i saw this together with my gf at the theater and was bored and repulsed by it
so obviously i dont get it
if anyone gets it and is kind enough to share it on the net, that would be real nice!!!
and now for something completely different
greetings!
bart from belgium
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Yes, I agree...I liked his two previous flicks but felt like there was nobody you could like, respect, sympathise with or find interesting in this one, and so it was an exercise in nihilism.
Luckily it was short, so it's only 90 minutes out of my life I'll never get back!
Hmm... not nearly as repulsive as Happiness which I loved but did leave me pretty messed up. Let's see how well I can sum up storytelling.
First of all it's a movie about how we view ourselves vs reality. We think we are interesting, we think we are open minded, we think we are indestructible... but in the end all the characters in the film live in very poorly constructed fantasies that fall apart with just a little outside preassure.
First story: These kids are idiots. They are writting poorly constructed essays on their own lives and trying to pass it off as ficiton, trying to call themselves writters. What the teacher has sex with his student (concentual sex in my opinion, just not what she expected) she uses it as an exuce to make herself more interesting, to turn her own misguided, racist desire for her teacher into a tragedy. And she get's humiliated, which I dont think is a cop out.
Second movie in less words: Scooby exemplifies lot's of people I know... they expect success to fall on their lap just because every thing else has and well it dosent work that way, they have no idea how it works. Still dosent stop them from dreaming mediocre dreams. It take's some stabs at american beaty, some stabs at the pretension of filmakers, some at youth and so on but my favorite was that creepy little kid. Even though such a character is a total deux ex (practically the director entering the story to change things, he's too weird to be "real") he totally represents the sick selfishness of the white, well off suburbia represented in this movie.
So the moral? Dont make a hispanic maid angry.
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It seems to me that this movie is less about itself, and more about your reactions to it in many varied ways.
It explores and tries to debunk viscious stereotypes. Such as that of the big scary black rapist in "Fiction" by showing how ludocrous our stereotypes look when played out in real life. They don't make a whole lot of sense. That's the point of "fiction".
Another example of "Storytelling" asking its audience to take a look at itself occurs during "Non-Fiction". The film stops dead in its tracks when Consuelo, the disgruntled deposed maid, breaks into the house of her former employers, severs a gas line, and turns the stove on high. The camera turns to a broad shot of the facade of the house. The audience is completely expecting for the house to burst into flames, but it doesn't happen, and it's just an abrasive hault in the film for the average American "guts and gore" movie-goer. This is merely to torture our own morbid psyches.
This is a really interesting film that I intend to watch again.
It's funny, i actually found the characters in this film a bit less unlikeable that Solondz's previous films. Well, not entirely, but Scooby was at least just a dumb kid, not some pervert.
Actually, i found the characters in Welcome to the Dollhouse the most unlikeable out of all the films. I didn't even feel that sorry for Dawn, which is maybe why it's my least-favorite of them.
Happiness was of course filled with a lot of total creepy creeps, but Joy wasn't really a bad person, just sort of pathetic. Even Philip Seymour Hoffman's character had a glimmer of humanity.
http://www.ymdb.com/user_top20_view.asp?usersid=11491
Maybe the movie is trying to tell us that none of us are perfect or 'good'. Maybe it's a response to average Hollywood film where everybody's good looking, smart, and in the end, they do the right thing.. In real life there are seldom good or bad people, everybody is selfish at some level. I liked Todd Solondz's quote:
"If you want sympathetic characters it's easy enough to do, you just give someone cancer and of course we'll all feel horribly sad and sorry. You make anyone a victim and people feel that way. ... I think that it's only by acknowledging the flaws, the foibles, the failings and so forth of who we are that we can in fact fully embrace the all of who we are. People say I'm cruel or that the film's cruel, but I think rather it exposes the cruelty and I think that certainly the capacity for cruelty is the most difficult, the most painful thing for any of us to acknowledge."
Normally you could've sympathised with the maid, but you didn't. Why ? She was fat, ugly and seemingly stupid. And she was cruel in the end. Was there really a single 'bad person' ? Maybe the kid, but then again maybe he was just naive and young. Did he deserve to die? It's much easier to sympathise with the death/defeat of the average Hollywood bad guy who is strong, 'evil' and clearly deserves it. Usually the moral is so black and white. (I wonder if it has some effect on the way the Americans seem think nowdays..)
Anyway apart from that, Storytelling didn't in my opinion have enough conclusions or some final point. It did seem a bit hollow. Some funny moments also but nothing compared to Happiness.
All of the preceding posts make sense to me, but I still have one question that the original poster didn't address: Why did Solondz decide that there had to be two stories in the film? Any thoughts?
"Jerry Lewis? You thought that was Jerry Lewis?"
-Tommy Basilio, "Trees Lounge"
what i gathered was that it was a statement about fiction and non-fiction. the characters in the fiction writing class wrote about their own lives and experiences, word for word as they actually happened. So, the fiction was more non-fiction.
in the non-fiction section, toby was very biased and skewed the story of this family to fit his own pre-conceived notions of being a teenager. rather than actually following a wide range to teenagers from different backgrounds he only used one person to make it easier to go along with his idea which was more entertaining than the truth. so, his non-fiction became fiction within the process of trying to make his documentary entertaining and likable.
so, sometimes what we call fiction has more truth than what we call non-fiction. does that make any sense?
I think you've got it. The writing class were able to confess things and recount events they would have otherwise not done so- but it was okay because it was 'fiction'. However, in 'non'fiction' we supress the truth of the situation and thus it becomes fiction (I.E Toby's subjective perception on the Livingstons).
shareIts seems like self justification and an attack on critics and inferiors. In that respect, the movie succeeds.
Its about the art of storytelling, and what the director thinks it should be.
lugaruclone, i agree with you 100%. i couldn't have said it better.
"Happieness, something in my own place. I'm stood here naked and smiling I feel no disgrace"
I'll do you the justice of assuming its meaning and humour were lost in translation.
shareI love the end of the movie(if u haven't seen it, i suggest u stop reading)...
I havent seen it in a while, so I am probably not using the exact wording, but Scooby gets back and is realizing what has happened to his family. The director in the movie is asking Scooby "How does this make you feel?" And scooby says something along the lines of "It doesn't matter, your movie is a hit" and then it just ends.
That spoke to me so much. Even in real life with our real problems, when things become news worthy, the media gets involved and alhough the story they are reporting begins as non-fiction, a lot of times elements of fiction get added by dirty reporters, conservative/unconservative news stations etc. The of course in big cases movies are made off of people real life non-fiction tragedies and people profit off of horrific reality. It makes you think about when and if the media actually cares and when they just care if "their movie is a hit".
loved it.