Todd Solondz

Personally, I’m not sure. I saw Storytelling only once, and liked it okay, though less than Dollhouse and Happiness. But the latter two I saw several times and maybe I got a lot out of them because I’ve seen both 5x or more.

Palindromes

(I also appreciated the full-body-censor-blocked sex scene and the American Beauty parody)

THIS IS ALL OF ILX

lynch and cronenberg are some kind of genius and this helps a lot if you are gonna tackle morality, good, evil, etc, in your films. plus, their ideas about good and evil and their depictions of it are often mythical and grander in scope than the miserablism of Labute and Solondz who attempt to stylize a more mundane depiction of the banality of evil and, in effect, give great lines to assholes and creeps who in real life are never so eloquent or self-aware. their morality plays (and Labute's and Solondz's stuff reminds me more of theatre than good cinema) seem to be based on contempt and they go too far in stacking the decks in favor of ickiness and a general feeling that original sin is the bulding block of character, whereas Lynch and Cronenberg for all their fear of the body are also fascinated by them (bodies-sometimes in the clinical sense, but also in their inherent beauty) which in turn fascinates ME when i watch their movies. but movies like happiness and in the company of men don't make me think about much at all. they are more like car crashes that you pass on the road. they make me wince and give me a desire to keep moving. they are like comic book versions of reality/realism with all the good stuff that a comic book fabulism can engender taken out. their creators seem to want to elevate pettiness to the level of grand opera, but they(the creators) usually just end up looking nearly as petty and mean for being so myopic and rigid. then again, maybe i just don't think they are talented enough to make me care about their visions.i never feel like their shock tactics have anything behind them. they feel empty. ugly for ugly's sake. that's not enough for me. all those movies you mentioned make for good discussion though, so maybe i'm wrong and they are towering film giants. i'll let history decide.given the choice, though, i'll take Candyman every time.

-- scott seward (skotro...), May 21st, 2003.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/12/todd-solondz-paris-hilton

will be my first exposure to her talents

i never knew what todd solondz looked like, but i think i could have drawn a 'guestimate' picture and got pretty close.

xpost: you should just ask her for a blowjob

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808526/
cast looks impeccable - this has kinda crept up

^Very excited about it. Anyone seen it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBKzHhtCTMM

sound on that sucks.

but anyway - Michael Lerner!! I R excited

I saw it

absolute trash

Armond approves (and of course has to trash Todd Haynes incidentally):

http://www.nypress.com/article-21439-the-right-todd.html

I sort of wonder if I would finally like a Tood Solondz movie with this. I mean, Paul Reubens! But I almost certainly won't see this because there are too many other things to see.

Not just Todd Haynes but Inception and The Kids Are All Right.

Anyway, this is in no way as good as Happiness or even Palindromes, but the Paul Reubens stuff carries a pretty unsettling new twist on Solondzian pessimism.

(Oh god, I forgot he killed Dawn Weiner in Palindromes.)

*RETRO-SPOILER*

isn't Paul R playing Jon Lovitz, who committed suicide in Happiness?

Yep. That's what's disturbing about it; Solondz seems pretty sure that human existence only gets more miserable after death.

I always got the sense of EC comics sense of justice applied across solondz movies where people get disproportionately punished for their character flaws.

EC comics' "character flaws" were more along the lines of killing your spouse, not breathing through your nose.

they got tamer after the whole frederick wertham crackdown thing...

Solondz and Ally Sheedy appearing at NY screenings tonight

"Returning to these pre-9/11 characters"

lol

I pronounce this grim and rather feeble. I did like two scenes a lot: Charlotte Rampling's pickup and Hinds and the son in the dorm room.

also, lame Keanu-mocking punchines very 1993

this movie is fucking great

hmmm, no

It wasn't til after that I realized The Wire guy was playing P S Hoffman's part, and that Michael Lerner was Dawn Weiner's dad.

Finally got to see this movie the other day. So disappointing. This is the first Solondz movie I don't like.

I'm trying to figure out whether Dark Horse has any right to exist

Okay: I was only 40 minutes in when I posted that , this is getting more interesting now somehow

I watched it and I'm going with no.

Solondz is one of my favourite directors and it's a big no

Huh. Haven't seen or wanted to see a film of his since "Happiness," but this one looks intriguing. Description makes it sound like a cross between Apatow and the Duplass brothers.

Josh, see it.

The impact isn't seismic but it lingers with you in weird ways.

I rented palindromes and watched it twice a few years ago, and the effect was similarly bizarre: there was nothing neat and tidy and definite about the experience but it was one I'm glad I had.

I skipped out on Life During Wartime, didn't seem promising and Happiness 2 with different actors didn't appeal to me

Suddenly I have this thing in my head:

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=HjdkiYJkGHE&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DHjdkiYJkGHE

I'll probably see this. I don't remember a thing about Life During Wartime but his other ones have all been good.

Pre-emptive "I told you so"

so anyone seen Wiener-Dog? Gerwig plays Dawn!

Going tomorrow.

i dislike gerwig's 'look at me' self-consciousness, but its solondz, so hope he gets something good out of her.

I liked Weiner Dog. It's been ages since I saw his three other multi-story (episodic, whatever term applies) films, so it felt a little overly familiar, but maybe this one's different in ways I've forgotten. Ellen Burstyn and all the angels near the end hit a little too close to home. Danny DeVito is such a good actor when he plays a character like this. The intermission...is something. Have to go look up what film I remember Burstyn's granddaughter from.

Getting Wiener Dog confused with Weiner, evidently.

Joyce on Mad Men, of course.

Wiener-Dog didn't do a lot for me, though Burstyn, Delpy, the kid in ep1 were good.

yeah it felt kinda slight to me. Burstyn was great, but my favorite segment was the DeVito bit and the awful college students (one of the kids wearing an "I Can't Breathe" shirt was an amazing touch).

well, film students, even worse

would've loved a whole movie of Solondz shitting on millennial film students tbh. that segment is so dark considering Solondz teaches at NYU himself. he's obviously familiar...

https://www.amazon.com/Wiener-Dog-Keaton-Nigel-Cooke/dp/B01GU87FNA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497401866&sr=8-1&keywords=wiener-dog

Reviews are amazing.

oh man

I was taken in by the cute title and cover picture. Not at all like the "cute dog movies" previously seen and certainly not for kids!!!!

ahahahaha

Got the Radiance bluray of Welcome To The Dollhouse and liked it a lot, somebody recommended it to me after I talked about liking Funny Pages so much. I appreciate this kind of thing even more these days

Dinner In America was getting compared to Wellcome To The Dollhouse and there are similarities but it's a lot more conventional, near cliched at points but I loved Emily Skeggs in it so much, all the little shifts in her facial expressions, haven't loved a film character this much in a long time. Skeggs has been getting award recognition for other films I haven't seen so I'll keep an eye out for her.

Sorry for talking about non-Solondz films so much but Welcome To The Dollhouse, Funny Pages and Dinner In America have probably stood out so much because I've mostly been watching martial arts films for the last 5 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIf2SbZqtTE

Some of the scenes in Life During Wartime have really gorgeous colour. Was really happy to see that Shirley Henderson was in one of his films.

I don’t love that movie for a number of reasons, but there are a couple scenes that still haunt me, in an impressive way.

Did Solondz ever say why he used so many actors for the girl in Palindromes? I thought that boy with the glasses at the Christian home was very funny.

xxpost Helps to have Ed Lachman as your frequent DP!

It seems pretty clear now that not only will Happiness never again be released on home video; it also won't ever be available on streaming

Why not?

You have watched it, haven't you?

C'mon, Ebola Syndrome and other category III nasties were recently released on bluray.

Or is that the labels likely to release Solondz films are getting reluctant to touch that kind of subject matter?

I mean maybe Vinegar Syndrome picks it up, but that'd be weird for them, brand-wise

Spotted in this morning's Little White Lies newsletter:

Charles Melton will star alongside Elizabeth Olsen in Todd Solondz’s upcoming Love Child, in which an eleven-year-old plots the murder of his no-good father so that Mom (Olsen) can shack up with a more worthy mate (Melton). I can only assume Melton first heard of Solondz’s work while googling “movies that make May December’s central relationship seem more or less fine” to win an argument…

Never heard of him but he looks incredible

They said it would never happen: https://www.criterion.com/films/30465-happiness

LOL, certainly *I* said it would never happen ... glad the universe stepped in

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/todd-solondzs-unfulfilled-desires?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=app.dashhudson.com%2Fnewyorkermag%2Flibrary%2Fmedia%2F454127984

The bit about him getting offered Charlies Angels Full Throttle made me gasp

At twenty-three, he already felt that he had spent his life being mediocre. He grew up in the suburbs near Newark, the son of a businessman in the building trade and a classically trained pianist turned homemaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Siqh8Qy7A

It seems pretty clear now that not only will Happiness never again be released on home video; it also won't ever be available on streaming

― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.),

*waves Criterion DVD checked out of library*

They said it would never happen: https://www.criterion.com/films/30465-happiness

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Monday, June 17, 2024 1:43 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

LOL, certainly *I* said it would never happen ... glad the universe stepped in

― Rich E. (Eric H.), Monday, June 17, 2024 1:48 PM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I saw it; I'm teasing Eric should he come back.