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DVD Happiness
At times brilliant and insightful, at times repellent and false, Happiness is director Todd Solondz's multistory tale of sex, perversion, and loneliness. Plumbing depths of Crumb-like angst and rejection, Solondz won the Cannes International Critics Prize in 1998 and the film was a staple of nearly every critic's Top Ten list. Admirable, shocking, and hilarious for its sarcastic yet strangely empathetic look at consenting adults' confusion between lust and love, the film stares unflinchingly until the audience blinks. But it doesn't stop there. A word of strong caution to parents: One of the main characters, a suburban super dad (played by Dylan Baker), is really a predatory pedophile and there is more than an attempt to paint him as a sympathetic character. Children are used in this film as running gags or, worse, the means to an end. Whether that end is a humorous scene for Solondz or sexual gratification for the rapist becomes largely irrelevant. Happiness is an intelligent, sad film, revelatory and exact at moments. It's also abuse in the guise of art. That's nothing to celebrate. --Keith Simanton
Man, this is difficult, difficult movie!! It's packed full of thoroughly unlikeable characters. And they do some awfully uncomfortable things.
The actors are all outstanding. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a loser (what a stretch!!) who starts making obscene phone calls to his next door neighbor (Lara Flynn Boyle), who enjoys them. What happens when they meet? That's just one sample of the kind of interactions you might see in this movie. It plays a little like MAGNOLIA, but without much of the hopeful tone that movie ends with.
But the source of all the controversy in this movie is the character played by the brave, brilliant Dylan Baker. He plays a totally milquetoast, average, middle-class father. Yet his character is also a child-molester. I wouldn't say his character is presented sympathetically, but he isn't always shown as just a monster either. There's one scene, wherein his son has just discovered his beloved father's secret and questions him in detail about his twisted desires. The scene is hands-down the most uncomfortable thing I've ever watched. I was literally squirming...it is so shocking, so obscene and so terribly, terribly sad. In two minutes, we see how several lives are shattered forever.
Baker's performance should have been nominated for an Oscar, but this would have required too much bravery on the part of the selection commmittee.
Do I recommend the film? Well, if you aren't afraid to have your limits tested, absolutely. It has a lot to say, not just about child molestation. It's well-acted and written, and has many very funny moments too (one character to another: "I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you." to which the response is: "I'm not laughing." It's from the creator of WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, so you know it's going to be unconventional. But it is exciting filmmaking. ABSOLUTELY KEEP THE KIDS AWAY FROM IT!
I'm living in a state of irony.
Having seen 'Storytelling', I had a fairly good idea of what I was getting myself into when I picked this movie up. It deals with adult subject matter, for sure, but it manages to present the inherent, subtle humor of strange, bizzare, or grotesque situations. One scene that sticks out in my mind is when Philip Seymour Hoffman's character is in a diner with the character played by Camryn Manheim and she just finished telling him about her being assaulted and the particularly gruesome way she dealt with the assault, and he replied, "Well, we all have our plusses and minuses." I laughed until my sides hurt. You really have to see the scene and all it's nuances to fully appreciate it. And there are a lot of scenes like this throughout the movie. This is definately a squeamish and unsettling type of movie with some pretty difficult subject matter. Given that, I wouldn't recommend this movie to just anyone. Seek it out if you must, but be warned, it's not a happy story. As far as one reviewers' statement that the scenes were presented for there shock value only, I didn't really see it that way. I saw a peeling away of the appearance that is presented by people to show the sorid underbelly of life, like turning over a big rock to see what kind of creepy crawlies are hiding underneath. That's not to say that the people in this movie are representative of people in general, but I think we all have little secrets about ourselves, our 'rocks', that we wouldn't want the rest of the world to know. I can understand why some people would be turned off by a movie like this, as I think a lot of people go to see movies to escape from this kind of material. Also, I think Dylan Baker did an excellent job in portraying his character. He played a character who seemed to have the idyllic life, a beautiful wife, a large home in the suburbs, three children, and good career...and pedoephillic tendancies towards young boys. He was so creepy, taking advantage of oppourtunities presented to him, regardless of the consequences. I didn't feel sorry for his character, but I did feel like he was a creature trapped by his own demons, acting on his primal urges. He was what he was, and that wasn't going to change. I don't understand the urges he felt, but the characterization of the monster he became was certainly interesting to watch. I enjoyed this movie, and I am looking forward to seeing 'Welcome to the Dollhouse'.
Cookieman108
This film is NOT honest.
"If you can't handle the realism, it's your problem; this movie isn't afraid to be honest; blah blah blah." On the contrary, Solondz goes to ludicrous extremes of contrivance to convince us that the world is horrible, people are monsters, and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. Every single character in this film is depressed, insane, a pervert, or a liar, and every character is unhappy. That's neither realistic nor, in my opinion, "honest" on any deeper level. Solondz does his utmost to deny the existence of any chance for redemption. The worldview this movie conveys seems to be that of a deeply troubled person desperately trying to tell us that everyone else is as miserable as he is. I'm not saying some of the things he depicts don't happen in the real world (albeit in less contrived ways). But to focus on them, to the exclusion of anything else, to make a point about the impossibility of obtaining happiness, seems dishonest, manipulative, and downright irresponsible.
I really wanted to like this movie. It was well made and well acted. I even gave it the chance to sink in, since many of my favorite movies become my favorites only after a while of thinking about them. But the more I think about this one, the angrier I get. Why would anyone want to use art in this way?
Todd Solondz, director of the acclaimed Welcome to the Dollhouse and the controversial Happiness, continues pushing the envelope of social decorum with the merciless and casually cruel Storytelling, his most ruthless satire of suburban complacency. Broken into two unrelated chapters, "Fiction" follows college girl Selma Blair through a degrading encounter with her resentful writing teacher (Robert Wisdom), while the more sprawling and scattershot "Non-Fiction" circles around the mutual exploitation of a fumbling documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti doing a near-parody of director Solondz) and his clueless subject, a suburban high school slacker named Scooby (Mark Webber). The squirmy laughs are laced with humiliation and the satire is acidic and cynical; in the world... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Selma Blair Director(s): Todd Solondz DVD Release Date: Released the 16 July 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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What is junior high school but a strange, disorienting pastiche of black comedy, tragedy, soap opera, and (most of all) horror movie? Well, that pretty much describes Todd Solondz's astonishingly honest and clear-sighted film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. Like Solondz's even more controversial follow-up--the acclaimed and despised Happiness (1998)--Dollhouse unflinchingly looks deep into its characters' souls (and their embarrassing desires, and their floundering sexuality) in ways that can be simultaneously disturbing and liberating, appalling and hilarious. Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo) is a hapless seventh-grade geek whose cruel and contemptuous schoolmates have nicknamed her (what else?) "Wiener Dog." Everything about Dawn is so awkward--the way she looks, talks,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Heather Matarazzo - Christina Brucato Director(s): Todd Solondz DVD Release Date: Released the 03 August 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
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In my personal opinion, i felt Gummo to be a boring film. Harmony Korine is a talented individual, but it seems that this film was missing an important element. That element was a storyline. Kids is a masterpiece,due to the fact of a great storyline. I didnt feel a connection with the characters of Gummo. I felt there wasnt a main focus to the film. It was sprawled out disconnected. But never the less, i did understand his reasoning for taking you into the world we stereotype as white/trailer trash. But overall, Gummo is a million pieces to a puzzle that aren't put into the right slots. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Nick Sutton - Jacob Sewell Director(s): Harmony Korine DVD Release Date: Released the 20 March 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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I don't have much to say about this film other than that it is extremely bizarre, disjointed, mostly incoherent, and surreal. At times its almost as if it was filmed in the attempt to show the world through a skitzophrenic's eyes. Werner Herzog plays this creepy, gas mask wearing lisping father who tries to pay his son ten dollars to dress up like his dead mother and dance with him. That, for me, was the highlight of the entire movie. The rest of the film is difficult to pay attention to as the camera follows Julien throughout his day as he goes to work as an aid to blind people (watch out for the blind black albino), goes ice skating,
pretends an almost completely incoherent conversation between Hitler and God, wrestles with a brother that is almost pathologically obsessed with... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Harmony Korine DVD Release Date: Released the 20 March 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Bully stars Brad Renfro (Apt Pupil) and Nich Stahl. These two characters grew up together. Nick Stahl's character is a bit of a sadistic bully. Brad's character takes the abuse because he doesn't know what to do about it...until he gets a girl friend who despises the bully. The girlfriend plots the murder of him and manages to pull all the other characters into it. Very, very dumb teenagers who can't seem to think 30 minutes into the future.
This movie has lots of sex and violence including rape. Full frontal nudity of females and partial frontal nudity of males.
The movie is worth seeing but at the end, you'll be shaking your head finding it hard to believe that people exist who are that dumb. There are. It's a true story.
More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Brad Renfro - Nick Stahl Director(s): Larry Clark DVD Release Date: Released the 29 January 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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