Josh Peck

It was a year ago this month that a Sunday morning throng at the Sundance Film Festival rose to its collective feet in appreciation for a little flick called "The Wackness." Josh Peck, who plays a troubled teen pot dealer with an unlikely customer in a professor portrayed by Ben Kingsley, recalled the reaction for Sundance's Audience Award winner, out this week on DVD.

It was a year ago this month that a Sunday morning throng at the Sundance Film Festival rose to its collective feet in appreciation for a little flick called "The Wackness." Josh Peck, who plays a troubled teen pot dealer with an unlikely customer in a professor portrayed by Ben Kingsley, recalled the reaction for Sundance's Audience Award winner, out this week on DVD.

They are television's latest "Odd Couple," a teenage version of Oscar and Felix thrown together not by divorce, but by the marriage of their TV parents. But the oddest thing, say the stars of Nickelodeon's new hit series "Drake & Josh," is that what you see on TV isn't that much different from real life. Josh Peck and Drake Bell, who play reluctant stepbrothers thrown together in a blended suburban family, don't share a room in real life.

They are television's latest "Odd Couple," a teenage version of Oscar and Felix thrown together not by divorce, but by the marriage of their TV parents. But the oddest thing, say the stars of Nickelodeon's new hit series "Drake & Josh," is that what you see on TV isn't that much different from real life. Josh Peck and Drake Bell, who play reluctant stepbrothers thrown together in a blended suburban family, don't share a room in real life.

Curator: Michael Darling, associate curator at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, is leaving to become curator of modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum. * To the big screen: Drake Bell and Josh Peck, stars of the popular Nickelodeon children's series "Drake & Josh," will team again for the big screen in an action-comedy film that will be distributed by Paramount. * Guest stars: Jerry Lewis will be a guest star on NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" next fall.

After centuries of being linked to emperors, kindly old uncles and secret agents who talk into shoes, Max has reemerged as one of the coolest names you could possibly attach to a baby boy. Anyone who has a kid named Max, raise your hand. See, you could fill a ballpark. The state of cool hasn't been too much of a concern to 12-year-old Max Keeble (Alex D. Linz), a paperboy whose imagination exceeds his daring.

We can't believe we're talking about: NBC's "The Baby Borrowers." Social experiment or the worst idea for a reality show yet? Here, teen couples are forced to grow up quickly. They're given homes, full-time jobs -- and babies. Real ones. And you thought the parents of the tots on "Kid Nation" were bad. (Wednesday) You will probably talk about: "Hancock." But only because you will be puzzled by it.

The green goo will be flowing tonight at Nickelodeon's 21st Annual Kids' Choice Awards. Sort of a "mini-Oscars" in which kids vote on their favorites in film, music, sports and television, the raucous awards show always slimes the hip and the cool with cold green goo. Jack Black returns as host of the proceedings -- let's hope he brings several wardrobe changes for the slime attacks -- at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion.

Rest assured, the helpless, hapless squirrel-rat, Scrat, is back in the sequel "Ice Age: The Meltdown," which opens Friday. Scrat was initially created to bookend the original 2002 computer-animated hit, "Ice Age." But when he became an audience favorite in the film's trailer, directors Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha expanded his role. Scrat (voiced by Wedge) even starred in the Oscar-nominated spinoff short, "Gone Nutty." Now, in "The Meltdown," Scrat is integral to the plot.

It's remarkable, when you think about it, that young people manage to survive adolescence without permanent psychological damage. It's a time of so much confusion and frustration, of such unmediated unfairness and unfocused rage, that it's a tribute to the resilience of youth that most of us come through it more or less in one piece.

Pineapple Express Sony, $28.96/$34.95; Blu-ray, $39.95 The Judd Apatow comedy factory cranks out another wildly uneven but mostly enjoyable comedy with this shaggy-dog story about two potheads (played by the hilarious James Franco and the movie's co-writer, Seth Rogen) who inadvertently cross a local gangster and end up running for their lives.

Luke Shapiro, the depressed high school grad at the center of "The Wackness," labors to be more than just your average white homeboy in 1994 New York City. Occasionally he succeeds. He drops the hip-hop qualifier "mad" (read: very) into every third remark, peddles drugs from an Italian ices cart to second-generation flower children in Central Park and trades dope with his psychiatrist in exchange for bonus therapy minutes.