Issue #17/72, October 16, 1999 
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This is bullshit. For once, it looked like I might have something worthwhile to discuss, a positively good movie whose only apparent shortcoming is its lame-ass, edgily cutesy indie comix poster (Germany, for once, at least has some better sense; see the poster released there, immediately below). I'm talking of course about Todd Solondz's Happiness. Which is Sadly. Instead of the expected first (non-festival) showing Monday evening, those of us who had been waiting expectantly were instead greeted with yet another screening of The Faculty. In other words, it was the same old "Fuck you, Mr. Moviegoer" as always. God I love this crazy little town.
As in his previous Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz depicts some decidedly imperfect New Jersey suburbanites with unflinching realism and yet still maintains a modicum of sympathy for his characters, portraying everything from your standard issue asshole behavior to dirty-old-man-molesting-young-boys type perversion with a deep understanding of motivation that makes it impossible simply to put them into the usual, facile categories--mindless bully, chicken child molester, tax attorney, or what have you. At least that's what I've heard anyway.
The cool thing about Welcome to the Dollhouse, aside from the fact that the usually untouchable angelic geek character was in that film thoroughly unpleasant (although understandably so), was the way it was pretty much guaranteed to be a somewhat uncomfortable viewing experience for just about everyone. You'd have to be pretty far gone not to feel at least partially complicit in the nasty goings on and--by extension--your own capacity for cruelty. Presumably, Happiness will have much the same effect. At the very least, it has basically confounded most critics (a pretty homogenous bunch, I'll grant you), who feel they have no choice but to praise the film highly but clearly don't feel entirely comfortable doing so. If Solondz has done his job right, we ordinary viewers will experience a similar response.
And I think it's worth noting, in light of the fact that nine out of ten reviewers seem to have picked up on this alleged fact, that the title is only an ironic one in the '90s scare-quoted Alanis Morissette sense of the word. While there may not be all that much Happiness up there on the screen, the film nevertheless is very much about the pursuit thereof. However, I wouldn't recommend trying to explain that to some well-meaning twit who tries to tell you how the title is "ironic." He'll just think you're some kind of pedantic dork and, possibly, a pederast.
Which leaves us, then, with EDtv. In case you can't tell by the title, this another one of those postmodern media invasion flicks. But the really bad news is that this one's directed by Ron Howard, which of course means it's about "regular" people. The problem is that, although Howard may know a thing or to about the media invading one's life, he has been a Hollywood fuck (a pretty geeky one, granted, but a Hollywood fuck nonetheless) practically since birth, meaning he has had next to no contact with actual living, breathing human organisms. Combine this with Opie's well-documented saccharine dramatic proclivities and you get a not quite watchable movie that seems ever more evil the more persistently it tries to convince you it's just a piece of harmless fiction with maybe a little well-meaning social commentary added for flavoring or something.
Not that the actual regular folks seem to mind, though. I've actually heard people describe this as a black comedy. Presumably, they were talking about the scene where Ellen DeGeneres is sipping a margarita while going at it with her Thighmaster. Talk about nasty. The only other laugh-out-loud funny thing about EDtv is the blue collar, white-trash Texas transplant family it has living in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco. I guess maybe Ron Howard has been watching too much of MTV's The Real World.
To get back to that social commentary I was talking about, part of this comes arrives through some unwelcome cameos by the likes of Michael Moore (still growing), George Plimpton (who, together with Norman Mailer, tried his best to ruin the almost impossible-to-ruin When We Were Kings), and other media drones, all of whom are busy trying to outdo each other with ironic (no scare quotes this time) self caricatures on some bogus tough-decisions-at-a-crossroads type panel discussion show. Jesus Christ.
Matthew McConaughey, in the lead role, is not nearly as bad as usual; Woody Harrelson as his brother--the same unpleasant lecherous hick oblivious to his own odiousness he has been playing ever since graduated from Cheers to the movies all those years ago--is. Dennis Hopper and Martin Landau provide some able but brief supporting performances. Elizabeth Hurley is also hanging about, but in the scene where she attempts to fuck McConaughey on her dining room table, the backs of her thighs look unpleasantly muscular, as if her personal trainer has her doing inappropriate leg exercises. I hope that something is done about this soon. I could not countenance another bad-thigh Hurley appearance.
There are plenty of other annoying things about EDtv, but I think I'll just sum it up succinctly here by saying that it's apparently a remake of some French movie having to do with nineteen kings, and this new script was written by a pair of cretins who usually write dialogue for Billy Crystal. One of them is even named Bobo. In other words, there are better ways of spending your time. Do take time out to see Happiness, though. Next issue... back to speed, it is hoped.
