Posts : 4151 Join date : 2007-12-15 Age : 45 Location : Hollandia
Subject: Todd Solondz Fri Mar 07, 2008 11:47 am
Todd Solondz
Todd Solondz (born October 15, 1959 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American screenwriter and independent film director known for his style of dark, thought-provoking socially conscious satire. Solondz has been critically acclaimed for his examination of the "dark underbelly of middle class American suburbia"
The first movie I discovered from him is the cultissim Happiness. This movie is for me the best that was ever made in Dark humour. I have seen it so many times, its ridiculous, and for a long time, everyone who would pass my door step had no choice but to watch it (yes, Im like that: I force people to watch movies but it's for their own good ha ha ha )
Each scene is a pleisure to watch, and even the darkest moments made me cry of laugh, this is brilliant
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Happiness (1998), a highly controversial film due to the themes explored in it, which range from rape, murder and paedophilia to a bizarre sexual phone caller. The original distributor, October Films, dropped it and then it was scooped up by Good Machine Releasing.[1] The movie received numerous awards, including International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and yielded strong critical praise for Solondz.
Seventh-grade is no fun. Especially for Dawn Weiner when everyone at school calls you 'Dog-Face' or 'Wiener-Dog.' Not to mention if your older brother is 'King of the Nerds' and your younger sister is a cutesy ballerina who gets you in trouble but is your parents' favorite. And that's just the beginning--her life seems to be falling apart when she faces rejection from the older guy in her brother's band that she has a crush on, her parents want to tear down her 'Special People's Club' clubhouse, and her sister is abducted....
Storytelling follows two separate, unrelated stories of the angst, frustration, depression of the youth of today against two backdrops. In "Fiction", Vi is a hip college teenager who allows herself to be exploited and abused by any guy, including her writing professor, in order to get inspiration for her creative writing class. In "Non-fiction", Toby Oxman is a hapless loser/shoe salesman who wants to be a famous documentary filmmaker. For his first project, Toby explores the dysfunctional Livingston family, focusing mostly on the oldest son Scooby, an alienated, hates-the-world, ticking-time-bomb, bisexual, high school student with dreams of being famous
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Probably Director Todd Solondz' most mature work to date, Storytelling is split into two parts `Fiction' and `Non-Fiction' - yet similar themes underlie both and pose questions about what we call reality when it comes to prejudice and taboo subjects. Whilst in previous attempts (such as `Happiness') Solondz' work has merely been controversial, in this film he berates political correctness more accurately and more entertainingly. It exposes ridiculous attitudes in the name of political correctness, whether it is the student with an awful essay who almost escapes criticism because he has cerebral palsy, or a black teacher who gets away with being a pervert because his victim doesn't want to entertain thoughts of racism. Nothing is sacred: Jews and the Holocaust also come in for merciless examination. But part of the film involves the story of a `documentary' being made within the main story, by an exploitative screwed up filmmaker who wants to do his own thing in the name of art, so in this sense, Storytelling even turns on itself and questions the validity of using the subject matter that it does. A controversial, worthy, and very entertaining film that stretches your ability to make moral judgements within a convincingly coherent framework.
A fable of innocence: thirteen-year-old Aviva Victor wants to be a 'mom'. She does all she can to make this happen, and comes very close to succeeding, but in the end her plan is thwarted by her sensible parents. So she runs away, still determined to get pregnant one way or another, but instead finds herself lost in another world, a less sensible one, perhaps, but one pregnant itself with all sorts of strange possibility. She takes a road trip from the suburbs of New Jersey, through Ohio to the plains of Kansas and back. Like so many trips, this one is round-trip, and it's hard to say in the end if she can ever be quite the same again, or if she can ever be anything but the same again
I love Todd Solondz movies, they are disturbing, subtile, always smart and most important: very funny
TO BE CONTINUED
Chrisy Squared eyes Admin
Posts : 4151 Join date : 2007-12-15 Age : 45 Location : Hollandia
Fri Mar 07, 2008 11:47 am
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