This Is Your Brain On Drugs

I graduated from high school in 1994, just like Luke and Stephanie in The Wackness. I may have grown up in Boston instead of New York, and I may have been only middle-class, but our lives shouldn't be that dissimilar.

I could not relate to these characters at all.

2) The Wackness (July 25; it's the third movie of the month, though)

A candidate for the worst movie of 2008, The Wackness is so bad that I refused to listen to mid-1990s hip-hop for a week after watching this hell. Writer/director Jonathan Levine uses full-length songs and cultural slang (Giuliani references, Forrest Gump ads, pagers) to advance the film in lieu of plot, dialogue and acting. Then again, the performances are so monotone (perpetually slack-jawed Josh Peck as dope-pushing high-school grad Luke) or absurd (Ben Kingsley, apparently Harvey Keitel's long-lost brother, as Luke's stoned shrink), and the storyline eventually so cliché (rich New Yorkers are messed up and bored!), that perhaps it's best to make Tribe Called Quest do the work. Only Olivia Thirlby, the best friend in Juno, manages to charm as the shrink's stepdaughter and Luke's forbidden-fruit love interest. She’s not reason enough for me to give up my Nas and Wu-Tang Clan boycotts, though - nor can she erase the image of Kingsley kissing flower-child Mary-Kate Olsen …