Word: solondz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other movie has, as its exalting emotional climax, the spectacle of one man helping another to pee into a tin can? Working as a horrors-of-war screed and a depiction of men under impossible stress, Lebanon is a salutary, unrelentingly claustrophobic nightmare. Life During Wartime, directed by Todd Solondz...
...central scene in Todd Solondz's 1998 drama Happiness was a bedroom conversation between a man and his 11-year-old son. Because the boy was frustrated that he hadn't achieved his first orgasm, and the father was a child molester, it hit audiences like a jolt of electroshock therapy. Eleven years later, Solondz returns to this extended family - three sisters and the men and kids in their lives - but with a new cast...
Most directors take conventional scenarios and lay on comedy or pathos with a trowel. Solondz (who also did Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling and Palindromes) creates worlds suppurating with unspeakable domestic horror and lends them the benison of tragicomic sympathy. Whatever domestic crimes the people close to you may have committed, in the end they're family and you have to try to understand them. This sense of connection, despite all, and the pitch-perfect playing of Solondz's large cast, makes Life During Wartime one of the year's best films, in whatever year it ultimately finds theatrical release...
...That Obscure Object of Desire, Luis Buñuel famously cast two actresses to play one character (though it wasn't to suggest a dual nature; it was because - who knows why, the man was a surrealist). Two years ago, in Palindromes, Todd Solondz had the lead character, a 12-year-old girl, played by eight actors (including a boy and two adults). Haynes' use makes the most sense, at least the kind of sense a filmmaker can pitch at a backers' meeting, since Dylan did have many lives, all of his own creation...
...stand being a part of Solondz’s world, this movie is worth seeing for all its faults. Just remember, that when I asked Solondz, in light of all the unhappiness rampant throughout his films, “What brings you joy?” he refused to answer. Instead, he replied that only “joy is so much more keenly experienced the greater your misery has been… that’s the upside of misery...