Storytelling

Rating:
Summary: When good directors go bad.
Review: Greetings from Tromaville!

Todd Soltdz is a talented director. His previous films "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness" are both masterpieces. Both deliver an excelent mix of dark comedy and thought-provoking drama that can remind any indie film buff exactly why they like movies!

However, Todd messes up. This film (presented as a DARK comedy) is divided into two parts: "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction." The "Fiction" section is about a caucasion girl in a creative writing class who is in love with a cerebral palsy victim and gets raped by her african-american teacher. The "Non-Fiction" section deals with a dysfunctional suburban Jewish family who is filmed by a wannabe documentary film maker.

Todd has been known as a director who was not afraid to take risks. He's been compared to John Waters in his brutal style of bad taste dark comedy, but there is a difference. John Waters has always used "Bad Taste" humor in a non-exploitive manner. Even though he did show a man in drag eating dog fecal manner, it was all done in a spark of creativity, inteligence, and a desire to entertain. However, Todd simply uses shock, not as an art, but as a coverup for a lack of good ideas.

Todd's previous works ("...Dollhouse" and "Happiness") used taboo subjects to get to a core point and make us laugh along the way. He used the bizarre to bring emotion. However, with "Storytelling," he's shocking for the sake of shock.

In the "Fiction" section, there is a promising start that pulls the viewer in with it's brilliant use of bad taste humor. However, it quickly loses speed and shows it's true colors of "look at me because I'm vulgar" attitudes and "let's see how far I can push you."

The "Non-fiction" section starts out promising as well. The tale of a failing documentary film maker working with a surburban Jersey Jewish family delivers many great laughs of the bad taste manner, and the jokes you don't feel guilty of laughing about. However, after a very entertaining dream sequence involving Conan O' Brien, the film takes a downhill turn. Todd once again returns to the "it's shocking so it's cool" method of directing which grabs the once promising tale and drags it downword into a world of dissappointment and wasted time. The ending itself, while attempting to be funny and shocking, acheives neither. In fact, it only succeeds in wasting your average cinema buff's time and money.

While the acting is excellent, and there are a handful of hard laughs, the last 10 minutes of both sections quite simply ruin the movie. One can assume that Todd had two great ideas, didn't know how to end them, but still wanted to make a film where only the souls of those who had fun picking on you in junior high can laugh.

While starting out enjoyable, this film follows the same pathetic route that accompanied the unwatchable "Very Bad Things." It assumes that shocking you and shocking you will eventually make you laugh when it, in fact, aggrivates you and completly shoots down any chance you had in enjoying the movie.

If you want a dark comedy that is a masterpiece, see "Ghost World." If you want to see a good work by Todd, see "Happiness." The only good use I can see for this film is a visual guide on "how not to make a dark comedy."

Rating:
Summary: Not the Best Solondz, but good...
Review: I have to say I didn't enjoy this film as much as WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE or HAPPINESS, but it was still pretty good. Solondz sensibilities and dialogue are quite specific and any fan of his films must find that rewarding. This film has much of his trademark black humor and I did enjoy that. He has the uncanny ability to make you laugh at things you might feel like you shouldn't be laughing at. My first theatrical viewing of 2002 and a good one!

Rating:
Summary: "'American Beauty' With Real Teeth"
Review: By common consent, the old WASP intelligentsia is said to have lost its tone-setting influence on national life in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. But what happened to that other encourager of high standards in national and private life, the New York Jewish intellectuals? Todd Solondz provides something of an answer in the brilliant second part of "Storytelling." It was the move to the suburbs of New Jersey and the attendant values of life there that did them in. People perhaps formerly interested in ideas became centered instead on comfort, real estate, temple fund raising, etc. Their children, allowed to grow naturally like plants, turned into jocks, dopers, or, worst of all, non-compassionate conservatives, focused on mere class rank and college acceptance rather than real learning. Solondz' suburbs seem embarrassingly on target as the object of contemporary satire. His vision of life there is a needed corrective to the sentimentalities of that overpraised mediocrity, "American Beauty."

Rating:
Summary: Solondz grinds in the bitterness
Review: While Todd Solondz' previous film, Happiness, was an acidic--and mordantly funny--attack on suburban life, Storytelling goes one "better" (if one can say that) and pushes the director's penchant for vitriol to the max.

The two unequal components of the film, Fiction and Non-Fiction, are meant to be complementary, but do not function as such. The first, Fiction, is mercifully short, juxtaposing the intense contempt of a black prize-winning writer, relegated to the role of a fiction writing prof in a two-bit college, with his snide, spoiled, white, know-it-all students, almost all girls. He unequivocally blasts their work. In a powerful revelatory scene, the black man vents his tremendous frustration on one of the white girls whose attempt to forge a relationship with a boy in the class, stricken with cerebral palsy, fails because of his own fears of inadequacy. Her sexual frustration absolutely must have an outlet, and so she turns to the only other available male she knows.

The phrase "mercifully short" is used because the characterizations here are flat and one-dimensional. In retrospect, Solondz may have done this intentionally to illustrate his own tremendous disgust at the rage inherent in societal conventions that destroy what should be (or at least is meant by) civilized behavior: racism and 'sub-human' categorization of those with physical afflictions. The bitterness is so deep in this short piece, it leaves a really strong taste; you can feel this down in your gut. Not only is it not pleasant; it's not that entertaining. He makes his point by smashing, not hitting, the viewer over the head.

The second piece, Non-Fiction, is much more fully realized, and chronicles the simultaneous activity of a schleppy documentary film-maker (Paul Giamatti in one of his best roles, bar none) with a bizarre dysfunctional family, played convincingly by John Goodman and Julie Hagerty as the parents, Lupe Ontiveros as the beleagured domestic, and some talented newcomers in the roles of the sons. Here Solondz does a masterful job of combining hypnosis, a sports-related disastrous injury, and death by gas with a jaundiced view of what "entertainment" in America really means. A closet gay teenager who aspires to be the next Conan O'Brien is picked by the hapless filmmaker as his subject--clearly a choice driven by desperation--and an outrageous twist of fate ultimately leaves the filmmaker at loose ends and the teenager even more rootless than he is normally.

This piece is without question one of Solondz' best works and, at the same time, is a denunciation of typical American suburban life even more bitter (if that's possible) than that depicted in Happiness. It would have been truly great to see this expanded to feature length. Rumor has it that Solondz actually shot three segments for the film. The third was not used; perhaps it will turn up in a future work, or in the inevitable DVD release.

Overall this is a curious two-part film which is saved by its second story. No film maker in the United States working today has as much hatred for American mores as Solondz, but, as shown in Happiness and the Non-Fiction part of Storytelling, his intensely black humor/ferocious irony makes his work compelling.

Rating:
Summary: 3 Stars for Part 2: "Non-Fiction"
Review: When I was a kid "story-telling" was a nice way of saying someone was lying. And even though I will not make the obvious jump and say the Todd Solondz is lying in "Storytelling," I will say that he is at least disingenuous and at worst a fraud.
"Storytelling" is broken up into two parts: "Fiction," starring Selma Blair as a college writing student in love with a fellow student, who has Cerebral Palsy and "Non-Fiction," starring John Goodman, patriarch of a family of mis-fits and neurotics; one of whom is his slacker son Scooby, who wants to become the next Conan O'Brian (!) but refuses to study and apply to college.
The "Fiction" section of the film is noteworthy only in that the writing professor states( and I am paraphrasing here): When you begin to write about something, whether it be "true" or not...it becomes fiction. A pretty interesting comment resonating with meaning and subtext which is totally unlike the movie that surrounds it. The acting is flat, non reactional and amateurish with Selma Blair coming off worst. This role and her performance in it is merely an extension of her histrionics and whining in "Cruel Intentions." Painful.
The "Non-Fiction" section of this film is another story: there's some meat here to grab on to with Paul Giamatti playing a down-on-his-luck documentary film maker who convinves John Goodman that his slacker son, Scooby would be the perfect star of a docu-drama centering on the "alienated youth of the suburbs" Solondz is at his best here and the dead-pan dialogue and situations ring true and yet are subversive and thought-provoking.
"Storytelling" would have been a much better film had Solondz decided to hack off the "Fiction" section and extend the second. "Storytelling" may tarnish the Solondz mantel a bit, but for those of us who can appreciate the incendiary nature of his wit, we still have "Happiness" and "Welcome to the Dollhouse" to keep us warm until the next Solondz film is released.

Rating:
Summary: dark yet interesting
Review: THe main reason I went to see Storytelling was that the movie was filmed in my high school and I was an extra in the SAT scene. But to step back from that excitement, I would say that although there was not a definite plot, the movie conveyed meaning. There was a character that almost every viewer, especially the teenage-college audience could identify with. Some of the cinematography was dark and depressing, as it was supposed to be. Overall, the film presented its audience with an interesting twist away from typical hollywood teenage angst flicks.

Rating:
Summary: Solondz answers his critics.
Review: First bad news for the audience: to fully appreciate 'Storytelling', you have to know about the (largely negative) critical reception of Todd Solondz's previous film, 'Happiness'. 'Storytelling' is an odd mix of apologia and justification - the two narratives, entitled 'Fiction' and 'Non-Fiction' are full of creators and critics, from the students at a creative writing class and their broodingly hostile teacher; to the documentary film-maker and the reaction of his editor and preview audience; to a child who hypnotises his loveless father to do what he wants, and the literal critical roasting by the Hispanic maid Consuela. Critics point out flaws in, and creators struggle to defend, these works in much the same way many in the press savaged Solondz, accusing him of condescension and misanthropy. By extension, the film explores what happens to 'real' human experience when it is ordered by the subjectivities of fiction.

By foregrounding those elements we don't usually see in day-glo mainstream culture - sexualised disability; inter-racial sexual politics; the shocking disparity between the nobility of our ideals and art, and the ugliness of our desires - Solondz might claim that his films are more 'real' than the manufactured norm; critics could object that replacing one extreme with another is simply dealing in caricature (the fact that critics have found these representations objectionable surely says more about them, though, than the director).

'Storytelling' is actually the indie equivalent of 'American Pie'. It posits a similar comic world, where all human endeavour is confounded by a conflict between brute instinct and delusion. Where 'Pie' glosses this unpalatable truth with attractive stars, sugar-coated comedy and bright colour, Solondz's films are remorselessly downbeat, his characters unsympathetic; his humour, far from comforting, is hostile and unsparing; his mise-en-scene as flat, ugly and dim as his characters, their lives and their milieux (although he offers occasional grace notes, such as Marcus in front of the mirror, or John Goodman's whole character).

This is an authentic vision, and we shouldn't complain because we don't agree with it, but commend Solondz for finding an appropriate cinematic style with which to express himself. 'Happiness' is a masterpiece. 'Storytelling' is not. It is more complex than it first seems - the difference in 'Fiction', for instance, between the 'realistic' depiction of Scott and Vi's sexual encounter, and her version of it in story-form, is blurred by the subjective filming of the former, the demonising of Scott as an African-American, lost in the shadows surrounding him, like Othello playing Iago. And the self-satisfied platitudes of 'American Beauty' definitely need the skewering given here, in both the first story's provocatively brutal relationship between an older man and a teenage girl, and in Toby (Solondz' altar ego)'s neurotic documentary, 'American Scooby'. The narrative structure is a maze of proliferating stories (e.g. the Conan dream sequence). But 'Storytelling' simply isn't funny enough (despite a terrifically sad Goodman), its insights too pat. Ingmar Bergman has shown that directors turning in on themselves can be a fruitful artistic manoeuvre. For this to work, however, Solondz needs to account not to critics, ephemeral and ultimately irrelevant irritants, but to himself.

Rating:
Summary: real comedy
Review: Todd Solondz has said that he thinks all his movies are comedies, just very sad ones. He doesn't just turn out amazing movies that redefine the word "entertainment"; he's Chekhov's heir apparent. That's made clear in his newest film, which is a brilliant blend of perceptive realism and hysterical absurdity. These are stories without morals, but not without meaning. It's a wonderful movie, and most people are going to hate it.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting work.
Review: Storytelling is an interesting movie that portrays the contemporary North American society.

It emphasizes the pitiful importance of the individual as the stem of a civilization; The mistaken use of woman's sexuality as a way to communicate love, pity, confusion and anger; reflects the worth that society has given to women as objects and shows the deep divisions between people of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Racism and the outcast of minorities are other elements shown but the most shocking issue is the dominant influence of media in our own lives. A single minute of fame and popularity could be worth the permanent loss of our values, personal convictions and even the lives of our most beloved ones.

A movie with content and meaning.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant vision of how to tell a story¿
Review: The mode of portraying a tale is in focus in Storytelling through two different stories that are disconnected, yet associated to one another, as one deals with the fictional and the other the non-fictional. In the first part, Fiction, Vi (Selma Blair) is in a relationship with Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick) who suffers from cerebral palsy and both are attending the same university. Vi and Marcus are currently enrolled in the same creative writing class where the students scrutinize each other's writing. Fiction exposes how personal experiences are turned into writing, which is callously slaughtered by judgmental readers as they their own set of values to the cerebral playing field of literature.

The second part of Storytelling, Non-fiction, illiterates the reality of the world as Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber) perceives it. Scooby lives in a upper-class bubble protected by his ruling father, Marty (John Goodman), where Scooby is constantly asked, "what are you going to do with your life?" This endless questioning of Scooby's future seems to have been stressful for him as he has sunk into a zombie-like state. Scooby escapes reality through smoking pot or chewing down a couple of mushrooms where he flees into dreams of working as a co-host with David Letterman. The day when a shoe salesman, who aspires to make film, visits Scooby's high school in order to make a documentary about the process of entering college Scooby believes that this is his chance to make connections in the world of media. However, when the documentary comes along it begins to depict the dream-like world in which Scooby lives in.

Storytelling is a clever film that displays the symbiosis between the audience and the storyteller, which is meticulously directed by Solondz. Solondz depicts the power of the audience to choose what to believe and what to disregard if it is not portrayed in an manner that the audience can accept. In addition, Solondz offers a notion of how the power of storytelling can sway an audience's convictions in a chosen direction if carefully planned. In a sense Storytelling is a philosophical film in regards to film and film making, which can be derived from the economics, politics, and the arts. Yet, the philosophical debate of Storytelling is deep beneath the surface as the audience must use a dialectic approach in order to reach it. Nonetheless, Storytelling offers a terrific cinematic experience as it offers the audience to choose whether to sink into thought or merely enjoy the ride.