Storytelling (2001)

This movie Stinks!

Don't even waste your time!! The movie made NO sense what-so-ever to me!! Its a dark comedy....do what???? I did not laugh NOT once!! Not even smile... I just want to tell you--- it sucks! That is all. August 10, 2008

...storytelling

Well. Not a film that I would recommend to anyone except serious film buffs who can stomach some pretty rough material. I barely made it through one scene...however, it's tamer than Solondz's previous films.

One can sense that Solondz is merely attacking his critics, and is using satire to do so. He pulls no punches, and as usual, remains as cynical as ever. The performances are great all around. The film is split into two parts, "Fiction" and "Non-fiction", which seem unrelated at first. It's not until after the film ends, that you can pick up on the subtle connections between the two. Once again, not a film that I would recommend to just anyone, but if you are familiar with Solondz at all, it's worth a shot...however, there are two scenes here that are rough and a bit gratuitous in nature. One could have been edited out all together, as it seemed to exist only for shock value and worked against the context of the film itself. That is my only criticism.

March 27, 2008

Trite stories told badly

The purpose of this review is to save someone 87 minutes of life. Spend that time elsewhere than with this film.
Before writing this review, I required myself to read all 68 previous reviews of the film posted on [...]. I usually allow myself this privilege only after I write a review. I want to record what I need to say before I allow others their fair say. I want to trust what I think, what I feel; I no longer want others--be they scholars or celebrities or athletes or family or friends--to think for me. Let me think, let me express, then let me consider the thoughts of others.
This time, though, my thoughts were so clear. This is trash--vulgar trash.
Am I surprised that people loved this movie? Yes. How did they record their impressions? One wrote about the "Sartrean power struggles" in the movie. If that phrase makes sense to you, perhaps this movie will also.
So I cast my vote with the haters of this movie, the critics who are forced to give it one star because we are not allowed to give it no stars, the critics who wrote the following:
"Less real than Sponge Bob Squarepants. . ."
"There isn't a laugh in it. . ."
"Arrogantly refuses to tell a cohesive story. . ."
"Simply mean-spirited. . ."
"More the illusion of substance. . .than substance. . ."
"It. . .offended me, bored me, confused me. . .very rarely did I feel entertained."
Save yourself.

March 25, 2008

Everyone always has a story to tell.

Todd Solondz's `Welcome to the Dollhouse' showed comic/absurd promise; his masturbation scene in `Happiness' overstepped the boundary of film taste but got everyone's attention. While I didn't enjoy "Storytelling" as much as I did the Director's two previous films, "Happiness" and "Welcome to The Dollhouse," Solondz continues to amaze with his depictions of just how awkward true life really is. As always, he masterfully shows the oft times tactless, cynical, transparent motivations of everyday suburban life and combines them with outrageous situations, giving a humorous view into the myriad of interesting quirky characters he creates. As with Happiness, Storytelling has no background characters. Each character gets fully explored in a way that no matter how familiar or foreign a specific character's behavior might be to you, you can't help but understand their motivations. Solondz can develop over 10 characters in 88 minutes while most conventional Hollywood films fail to portray just one in any given 3 hour "epic".

Selma Blair and Leo Fitzpatrick give incredible performances in the first segment of this film titled "Fiction". John Goodman is at his best here in the film's second segment "Non-fiction", not to mention it was a good to see Julie Haggerty in it.

One of the film's most honest moments (and there are MANY) comes in the beginning of the Non-Fiction segment, during a phone call Paul Giamatti gives to a female classmate he hadn't spoken to since high school. While hilarious, I couldn't help but feel bad for his character, which gets fleshed out in the almost confessional tone of the conversation (which of course, he blunders).

I don't want to dig far into the plot because the elements of shock and surprise that are Solondz bread and butter should only be revealed by others, suffice it to say I recommend this movie very highly. I look forward to anything this director does.
January 17, 2008

Different and disturbing

Storytelling is another highly enjoyable, if typically disturbing work from the New York director Todd Solondz. His films, from his first breakthrough `Welcome to the Dollhouse' to the recent `Palindromes', have all been thoughtful and controversial dark comedies. In my view, the comedic moments have become a little scarcer and less funny in his last two films (this one and Pallindromes), but the philosophical ruminations have been taken to another level. Here, as in Pallindromes, the director explores in a highly original way, the seemingly inescapable but ultimately cruel and futile need of individuals to impose artificial narrative structure on the lives of themselves and others. As the abusive black tutor in the first of the film's two `stories' puts it : `Our stories run better when they have a beginning, a middle and an end, but as soon as we try to frame them in words and meanings we must admit that they become fiction'.

Solondz's world is a dark one, a world in which all human relationships are abusive Sartrean power struggles, where even our very identities are attempts to fix `the other' into a false straitjacket in order to increase our own power to define and control the world. These battles are fought often enough through primitive means of physical or sexual abuse, but they are always ultimately decided by the more sophisticated armouries of words, labels and meanings. His films provoke and unsettle above all because he refuses to fix himself to any one moral interpretation or `camp', right or left, and even dares to challenge the left's sanctity of the victim/abuser relationship. Solondz has been criticised for raising the unspeakably ugly head of paedophilia above the dinner party discussion table yet here he explores the female `converse' of negrophilia in a similarly stark and honest manner. The black male tutor at the creative writing school has a penchant for sexually degrading his young white female students. We are shown, however, that he is only in a position to exploit his perversion because those same women (like all the white females in the school) sexually objectify and fetishise a racist and harmful stereotype of the Afro-american male as a violent brute with a huge penis. That the holding back of the black American male in contemporary society is no longer the result of the evil racism of the white American male, but in fact lies now more in the grotesque sexual appetites and fetishes of American women is a typically bitter pill for the left leaning cinema goer to be asked to swallow. But for this hugely talented film director, nothing should be black and white and any attempt to pretend otherwise is mere storytelling. August 30, 2007

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