find love and friendship while you can and when you can. It's testament to the Jonathan Levine's script and Ben Kingsley's acting that these goof-ball characters ring true and that we care about them. And after all, they're far nicer, and their own way, far more in touch with reality than the popular kids or the "normal" parents..... 

THE WACKNESS played Sundance where it won the audience award. It was released in the US earlier this uear and is currently playing in the UK. It opens in France on September 24th.