Sept. 29, 2002 - 3:45 am
after watching Storytelling (2001) a few days ago, i decided to go on ahead and see the other Todd Solondz film i hadn't seen. you get lots of warnings before you watch this film. the box even says it's for mature audiences. then you've got your friends who have seen it, and whoever you're checking it out from. "that movie's got some bad stuff in it."
the film centers around a family of women and their various relationships with men. one of the 3 grown up daughters has Philip Seymour Hoffman stalking her and calling her saying dirty things. another one is married to a pederast who talks to his son quite a bit about masturbating. the third is horribly unhappy and unsatisfied with herself and ends up falling for the first man she comes in contact with. the mother of the family is trying to deal with a husband who wants to separate from her and who she thinks is probably cheating on her.
this film has some of the good concepts that Storytelling had. mostly good acting. some is excellent (Dylan Baker and Rufus Read as the father and son are awesome). Lara Flynn Boyle is terrible though. not sure what they were thinking there. one thing i really didn't enjoy about the film was that the story got spread really thin at parts. some of the conflicts were much more developed than others and i didn't feel as though the actual unhappiness was very even between the various situations. it felt rather forced i guess. like Solondz wanted to tell a bunch of stories at once and some of them were awesome, but he just sort of filled in the gaps and made up a couple of lesser stories to occur at the same time. for example, the mother and father split up story i thought was worthless. i thought the beautiful sister's story was fairly trite too, except when it involved her relationship with Hoffman's character.
this movie is meant to challenge people and to get them thinking about sexuality sort of in the same way that Storytelling was trying to get us to think about fact vs. fiction. it's a difficult task and it involves shocking your audience a lot in order to make them actually sit back and think about how they feel. and not everyone is receptive to that type of stimulus. if you think it might be useful to question your values on sexuality though, you might check out Happiness. not an excellent film by any means, but it does make you think a bit.