(Note: We're re-posting the following review of The Wackness from The Tribeca Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release this weekend.)

Finally, a film for kids of the 90's!

This is a hard review to write because it feels as if The Wackness was tailor-made for people like me: a male who grew up in New York City and graduated high school in 1994; the year this film was set. (Actually, I graduated in 1995, but it doesn't matter much: same kids, same lingo, same music, same surroundings). How do you review your childhood? These were all kids I hung out with, this was the music we listened to, these were the mix tapes we made and these were the girls we tried to hook up with ... but didn't. And, to some extent, it actually surprises me that so many people have loved The Wackness -- not because it's a terrible movie, mind you, but because kids who grew up in New York City during the '90s were annoying as all hell, with their "Yo, that was mad good" and their "He's got da skillz, kid!" Trust me, I know -- I was one of them.

You say you've got an indie jones? A desire to see something that's not playing on every single screen in America? Then you've come to the right place. "Indie Spotlight" is a new column that will appear each Friday at Cinematical, listing the films that are opening in limited release that weekend. We'll tell you what they are, where they're playing, and what the critics are saying about them, to give you something to see beyond the multiplexes.

This Fourth of July is a fine time to declare your love of independents, as these films are opening in art houses across the land: Diminished Capacity, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Holding Trevor, Kabluey, Tell No One, The Wackness, and We Are Together.

Diminished Capacity
What it is: Matthew Broderick plays a man suffering from memory problems who returns to his hometown to hang out with his uncle (Alan Alda), who has Alzheimer's. He connects with an old girlfriend (Virginia Madsen), too; not sure on whether she can remember things or not. Oh, and it's a comedy.
What they're saying: Cinematical's Christopher Campbell gave it a so-so review; boss man Erik Davis liked it better, but he's in the minority.
Where it's playing: New York City (Landmark Sunshine Cinema; Clearview's 62nd & Broadway), Chicago (Landmark Century Centre Cinema), and Los Angeles (Laemmle's Music Hall 3, Beverly Hills).
Official site: IFC Films.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
What it is: Sadly, Gonzo is not the long-awaited biopic of the misunderstood Muppet. It is instead a documentary about the legendary writer/journalist/hallucinogen-enthusiast whose work you might know from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The doc, by Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), premiered at Sundance.
What they're saying: Cinematical's James Rocchi reviewed it favorably and interviewed Gibney. Our Nick Schager liked it, too.

Some of cinema's most iconic shots of Chicago appear in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the film is certainly Matthew Broderick's most iconic role. So, it's hard to watch the actor in the Chicago-set Diminished Capacity and not ask yourself, "is this what's happened to Ferris?" He is now relatively passive, paunchy and pitiful in the role of Cooper, a newspaper editor who has recently suffered a mildly debilitating concussion. And the character could be classified as yet another sad sack, one of three such parts he can be seen playing at present (Then She Found Me opened in April and is still in theaters; Finding Amanda debuted last week).

But is it fair that we most associate Broderick with Ferris, thereby continuing our disappointment in seeing him play one nebbish nobody after another? Couldn't we redirect our memories and accept that Broderick's modern roles are more like grown-up versions of Eugene Jerome, of Neil Simon's plays Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, who he portrayed on Broadway as well as in the film adaptation of Biloxi? Were Eugene not the fictional incarnation of Simon and had he not therefore become a famous writer (and were he not from an earlier time period), the character surely could have gone on to be the pathetic teacher of Election or Then She Found Me or the absentminded editor of Diminished Capacity.

"If a film fell in the multiplex, and no one was there to see it..."

Limited release: such a simple phrase, and yet two words that all but indicate to a majority of moviegoers that whatever it is they want to see may or may not escape the confines of a NY/LA run before the film in question comes to them by way of Netflix mere months later.

Meanwhile, screens upon screens across the nation are filled by the likes of the same stars and the same stories, with the same special effects and the same happy endings, leaving the smaller films, the different films, the better films to slip through the distribution cracks, as it were.

Among their number falls The Promotion, a film which we've admittedly supported ad nauseum to the oh-so-ironic tune of $365,928 on a grand total of 81 screens. It opened just this past weekend in my market, Orlando, Fla., on a single screen, for a whopping four days, with a grand total of eight showings, before being shuffled off to make room for that other Jason Bateman co-starring comedy-drama hybrid.

It was the first day of July, and the last night for the film. Having enjoyed it twice before and driven by - I don't know - a sense of romantic futility, I turned out for that final showing. Lo and behold, I wasn't alone...

Even the weirder artists of the twentieth century have been attracted to the allure of Hollywood filmmaking, and Salvador Dali was no exception. In the fall of 1941, the surrealist painter hosted a masquerade party at Pebble Beach during one of his regular visits to the town. Called "Surrealism Night in An Enchanted Forest," the fundraising event, intended to assist European refugee artists, brought out a number of stars, including Bob Hope and Ginger Rogers. It was here, the story goes, that Dali became attached to a major studio production called Moontide. The great German emigre Fritz Lang was hired to direct the movie, and asked Dali to create a three-minute nightmare sequence for the film. Unfortunately, after the incident at Pearl Harbor later that year, Twentieth Century Fox deemed the project too bleak. Lang was replaced, and Dali's nightmare sequence went with him.

Although inspired by the movies, Dali didn't always have the easiest time making them. He would get another chance to inject his hallucinatory vision into American cinema with the hypnosis scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, but it's his unrealized projects that truly indicate the scope of the painter's ambition. So many ideas, such little time. Dali: Painting and Film, a breathtakingly unique exhibit currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, surveys Dali's completed cinematic works in addition to tidbits from the ones that never came to fruition. Marvelously structured to show how his paintings were intentionally cinematic, the exhibit contains all the obvious highlights from Dali's movie career alongside lesser-known productions. The importance in film history of his collaborations with Luis Bunuel remain uncontested; two large screens in separate rooms showing Un Chien Andalou (where the opening eye splicing retains its original gross-out impact) and L'Age D'Or attest to that. Fewer visitors, however, might know about Dali's collaboration with the Marx Brothers on a deliriously strange movie that sounded too good to be true.

When is the news of an actor you really like joining the cast of a high-profile new movie bad news? When you wish that actor were doing other things with his time, that's when. In the case of Thomas McCarthy -- whom you may remember from his masterfully detestable performance as weaselly reporter Scott Templeton in the final season of The Wire -- I wish he were writing and directing another film as brilliant and deeply moving as The Visitor, which at this halfway point is my favorite movie of 2008. I'd even settle for something with the wry, quiet charm of his lovely 2003 debut The Station Agent.

Instead -- ::sigh:: -- he's gone and taken a supporting role in Roland Emmerich's disaster flick 2012, playing Amanda Peet's boyfriend. C'mon, Tom: anyone can do that. Only a handful of people have your behind-the-camera chops. Quit messing around.

I'm being mean, and in this Hollywood Reporter piece McCarthy makes a valiant effort at defending the choice in terms of how working with directors who make different kinds of films helps him with his own work. (The article also mentions that McCarthy moonlights as an uncredited studio script doctor, which I didn't know, and which makes perfect sense given the natural, effortless flow of the films he's written.) Okay fine. But direct something else please.

Have a happy Canada Day with these casting bites!

When I heard that Gore Vidal was going to pop up in Shrink, I went into literary fangirl heaven, which quickly became a fan rant. The movie stars Kevin Spacey as a shrink who isn't able to deal with a personal tragedy and becomes a burn-out pothead. And now The Hollywood Reporter posts that some young blood is being injected into the indie. Jesse Plemons (Friday Night Lights) gets to co-star as a pot dealer named Jesus. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's the shrink's drug connection.

Meanwhile, Doris Roberts, who became a household fixture as the overbearing mom and grandma on Everybody Loves Raymond, has picked up a new film gig. Variety reports that she's starring with Ernest Borgnine in a new film called Another Harvest Moon. She'll play "a relentlessly peppy septuagenarian in a nursing home." The film has got a pretty sweet cast that boasts the likes of Piper Laurie, Anne Meara, Cybill Shepherd, and Amber Benson.

Finally, there is Brian Baumgartner. Variety has posted that The Office star has picked up a gig in Into Temptation. This is the flick about the prostitute who plans to kill herself on her birthday, and the priest who tries to talk her out of it. Baumgartner will play a fellow priest named Fr. Ralph O'Brien.

Cinematical is stoked to bring you this exclusive new poster for In Search of a Midnight Kiss (click image to enlarge), which I've heard is just absolutely awesome. Seriously, my best friend caught this flick back when it first premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007 and he hasn't stopped talking about it since. I swear, he's a nut -- completely and utterly in love with this film. And I think it's totally rad. Written and directed by the very cool and extremely talented Alex Holdridge, Midnight Kiss tells of Wilson, who, considering he'll be broke and alone on New Year's Eve, is convinced by his best friend to post a personal ad. Through that he meets Sara, who's hell bent on finding the right guy to be with at midnight.

We talk up a lot here on Cinematical, but I have such good vibes about this one. Watch it. Support it. Then watch it again. Oh, and here's the trailer. In Search of a Midnight Kiss hits theaters in limited release on August 1.

If you read any part of that draft of W., Oliver Stone's Bush biopic, which hit the net a few months back, you might think it ludicrous for the film to be likened to Shakespeare. But Stone himself has done so, as part of an L.A. Times set visit interview. Lumped in with a quote in which Stone also contrasts the project to the work of Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning director's statement is in response to the film's level of seriousness: "W. isn't an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it."

The Times piece, which reports from Shreveport, Louisiana, where Independence Bowl stadium fills in for the Texas Rangers' Arlington Stadium, is very filling for anyone with an appetite for more W. updates. Included are a description of and dialogue from a scene between George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) and George H.W. Bush (James Cromwell), details on a "baseball-oriented fantasy" sequence, Brolin stating that he's not out to do a SNL-style caricature and admitting his initial hesitance to take on the role, a general overview of the project's coming together, and, best of all, a picture (seen, cropped, above) of Brolin as the future Commander in Chief looking like he's just had the crap beaten out of him. Also a fact I'd somehow never known prior to reading the article: Stone was "briefly a Yale classmate of Bush."

There seems to be no end to THINKFilm's monetary problems, which have plagued not only the company, but also the productions that have been picked up by the ailing business. But at least one of them has found a way out.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Momma's Man has received a handy life preserver from the likes of Kino International, an independent film distributor. The film, which was acquired by THINKFilm back in March (an acquisition announcement was made, but producers say that negotiations were ongoing), had premiered at Sundance this year.

Momma's Man, which sounds reminiscent of Full Grown Men, focuses on a man (Matt Boren) who decides to escape from his life. During a business trip to New York, the guy visits his parents, "and decides to stay, leaving his wife and child behind." Filmmaker Azazel Jacobs even cast his own parents in the film -- underground filmmaker Ken Jacobs and Flo Jacobs.

The film will get a limited release in New York on August 22, and LA on September 5, before a DVD release in early 2009.* Now I can only hope the rest of the pictures find similar luck. The company might be in trouble monetarily, but they know how to pick interesting features.

*Assumed 2009, as THR says "early 2008 DVD release."