Happiness

Rating:
Summary: Happiness
Review: Truly, this is for those who's stomachs can handle blacker than black comedies that would surely tramatize and depress others. The first time I saw this, I was so shocked by the themes of the film that I missed the absurd humor of it. The next time, my friend was so obviously uncomfortable that I slept so I didn't have to watch him nauseated and confused. Now, I can see it as the most brilliant mix of sadness and comedy that I'm ever bound to see. Dig it.

Rating:
Summary: Cute and amusing
Review: Although this movie has been both widely praised and widely trashed, I think that these pretentious, melodramatic interpretations overlook the main point of this movie: to be a sort of perverted (ok, maybe that's an understatement) comedy about suburban life. It is a comedy, nothing more, nothing less; many of the "jokes" are funny simply because they are so unbelievably crazy - just like we can't help but laugh at 'American Psycho.' Now, one might argue that it is not funny when a small hapless boy is anally raped by a guy who looks like he just jumped off the set of Leave it to Beaver. But that is why we can have movies, people. I think 'Happiness' achieves a definite success. Watch it. Well, don't watch it with your grandparents or something. But other than that, it is a nice little movie.

Rating:
Summary: disturbing? Yes. Brilliant? Again, yes.
Review: But both only occur in spots in the film. Basically, Happiness suffers from what many films of its ilk succumb to: The director trying too hard to be artistic. While you have to be pretty dense to just toss this off as pointless or a drama king/queen to call it nauseating, there's no way this is a five-star film. It's too flawed; First, some of the acting is second rate. You'll know it when you see it. Next, not every character is developed to the point they need to be to be effective. Third, The script is way too stagy or simplistic at times, other times it asks us to assume something that's essentially a leap of faith. And the actions of some of the characters, especially Joy, are not even a little realistic. They just ring false, period. As a whole, while the concept of Happiness is good, the execution was mediocre. The result is something highly disjointed that could've been much more.


Rating:
Summary: Unhappy with this film.
Review: More like, disturbed and forever traumatized. Okay, maybe not to that extreme. Maybe I'm just not used to the whole "pedophile" concept being portrayed in films but this movie just made my stomach churn. I don't find happiness in watching perverts fulfill their own happiness.

My only favorite scene was the first scene of the film with Jon Lovitz "No you're not!". Jon Lovitz, great guy. Too bad he only had one scene. I thought I had made the right choice renting this movie, but after that scene, it went all downhill from there. I do understand why it's titled "Happiness", but it's just too overwhelming for me. Child molestation is a very serious topic, and I don't find it something to be joked about.

Good thing I only rented it (based on the raving reviews on Amazon) and right after watching it, I jogged back to the video store and returned it ASAP! I don't understand how someone can sit through all this!

Rating:
Summary: NASTINESS
Review: I am hardly an uptight person, making me all the more surprised that this is a film I could barely handle. This movie sat with me like a bad meal I just want to get out of my system. I normally like unusual and groundbreaking film. And I did like Welcome to the Dollhouse too. But this movie, aside from it being slow... this movie was perversion in the guise of art.

Some things are better left unspoken. Unless you need to have your eyes opened that perverseness can be your neighborhood superdad, I'd say the aware people have no use peeking in the window of a pedophile's world.



Rating:
Summary: Bravo!
Review: I'll never forget when i saw this movie in a small independent film theater years ago. I was so disturbed during the viewing that I thought about leaving. Years later, I can appreciate this movie. While it may be dark and twisted, it is also amazing how it just keeps getting worse and worse until the unforgettable ending. Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: Sick, twisted, disturbing - but you can't stop watching it
Review: There have been few times that I've sat for more than two hours, intently watching a film, screaming "I hate this movie!" as the credits begin to roll, but then realize that I don't hate it at all. In fact, I don't know if that has ever happened before, but last night, after the final, revolting line of Todd Solondz's 1998 shocker Happiness, I did just that, and probably because I couldn't bring myself to admit I liked it. It's a movie that deals with wildly perverse subject matter, contains not a truly likeable character in the whole bunch, and doesn't even bother to show the consequences of the horrible actions for any of its transgressors. If there is a poster-child movie for complete and total amorality, Happiness is the one. But I liked it, and that scares me.

Joy (Jane Adams) has absolutely nothing in common with her name; her sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a sultry, narcissistic author who wants the experience of being raped to make her writing authentic; other sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) is married to Dr. Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) and has three kids. Dr. Bill is a pedophile who pleasures himself to teen magazines in the backseat of his car and has dreams of murdering strangers in a park; Dr. Bill's strangest patient, Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), makes obscene phone calls and has an inventive way of pasting postcards to the wall; Allen's neighbor, Kristina (Camryn Manheim), is in love with him but has her own disgusting little story to hide. Nearly every character has a dark side, the only truly 'good' one (Joy) seems to get everything wrong, and the one romance that blooms during the movie has a twinge of wrongness to it. The movie is a strung-together mosaic of perpetual sadness, the search for the remedy, and the stomach-churning causes of it all; and yet, between my gasps of shock and uneasiness, I can't say there's a boring moment in the film.

The most difficult character in the movie to even look at is, obviously, Dr. Maplewood. Dylan Baker has that glaring gaze that could boil cheese, and it takes on an especially creepy tone when he's gazing longingly at his son's baseball teammate at a little league game. But, believe it or not, Solondz injects comedy even into something as despicable as the Maplewood situation. The film's most controversial scene, involving drugged chocolate sundaes and a tuna salad sandwich, is god-awfully wrong...but had me thinking about that great moment in Psycho when Marion Crane's car stops as it's sinking into the swamp and Norman Bates panics for a moment. And laughing, too. This element of the plot angered many people in 1998 and is still something to wrestle to this day; why make Maplewood a three-dimensional man with real emotions when all he is is a predatory pederast? Because it wouldn't be interesting, it wouldn't be watchable, if he wasn't. Take a climactic scene in the film, that must deal with the truths of Maplewood's actions: Solondz creates a scene that is brutally honest and deeply disturbing, but still grounded in the poignancy of a father-son discussion.

I found myself alternating between pure puzzlement and a desire to turn the movie off in its first, love-it-or-leave-it act. But Solondz is in such control of his connecting plot strands that he makes the links quickly, moves in and out of them with ease, and even allows for unexpectedly moving moments to occur. The great subplot of the film is with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Camryn Manheim. In some ways, it sums up the entire theme of the film, while having all of Happiness' strengths and weaknesses. Solondz gives us a great scene where the two come together, dancing to a pop song in a bar, and it's a brief moment of euphoria and sweetness despite the depravity that surrounds and underscores it. Of course, for some viewers, the hidden lives of even Allen and Kristina may be too strange to merit caring about. I struggled with it, too.

Solondz made a very good film a few years ago, Storytelling (rent it), that contains similarly risque subject matter but ends up being too facile in the resolutions of the two vignettes that comprise the film. His breakthrough movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse, came before Happiness, and takes a similarly piercing look at real life but is bogged down too much in its deadpan humor and relentless punishment of its protagonist. Happiness straddles the shortcomings of both of those films, neither offering a simple resolution to its problems or being too strange to the point where unrealism sets in. It is real, it is complex, and it's also deeply disturbing and maybe morally offensive. I'm also known for not really caring about the morality of a movie, so maybe that's why I was never bored or too offended at any time.

The best line in Happiness comes toward the very end, when the sisters and their parents are sitting around talking about a grisly New Jersey murder, involving dismemberment and plastic baggies, that occurred in the apartment building of Flynn Boyle's Helen. "Everyone uses baggies; that's why we can relate to this crime," she says. Happiness is one of those twisted American suburbia flicks that contains things that happen every day, probably closer to us than we expect. That's why I could relate to this movie. I don't expect you to; in fact, I don't blame you if you hate it with a passion or don't get past the first ten minutes. Things will happen that will disgust you, revolt you, and disturb you. There is no reason why anyone should like this movie or why it should 'work.' But I was entertained in some sick and twisted way, even while my jaw stayed glued to the floor. Don't say I didn't warn you, and extensively...but I dare you to see it. A-