Director/Writer: Todd Solondz
Stars: Jane Adams, Jon Lovitz, Dylan Baker and Philip Seymour Hoffman
Year: 1998
IMDB
My Rating: 9/10
The humor in this film is not even black anymore, it's the new dead humor! This is an outrageously funny film, and the film did it so subtly. And it's the little thing that the actors do or say, that keeps the humor going. I pretty much laugh the whole way through. Also, the cast is excellent!
Happiness is a good topic, let's talk about it. What is happiness? Falling in love? Being in love? Doing the things you like? We can spend our life looking for happiness and never find it, or it appears like magic for that few moments, then your life is washed over with sadness or boredom. I think it is fundamentally wrong to emphasize seeking for happiness in our life. We need to accept life is a suffering process, and there'll be no salvation. Living is a constant suffering, until the day Death comes, which puts an end to all suffering. Then, why do I live? what for? Good question, I'm not sure, but perhaps curiosity. It may kill a cat, but it keeps me alive.
Back to the film, you see everything, everything going on inside the four walls, a middle age single male jerking off against the wall, a hearty talk between father and son about "come", a woman who kills a doorman and cuts him into pieces and calls it "crime of passion", slowing dancing to "all out of love" by air supply... etc. This film really presents an profound idea of people are the same, the same pathetic beings, desiring the undesirables, loving the wrong person, trapped into our own fantasies. Still we set so much distance between you and me, between the beautiful and the ugly, between the righteous and the wrong... could we ever be free? No, that's why we're doomed to be pathetic, to suffering.
Last thing, I'm surprised that this film has not been mentioned much! Well, it happens a lot.
