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| Released: |
1998 |
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| Genre: |
BLACK COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
140 |
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ANTI Reviews
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| | Todd Solondz's new film is called Happiness even though the only people in it who consider themselves happy are either transparently ignorant or morally bankrupt. This should give you some idea of what passes for wit in this scabrous, sophomoric and overrated put-down fest that wants to pass itself off as a comedy of modern manners. Through two-plus hours, Solondz posits paper-thin targets for his self-congratulatory indignation and then peppers them with hip little barbs. Its daring, you see... The problem with Happiness isn't the filmmaking. It's the writing and, specifically, the soulless superiority behind it. The film flits from pathetic story to pathetic story with the sole apparent intention of rubbing some other poor straw man's nose in the mess that Solondz has concocted for him or her. It doesn't matter, finally, that Happiness is a skillful film because it is so patently a craven and jejune one. Solondz, who is pushing 40, comes off as Holden Caulfield might have if he'd grown up to write soap operas. Everyone is a phoney, his film tells us with adolescent certainty. Don’t look now, pal, but that lens you're looking through can also work as a mirror. | | | | (Shawn Levy, Portland Oregonian) | | Graphic, disgusting and overwrought. This movie is all the rage, a prize winner at Cannes that hates everybody and everything, wherein the end product of masturbation sticks to the walls and a New Jersey patriarch rapes his son's 11-year-old best friend. It's a dirty movie, played for uncomfortable laughs, and if we don't get it, we're just not hip... Shot in the minimalist, long-take, static style currently in vogue among rabble-rousers (Neil LaBute in his two films), most of the characters don't progress - they're portraits rather than in-depth studies. | | | | (G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Examiner) |
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