Happiness (1998)

All the actors do a great job, but this is one hell of a depressing movie. Girlfriend at the time convinced me to snag the DVD telling me it would really be my type of movie. It ended up being the movie I paired with Irreversible to fuck with people. Hoffman using the nut to pin the cards to the wall is a hilarious bit though.

And the final scene with the dog really is sickening.

There was a bit in the Wrong thread about whether PTA liked his characters or was mocking them or both in Boogie Nights. Solondz fucking hates his characters.

Dylan Baker pulled off some astonishing shit in this movie.

This film is truly an example of not being the feel good movie of the year.

BTW Ripoll I saw your Saturday night video. Hilarious! That certainly reminds me of a few Saturday nights I've had. Except without the good lighting.

Dylan Baker's performance in this is one of the most disturbing I've ever seen, and I love it.

If there ever was a first date movie, this is it!

This is the one Solondz film that I've seen thus far that I can actually stand. Storytelling came across as pretentious and Welcome to the Doll House seemed forced and over the top. I found his characters in Happiness obviously appalling yet I didn't necessarily hate them all that much. Strange movie.

Get around to seeing STORYTELLING yet?

This movie makes me feel unclean. And not in a good way like Auto Focus does.

I agree. But as unpleasant to watch as his films might be I feel they're important. It's similar to what Harmony Korine does with films like Gummo.

Here's this very ugly, kind of frightening, often sickening aspect of humanity. You may not like it, but damn it it's real and you should look at it and think about it.

I've seen him play a pedo on at least two TV shows since Happiness.

Kinda weird.

I think you mistook my reaction to the movie for criticism. It impressed the hell right out of me. The ugly just never stops.

Really? How do you top this?

Just watched this.

I don't think I'm even close to being in the right state of mind of going terribly deep with this just yet, but I think everything one can say about the film can be summed up by the fact that the first thought that ran through my head at the end was "Jesus, I couldn't imagine living someplace where everybody's that fucking depraved, sad, and lonel--oh."

Well I kinda do so I can relate very well to this kind of film. This one's a little long maybe but it's pretty good. Solondz seems to have lost his touch lately

Saw this for the first time in about a decade this week. The phrase that keeps coming to mind is one I remember Devin using to describe Tideland: it's a diseased movie. But for all the talk about how disturbing and unsettling this is, people always seem to forget to mention that it can be pretty fucking funny, so long as you like your humour bitter and blacker than black. Those father/son heart to hearts, complete with 'heartwarming' soundtrack music... some of the most twistedly wrong but somehow bizarrely funny stuff this side of a sketch from Chris Morris' Jam.

I think this was my first introduction to the delights of Philip Seymour Hoffman (who at the time seemed to be popping up in everything I was watching) but obviously Dylan Baker is the standout here with a performance that should really be the stuff of film legend, and maybe one day will be. My absolute favourite moment is his brilliant subtle little reflex reaction when he realises his slip up when talking to the cops. Plus the sequence where he tries to feed the boy a drugged sandwich is one of the most fucked up examples of a director using technique to build tension in a way that makes you almost will for a monster to succeed in spite of yourself. Made me think of the car-in-the-swamp bit in Psycho, which did something similar.

Only part that doesn't really work for me is the subplot about the elderly parents, which just didn't seem to add a whole lot to the movie.

Oh and someone brought this up in the Dollhouse thread, but Jane Adam's 'Joy' character in Little Children had to be the most obvious example of a character from another movie being renamed and reused this side of the Withnail and I Camberwell Carrot guy popping up in Waynes World 2.

Very interested in how Life During Wartime will stand up to this. I mean, Michael K Williams in the PSH role? Solondz is nothing if not ballsy.