Now Playing at Lamar: WEIRDSVILLE

The Mondrian mosaic of miscellaneous elements from some of the best films of the past 15 years makes the beginning of WEIRDSVILLE a little strange to watch. Your thought process might go something like this: "Hey! It's the gnome from AMELIE! These druggies probably hang out with the guys from TRAINSPOTTING! I wonder if HAROLD & KUMAR will show up? And seriously, where are the nihilists from THE BIG LEBOWSKI? I know they're right around the next corner..." But as dizzying as some of the similarities can be, by the time you get to the medieval weapon wielding midgets, you're fully immersed in an entirely new world. And when all of those seemingly incongruous "wacky" elements start coming back together and flying into place like a game of Tetris played by this guy? You'll wander out of the theater shaking your head a little bit, putting the pieces back together a few hundred times, and ready to watch and re-watch this soon-to-be cult hit over and over again.

Allan Moyle (PUMP UP THE VOLUME, EMPIRE RECORDS) directs this latest entry into the slacker buddy movie canon, and with this film he appears to be setting himself up as the Quentin Tarantino of stoner comedies, right down to the part where he takes underappreciated actors that haven't had a chance to shine in a while and puts them front and center to show us just how wrong previous casting directors have been. Scott Speedman shows more charm than he had as the guy who started it all in FELICITY, and completely makes up for his turn as Michael Corvin in UNDERWORLD. But the real reason to check out the cast in WEIRDSVILLE this weekend at Lamar is to see Wes Bentley as the stoner buddy. Bentley first came across most of our radars as Ricky Fitts, the drug dealing waiter/videographer of beautiful trash bags in AMERICAN BEAUTY, and thinking of this film as a sequel to that? Completely sublime. Of course, it helps if you're under a little bit of an influence, but that would be wrong, so don't do it.