On Movies: 'Wackness' writer's life not quite so wacky

'I wish I could say that I sold pot and I had a shrink like

Ben Kingsley

, but no, it wasn't like that," admits

Jonathan Levine

, the writer and director of

The Wackness,

a sharp, smart coming-of-age comedy about a just-graduated high school kid who sells pot, and whose therapist is played by the Oscar-winning

Gandhi

star.

Still, there's definitely an autobiographical thread running through Levine's movie. Winner of audience awards at Sundance in January and at the Los Angeles Film Festival a few weeks ago,

The Wackness

opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse and Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ.

"It's the details and the backdrop, and a lot of the perspective of this kid and the way that he looks at the world," explains Levine, who cast

Josh Peck

(Nickelodeon's

Drake & Josh

) as the kid, Kingsley as his dope-fiend psychiatrist,

Olivia Thirlby

(

Juno

) as the shrink's aloof stepdaughter, and

Famke Janssen

as her moody mom. Peck's Luke falls hard for Thirlby's Stephanie, and for a while it looks as though she's fallen for him, too.

"The Stephanie character, I guess, is a composite of a few different ladies who broke up with me," Levine says with a laugh. "That happened."

Set in

Giuliani

-era, mid-'90s New York, with the music (

Nas

,

A Tribe Called Quest

,

The Notorious B.I.G.

) and the clothes (baggy T's, Danücht street wear, door-knocker earrings) that a whole hip-hop-obsessed generation embraced,

The Wackness

is nostalgic and a little nutty.

Kingsley, for one, seems to be having a ball as a therapist who trades couch time for bags of weed, his shaggy, bewigged head (his idea, the wig) wrapped in a fog of bong smoke as he sits in a wood-paneled office.

Levine, 32, an alum of Brown University and the American Film Institute who has one previous feature under his belt - the yet-to-be-released

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

- says working with Sir Ben wasn't so much daunting as revelatory.

"When we were first about to start shooting, I had no idea what voice was going to come out of his mouth or how he was going to carry himself," recalls the director, a native New Yorker now living in L.A. "I was kind of freaked out. . . . I was just standing behind the monitor going, 'OK, here we go,' and what impressed me most with him was that, for an actor of his stature and his experience, he tackled this role with the energy of a kid.

"There's not a moment in his performance when he's doing anything passive, or phoning anything in. Everything is life or death."

With his semiautobiographical movie behind him, Levine - who cites

Steven Soderbergh

,

Woody Allen

,

Spike Lee

and

Jean-Luc Godard

among his influences - is busy on something less personal, and likely more lucrative. He's working on a screenplay adaptation of the

David Stone

spy thriller

The Echelon Vendetta

, for Sony Pictures.

"I'm not attached to direct it, necessarily, but I would love the opportunity, and hopefully I'll make it good enough that they won't have a choice," he says. "It's a contemporary spy thriller, government conspiracies, that sort of thing. I'm trying to do it like those old

Alan Pakula

films meets

JFK

meets

Bourne Identity

. If I can do that, it will be really cool."

Herzog in the antipode.

There will be no penguins,

Werner Herzog

promised when he set out, in late 2006, to shoot a documentary at the South Pole. Basing himself at McMurdo Station, pop. 1,000, a place with an ATM, a yoga studio, and a bunch of biologists, glaciologists, and even a plumber, the intrepid German filmmaker proceeded to do what he does best - investigate an environment and the way humans inhabit it, and react to it, and try to survive.

The result is the barmy, brilliant

Encounters at the End of the World

, which opened at the Ritz at the Bourse on Friday. And never mind that promise, it

does

have penguins. But unlike the hugely successful, cutesy-poo

March of the Penguins

, Herzog's gander at a gaggle of Antarctic birds is a definite downer.

"Lets face it, penguins are quite extensively well-documented," says Herzog, on the phone from New York. "So, I didn't have the intention to make another penguin movie. . . . But finally I got curious, and of course I was curious with different kinds of questions about nature. The question, for example: Is there such a thing as sanity among animals? Do we have derangement among penguins?"

Of course, Herzog, whose fiction and nonfiction filmography includes such man-vs.-nature classics as

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

,

Fitzcarraldo

,

Grizzly Man

and

Rescue Dawn

, answers that question by finding the one depressed, antisocial penguin on the pole. A penguin that Herzog films walking away from his colony, toward certain doom.

And then he gets a scientist to make the case that there is prostitution among penguins, too. "He's very convincing," Herzog says.

Now 65, Herzog continues his global peregrinations. He's at work on a project about dying languages. He's planning a new version of

Bad Lieutenant

("but not a remake, and we may not even keep the title"), to be shot in New Orleans with

Nicolas Cage

.

Herzog was the subject of a retrospective at the Torino Film Festival last year. "It was kind of scary, they had a full retrospective, and they had something like 55 movies," he says. "It was not even absolutely complete, and I thought, well, I really must have worked a little bit."

With

Encounters at the End of the World

- with its frozen icescapes and underwater, sci-fi-ish creatures - Herzog has now made a movie on every one of Earth's continents.

"That's kind of embarrassing to admit," he says with a jolly snort. "I really do not want to end up in the Guinness Book of World Records. That would be the moment I should quit.

"No, it's just my curiosity. As a man early in

Encounters

says, he fell in love with the world. I had the feeling that that happened to me as well, and that's why I've ventured out, why I was exploring. I was fascinated by the planet we are living on."