Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Olivia Thirlby Mary Kate Olsen, Method Man
Screenplay By: Jonathan Levine
Directed By: Jonathan Levine
Produced By: Joe Neurauter, Keith Calder, Felipe Marino
Audience Award--Sundance Film Festival
Set in New York in the sweltering summer of 1994, THE WACKNESS tells the story of a troubled teenage drug dealer, who trades pot for therapy sessions with a drug-addled psychiatrist.. Things get more complicated when the kid falls for one of his classmates, who just happens to be the doctor's daughter.
Set against the backdrop of the greatest year in hip hop history, THE WACKNESS is a coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, music and what it takes to be a man.
1h 50mins
Phoenix Cinema 9pm €10
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SILENT BUT VOILENT
Synopsis:
Suffering from an unbearable attack of trapped wind, Sarah, seeks to alleviate herself in the quiet environs of the office bathroom.
Director / Writer : Fionn Groeger
Producer: Jason Ferguson
HUNT FOR MOBY DICK
Phoenix Cinema 12noon €5
In this feature-length adventure documentary, filmed in England, America, and the Azores, and incorporating John Huston’s cinematic masterpiece, writer Philip Hoare confronts man’s complex relationship with the eternal mysteries of the whale and brings it into startling new focus.
We owe our image of the whale to one man and one book: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It is a 19th century novel that resounds with 21st century relevance. Its story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the great White Whale on the high seas has been evoked in the current ‘war on terror’, from 9/11 to Iraq. In just one hundred years man has moved from the dramatic battles of the 19th century when whalers pitted themselves against the greatest predator on earth, to the sense of awe we now feel as we witness the gentle giants which still populate the open ocean. Embarking on his own odyssey, like Melville’s troubled hero, Ishmael, Hoare is both narrator and participant, as he asks: What lies behind our perennial obsession with the whale?
In an epic journey which takes him from the bleak northern coast of England via the historic American whaling ports of New Bedford and Nantucket to the remote Portuguese islands of the Azores – where whales were still hunted up to the 1980s - Hoare circles ever closer to the whale of his and our own imaginings. He goes to sea with ‘Stormy’ Mayo, battling to save the last right whales of Cape Cod Bay, discovers the original skeleton of a Victorian whale which inspired Moby-Dick in the outhouse of a 16th century manor in Yorkshire, and stands at the desk in Melville’s New England study where he wrote his masterpiece. He also has his own remarkable encounter with the legendary sperm whale itself.
Melville instructed his readers that ‘the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a-whaling yourself; but by doing so, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.’ But in his own obsessive hunt, Hoare comprehensively ignores the author’s advice, and in doing so, he takes us closer to the truth behind Moby-Dick and our fearful, timeless fascination with the whale.
THE ART OF THE MOVING CAMERA
Garrett Brown
2pm €12
A Conversation with Gregory Peck followed by Gregory Peck Award Cermony presented to Gabriel Byrne
97mins Phoenix Cinema 6pm €20Iconic actor Gregory Peck is the focus of this intimate portrait by Oscar-winning director Barbara Kopple. The film follows Peck as he takes his one-man stage show across the United States, putting on display his keen storytelling abilities and inimitable charm while looking back at his career as an actor and a family man. Kopple's camera follows Peck off the stage as well, as he and his family travel the world receiving presidential honors, dining with old friends, and welcoming the birth of a new member to the Peck family. Featuring appearances by Bill Clinton, Martin Scorsese, and former French president Jacques Chirac, the star-studded film resonates with the warmth and sincerity that Peck extends to everyone he encounters. Co-produced by Cecilia Peck, Gregory's daughter, A Conversation With Gregory Peck weaves together Gregory's own storytelling with films clips, home movies, and photographs to create a moving and inspiring profile of an American legend. A Conversation With Gregory Peck was an Official Selection at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
