Lou Reed watches over his Berlin gig.

Teen’s Tusing

horribly, paranoid. The plot twist that finds the paparazzi chasing Jack like torch-wielding villagers tailing a werewolf might be wholly predictable, but that lapse doesn’t make Jack’s descent into the part of a monster any less affecting.

Germany Triumphs

The Wackness ½ JOSH PECK, BEN KINGSLEY

SON Y PIC TURES CLASSICS, R Clichés abound as ’90s New York City goes to pot

In the Manhattan of 1994, with
Giuliani hosing down the streets
and the Notorious B.I.G. dirty-
ing up eardrums, mumbling
hip-hop kid Luke Shapiro (Peck)
sweats out the summer, selling
weed to earn both money for
college and, being the awkward
type, his sole claim to social
status. “I’m mad depressed,
yo,” Luke mumbles to his shrink
(Kingsley), who’s also a client,
eager to dull the pain of a lousy
marriage. With its predictable
jokes about beepers, 90210, and
fad beverages—“I gotta bounce,”
one of Luke’s schoolmates says
at a party; “they’re almost out
of Zima”—The Wackness plays,
lamely, like I Love the ’⁹⁰s:
The Movie, only inspiring
nostalgia for a time when its
played-out first-love tropes,
midlife-meltdown moping, and
cross-generational seize-the-day
messages were slightly familiar.

Ex-Velvet’s challenging solo album hits stage, then screen

Lou Reed’s Berlin LOU REED, EMMANUELLE SEIGNER THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY, PG- 13

Two years after Lou Reed released Berlin in 1973, Lester Bangs called it “a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor that may well be the most depressed album ever made,” which, coming from the infamously combative rock critic, might rate as a minor compliment. Reed had revisited a few bits of grimy sentimentalism he’d first worked on with the Velvet Underground (“Stephanie Says,” “Sad Song,” “Oh Gin”), composed some deliberately plodding new numbers about the boulevards on the dirty side of the German city, and emitted a concept album that vamps around like terminally decadent cabaret, a rock Threepenny Opera. And it was a commercial failure, as the opening titles of Julian Schnabel’s concert film rather proudly observe. This is high art, Schnabel says with annoying insistence. Lucky Lou—the director (Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and his sound team deliver enough beauty to justify the boast.

In 2006, Reed played Berlin with an orchestra at a five-night stand at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and Schnabel synthesized three of the performances into this enraptured document. Reed, a minimalist frontman, keeps his move-

ments few and dry. Schnabel lights the parchment of his face in triumphant gold, sinking almost everything else in greens, from emerald to sea foam to night vision. Also green—a bleary shade of junk sick—are the bits of film playing, Warhol Factory–style, as occasional back projections. Shot by Lola Schnabel (the director’s daughter) and starring Seigner (his Diving Bell lead actress,

This is high art. Director Schnabel
and his sound team deliver
enough beauty to justify the boast.

glamorously sad-eyed), the scenes sketch the rotten life of Berlin’s beautiful, promiscuous, abused, self-victimizing drug addict of a heroine. “Depressed” is right on target, but not to be confused with “depressing.” The bleakness of Lou Reed’s Berlin resolves itself in noble blasts of brass and the melodic sighs of a youth choir, and Reed plays you out the door with an encore peaking at “Sweet Jane” and her heavenly wine and roses, a smile at life in a rock’n’roll band.

Boy A ANDREW GARFIELD, PETER MULLAN

THE WEINS TEIN COMPANY,
NOT YET RATED
Killer kid tries to get a life in
compelling British drama
Once a tabloid villain for slaugh-
tering a schoolgirl at the age of
ten, now a parolee trying to live
anonymously as an undevel-
oped 24-year-old, the hero of
this sad, sturdy drama flinches
his way through Manchester,
England, part lost boy, part
hollow man. Starting over fresh
with the depressive nursery-
rhyme name of Jack Burridge,
he’s timid with the ripe blonde
flirting with him at work; a
sweetheart with the caseworker
who thinks of him as a son;
burning to confide his past to
his new friends; and rightfully,

American Teen HANNAH BAILEY, JAKE TUSING

PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, PG- 13
Superslick documentary
follows Indiana high schoolers
Kids being kids, a documentary
about high school seniors in
Warsaw, Indiana, could only
focus on their attempts to get
the hell out of there. Thus, a
square-jawed jock shoots for
a basketball scholarship, a
yellow-haired princess pines to
follow Daddy to Notre Dame,
and a sullen-eyed art chick
aches to make for California. The
director, Nanette Burstein, made
her name with The Kid Stays in
the Picture, perhaps learning too
well the lessons of Hollywood
glossiness. The movie often feels
like a corn-fed version of Laguna
Beach, overworked and overslick,
as when the viral spread of
a pee-wee sex scandal gets
rendered with phony precision.
It’s actually most emotionally
authentic when entirely fake:
Animated sequences launch the
kids into virtual realities, so that
the marching-band geek can
float back to medieval times,
donning a suit of armor and
scoring himself a damsel.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF

Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot

Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot (Oscilloscope Pictures) tracks a handful of high school basketball stars squaring off in Harlem’s Rucker Park. As assembled by Adam Yauch (of the Beastie Boys, of course, and the director of the fan-assisted concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!), its soundtrack complements the spin moves and no-look passes with giddy street beats, Jay-Z dishing playground funks, and Ludacris crunkily dunking the lyrics that give the movie its title—plus, the Beasties offer a new instrumental, “Beasley Is a Beast.”

#1’s Brandon Jennings

The Wackness’ Mary-Kate Olsen comes on to Kingsley.