Review: Todd Solondz's "HAPPINESS" Remains Objectionable, Thankfully (Happy B'day, Todd Solondz)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 7 (of 2006) by Leroy Douresseaux

Happiness (1998)

Running time:  136 minutes (2 hours, 16 minutes)

Rating:  MPAA – NC-17 (rating surrendered and film released “unrated”)

WRITER/DIRECTOR:  Todd Solondz

PRODUCERS:  Ted Hope and Christine Vachon

CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Maryse Alberti

EDITOR:  Alan Oxman

COMPOSER: Robbie Kondor

DRAMA/COMEDY

Starring:  Dylan Baker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Cynthia Stevenson, Rufus Read, Louise Lasser, Ben Gazarra, Camryn Manheim, Molly Shannon, Jon Lovitz, Justin Elvin, Jared Harris, and Dan Moran

Happiness is a 1998 drama and black comedy film from writer-director Todd Solondz.  Happiness follows the lives a several individuals who live unique lives and who also engage in acts that society as a whole find disturbing and criminal in their desperate searches for human connection.

In Happiness, three sisters are the center point or nexus of a large group of unhappy people.  Joy Jordan (Jane Adams) is the least successful of the three Jordan sisters.  Andy Kornbluth (Jon Lovitz), a would-be suitor, kills himself after Joy dumps him, and she spends the rest of the film looking for a compatible mate.

Her sister, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), seemingly has it all – a husband with a great job, a big home in a posh suburban neighborhood, and three children.  However, Trish won’t have sexual relations with her husband, Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker).  Bill is a pederast who preys on prepubescent boys, and their 11-year old son, Billy (Rufus Read), is obsessed with ejaculating for the first time.

Helen Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a successful writer who is desperate to make contact with a sexual partner who can really satisfy her, as none of her numerous male companions have to this point.  Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a computer data analyst and engages in chronic masturbation.  He makes prank phone calls to women and masturbates while he gets them to talk about their underwear, and he is infatuated with Helen – often calling her and hanging up.  After 40 years of marriage, the Jordan sisters’ parents, Mona (Louise Lasser) and Lenny Jordan (Ben Gazarra) are divorcing because Lenny wants to live as a hermit in Florida.

Todd Solondz’s Happiness takes the lives of several, ordinary middle class characters and shows how warped and abnormal their lives really are.  The film is so relentlessly matter-of-fact that it almost makes those characters seem normal, but the truth is that abnormality is their norm, and that if you get to look behind the façade, you will find that it is indeed a façade.  Some of the characters struggle to be normal (Allen and Joy Jordan), while others are hopelessly stuck in aberrant or deviant behavior (Bill and Trish Maplewood).

Happiness is frank in its depiction of sexual dysfunction, dissatisfaction, deviancy, and desire.  No matter the sexual disorder, the characters are stuck with it.  They are trapped, feeding a need, and never really seriously looking for help.  One wonders if they really don’t want more healthy sex lives or if they’re feeding the beast of sick and unusual behavior because it’s old habit.

It’s hard to tell, and the film just throws sexual failure and abnormality in your face.  There are shots of ejaculate hitting a wall and later a railing, and in one case the ejaculate belongs to Billy Maplewood, a child, who is masturbating while watching a sunbather.  So what’s the point of all this?  I think Solondz is simply saying that such abnormality or dysfunction exists, whether we deny it, hide it, or overreact to it.  He provides no solutions; in a way Happiness is a hybrid family drama and quasi-documentary about the still waters of American sexuality – whether it is a boy on the verge of sexual discovery or an old man who can no longer feeling anything, physically or spiritually, when he has sex.  If the film has a major weakness, it’s that the characters are too married to their dilemmas; only the character of Billy Maplewood comes across as three-dimensional.

The ensemble cast gives great performances, but two stand out from the rest.  Dylan Baker gives a riveting performance that is both scary and rich.  He manages a balance of fantasy and verisimilitude that is a work of performance art in creating a sick man who is despicable in his attempts to have sex with young boys.  Philip Seymour Hoffman, as he does so often, personifies the outsider scratching and clawing to get in with the straight crowd.  His Allen is pitiful and pathetic, but he possesses kindness and understanding that only shines through in rare moments of beauty, no matter how ugly the situation is.

Lara Flynn Boyle gives a surprisingly marvelous turn as the pretentious, self-absorbed, and unsatisfied Helen.  These performances and Todd Solondz’s boldness in tackling this subject matter the way he does make Happiness a winner and a must-see for moviegoers with guts who will not turn away from subject matter that repulses them.

8 of 10

A

★★★★ out of 4 stars

Thursday, January 12, 2006

RE-EDITED:  Saturday, October 10, 2026

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Review: Yes, "Pink Flamingos" is Culturally Significant (Happy B'day, John Waters)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 154 (of 2006) by Leroy Douresseaux

John Water’s Pink Flamingos (1972)
Running time: 93 minutes (1 hour, 33 minutes)
MPAA – NC-17 for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail (re-rating for 1997 re-release)
PRODUCER/WRITER/DIRECTOR: John Waters
EDITOR/CINEMATOGRAPHER: John Waters

COMEDY/CRIME

Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Danny Mills, Edith Massey, Channing Wilroy, Cookie Mueller, Paul Swift, Susan Walsh, and Linda Olgierson

Pink Flamingos is a 1972 black comedy and exploitation film from director John Waters. Controversial upon its initial release, because of its depiction of perverse acts, Pink Flamingos went on to become a cult film because of its notoriety. The film follows a notorious female criminal and underground figure who resists attempts to both humiliate her and to steal her tabloid reputation.

Divine (Divine) lives on the outskirts of Baltimore in a trailer with her degenerate son, Crackers (Danny Mills), her dim-bulb mother, Edie (Edith Massey), and her “traveling companion,” Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). She lives under the pseudonym Babs Johnson, and in local outsider community and to its news press is known as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” However, local couple, Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary), also vies for that title. The vile Marble clan launches an unbridled assault on Babs Johnson’s reputation and on her home. But Babs and her family fight back in a small war that breaks just about every taboo in the book: incest, drug trafficking, bestiality, castration, murder, cannibalism, etc.

It seems impossible that (regardless of what other films he has directed in the past or may direct in the future) John Waters will be best remembered for any film other than Pink Flamingos. Cheaply made with a cast of amateur actors and locals from the Baltimore area (from where Waters originates), this is the kind of film that would normally merit a review of “no stars” or a grade of “F,” simply because it isn’t like a “normal” film (at least not one from Hollywood). However, Pink Flamingos may be the ultimate low budget trash movie, the ultimate camp experience, and a supreme ode to bad taste. Fun, vile, and also disgusting to the point that many people might turn off the TV early in the film (or walk out the theatre), Pink Flamingos is an object – a piece of art by someone who wants to put his thumb in the eye of American values. It doesn’t matter if its working class, middle class, church-going, God-fearing, or baseball-mom-and-apple pie American values, John Water made Pink Flamingos an assault on decency.

New Line Cinema, the film company that distributed the movie in 1972, released a trailer for Pink Flamingos that did not include scenes from the film, so in that vein, I won’t give away more about the movie. I will say that no serious fan of movies can go without seeing it.

8 of 10
A

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

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Review: "The Evil Dead" Still Givin' Head to Horror Fans (Happy B'day, Sam Raimi)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 125 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux

The Evil Dead (1981)
OPENING DATE: January 1, 1983
Running time: 85 minutes (1 hour, 25 minutes)
MPAA – NC-17 for substantial graphic horror violence and gore (1994 theatrical release)
WRITER/DIRECTOR: Sam Raimi
PRODUCER: Robert G. Tapert
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Tim Philo
EDITOR: Edna Ruth Paul

HORROR with elements of comedy

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Hal Delrich, Betsy Baker, and Sarah York

Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his four friends are college students on vacation, and their destination is a cabin (an actual abandoned cabin that director Sam Raimi reportedly later burned to the ground) remotely located in the Tennessee woods. What they don’t know is that those very same woods are full of slumbering demonic spirits that are ever-present and ever listening. They lie in wait for the recitation of an ancient incantation that will allow them to possess the living. The student quintet finds a reel-to-reel recording of that same incantation in the cabin’s cellar, and they unwittingly play the recording. One by one, Ash’s four friends succumb to these merciless spirits, leaving him alone in a struggle to save his body from possession and becoming one of the evil dead.

Long before they produced the “Hercules” and “Xena: Warrior Princess” TV shows, Sam Raimi wrote and directed and Robert Tapert produced one of the most shockingly original horror films of the last quarter of 20th century, The Evil Dead. If horror movies can be funny, then no truly scary movie was as funny as The Evil Dead. The film’s primary influences were obvious (writer H.P. Lovecraft and filmmaker George A. Romero), but Raimi’s script created a bastard child of Lovecraft and Romero that wouldn’t submit to being properly reared. It’s insane. It’s gory. It’s frickin’ hilarious.

Using the few resources he had, Raimi combined stop-motion photography, homemade gory effects, and cheap, but frightening monster makeup. Perhaps the element the best served The Evil Dead was the Raimi’s penchant for using an active camera. He mounted a camera on a 2x4, and he and actor Bruce Campbell would each hold an end and run headlong through the set. This created Raimi’s signature visual clue that evil moving running through the woods. The camera also tilts, spins, dips, swerves, flips over, and generally does whatever it takes to create the sense that demonic forces are constantly moving and creeping around – always in attack mode.

The performances are great, in particularly Bruce Campbell’s combination of half-madness and half over-acting. However, his cohorts (and the many stand-ins actors or “shemps” as they were called, who played the possessed students in the second half of the film) attack their roles as demonic zombies with relish – all in all creating some of the scariest film creeps in horror movie history. No one can be a true fan of horror films without having seen The Evil Dead, regardless if in the end he or she didn’t like it. The film is simply a viewing requirement for scary flick fans.

8 of 10
A

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Review: "Crash" Crashes into Itself (Happy B'day, David Cronenberg)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 45 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux

Crash (1996)
Release date: March 21, 1997 (USA)
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Canada/UK
Running time: 100 minutes (1 hour, 40 minutes)
MPAA – NC-17 for numerous explicit sex scenes
PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg
WRITER: David Cronenberg (based upon the novel by J.G. Ballard)
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Peter Suschitzky
EDITOR: Ronald Sanders
Cannes winner

DRAMA/THRILLER

Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger Rosanna Arquette, and Peter MacNeill

After being seriously scarred in a near-fatal collision (that was his fault and cost a man his life), television director James Ballard (James Spader) finds his soul mate in Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), fellow crash survivor and wife of the man killed in the accident. Anxious to connect with the widow, Ballard joins Dr. Remington in a study of cars, sex, and death in which they focus on the point where the three meet. Together, with a band of misfits that include Ballard’s wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), and Vaughn (Elias Koteas), a fetishist who recreates and eroticizes famous car crash deaths (James Dean and Jane Mansfield’s seem to be his favorites), they probe the eroticism of the automobile and the sexual violence of auto accidents.

To call David Cronenberg’s Crash “weird” would be kind of dumb and simple. To call it an obtuse art project would be close. The film continues Cronenberg’s look at the effects of technology, in this case machines, in particularly the automobile, on the human body. The film seems to take place in the near future, sort of a tomorrow or the day after that. Sensations increasingly have become the method of communication between humans, and mechanical things intrigue people, in particularly how they can be an extension of the human body and also extend perception of or enhance sensation. Cronenberg gives us lots of sex scenes that involve cars, car crashes, and death as aphrodisiacs.

Those who like film as art with an emphasis on the visual sensation or the visual communication of film will find interest in this. However, Crash too often comes across as a boring exercise in creating mildly disturbing images. Sometimes, those images are disgusting, but in a way that makes you roll your eyes. Still, Cronenberg is, as always, daring in the way he challenges audiences to come with him as explores the darker side of humanity merging with machinery.

6 of 10
B

NOTES:
1996 Cannes Film Festival: 1 win: “Jury Special Prize” (David Cronenberg); 1 nomination: “Golden Palm” (David Cronenberg)

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Review: "Requiem for a Dream" is Perhaps the Best Picture of 2000

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 59 (of 2005) by Leroy Douresseaux

Requiem for a Dream (2000) – NC-17 version
Running time: 102 minutes (1 hour, 42 minutes)
MPAA – R for intense depiction of drug addiction, graphic sexuality, strong language, and some violence (edited version)
DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky
WRITERS: Hubert Selby, Jr. and Darren Aronofsky (from the by Hubert Selby, Jr.)
PRODUCERS: Eric Watson and Palmer West
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Matthew Libatique
EDITOR: Jay Rabinowitz
Academy Award nominee

DRAMA/CRIME with elements of horror

Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Christopher McDonald, Louise Lasser, Ajay Naidu, Te’ron A. O’Neal, Denise Dowse, and Keith David

With films like Gladiator, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Traffic taking all the attention in 2000, it was easy for a far superior work of cinematic art to get lost, but hopefully serious film watchers will discover Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly filmed tale, Requiem for a Dream, on home video and DVD. Like Ang Lee’s work in Crouching Tiger, Aronofsky’s effort in his film is a dizzying achievement of directorial achievement, though on a smaller scale.

The film follows four drug addicts living in Brighton Beach, in the shadow of the crumbling Coney Island amusement park. A mother, her son, and his two friends find their drug-induced utopias slowly destroyed, as their addictions grow stronger. Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) is a lonely television-obsessed widow, who gets a call that she has a chance to be a game show contestant. Determined to fit in the red dress she wore to her son’s high school graduation (when her husband was still alive and seemingly the last time the family publicly showed a happy face), she sees a doctor about loosing weight in 30 days. He gives her three prescriptions, a mixture of speed and downers. Initially, Sara can’t adjust to what the speed does to her, but she soon adjusts to the jittery feelings it gives her. However, when her body adjusts and starts to crave the high, she begins to take too many of the pills. Before, all her anxieties (growing older, grieving for her late husband, worrying about her son’s life, loneliness, etc.) and her increasing dependency on drugs cause her to go over the edge mentally.

Meanwhile, Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), and his best pal Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans) are taking heroin and cocaine. Harry and Tyrone also start to make a lot of money dealing drugs, but a gang war dries up the dope supply and drives up the prices, making it difficult for the trio to get their fix. That in turn drives each of them to the depths of their souls and into the bowels of a cruel society that exploits their need.

The four leads are simple incredible; this is career defining work. Ms. Burstyn opens her soul to absorb the text and transforms it into a character that emits truth. Then, even more difficult, she has to bare her soul to the viewer, and her performance is so fierce and the character’s situation so scary that the combination could scorch your soul. Any Caucasian actor that would have given the kind of performance that Marlon Wayans gives here would have had the pick of heavyweight dramatic roles offered to him after Requiem; instead, filmgoers can only see him in lowbrow comedies. Jennifer Connelly also comes into her own here. She’s eventually win an Oscar for her supporting role in A Beautiful Mind, but Requiem was where she showed her ability to deliver in intense dramas. Jared Leto, as usual, shows how passionate he is about acting, especially building a character. He eats up the screen, and his presence is like sunburst on film.

Aronofsky and his collaborators used a number of in-camera effects with digital special effects, special cameras, and editing technique to create a world of drug addiction, hard core criminal activity, and institutional callous cruelty that is real as the flesh on your bones. However, Aronofsky isn’t alone in his talents. There are any number of great directors and skilled filmmakers who use tricks and techniques to make visually appealing, surprising, and shocking films. What makes this work stand out is that Aronofsky went to great limits to make you feel. Thus, you’ll love it or hate because Aronofsky pushes you inside Requiem for a Dream, and you can’t sit back. The viewer has to be involved, and he or she has to care. A viewer has no choice but to have a strong feeling by what he or she experiences via this truly engaging and gripping movie.

10 of 10

NOTES:
2001 Academy Awards: 1 nomination: “Best Actress in a Leading Role” (Ellen Burstyn)

2001 Black Reel Awards: 1 nomination: “Theatrical - Best Supporting Actor” (Marlon Wayans)

2001 Golden Globes: 1 nomination: “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama” (Ellen Burstyn)

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