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Palindromes (2004)
One of Solondz' best
Having seen most of Solondz' films (including the tepid Storytelling and the frankly unfortunate Life During Wartime), I think Palindromes may be his second finest, after Happiness. It isn't as funny as Happiness, but it is also less judgmental of Western humanity than that film (a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective), and has plenty of other things going for it besides.
Just about all I knew about Palindromes going in was that it was to some degree based on or inspired by Solondz' best-known film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. Unlike his more recent Life During Wartime, which fails because it tries (unconvincingly) to make too many various direct connections to its "prequel" Happiness, Palindromes is much less literal or obvious in those connections. Despite the occasional character reference to / recurrence from Dollhouse, it succeeds as an entirely separate and independent work, and one that I personally find much more sophisticated and interesting than the original that semi-inspired it.
Unlike most of the IMDb reviewers here, I was also totally unaware of the "multiple Avivas" device going into the movie. Quite late in the film, once Solondz starts alternating his various Avivas within the same "chapter," I finally realized the multiple actresses playing Aviva were all intended to be representations of *the same character*. To that point, I'd viewed them as separate but effectively interchangeable characters simply sharing the same name, along with a handful of obvious motivations and personal connections (even the fact that they wore the same outfits didn't throw me a clue; I figured it was just an attempt at semi-opaque metaphor, or maybe just an interesting way of improving continuity).
I felt pretty dumb about this when I got it all sorted, but perhaps I had been biased going in by the more disconnected vignettes that comprise Solondz' prior effort, the questionably uneven Storytelling. I ultimately think it was a good thing anyway, as it allowed me to experience additional layers of possible meaning that I know I would not have experienced had I known the full story throughout the film.
Palindromes is much less about black humor than Solondz' '90s films, but it's not to say there aren't quite a few flinch-worthy funny moments. By far, the hardest stretch to sit through-- but also the most entertaining-- is the long chunk of Palindromes that takes place at the Sunshines' compound for disabled, brainwashed children. This interminable but wonderful chapter has some of the funniest / skin-crawlingest scenes involving kids that have ever been laid to non-documentary film (upping the ante, without the humor: the real kids interviewed in Jesus Camp).
Mostly, Palindromes is a semi-realistic and touching art film about teen identity and sexuality, thankfully without the creepy quasi-pedo voyeurism of Larry Clark. There are plenty of moments where you'll find yourself shaking your head and saying "no" under your breath, but unless you live in the kind of permanent state of denial that would find you rooting for the likes of the Sunshine "family," it's an eminently watchable and moving film with an interesting and well-crafted linear narrative that comes together at just the right time.
Palindromes deserves to be seen by more people, and I can see it being much more broad in its mainstream appeal than much of Solondz' earlier work. I really hope Solondz can find his way back to making films like this and Happiness in his future filmmaking.
Life During Wartime (2009)
Let's hope the next Solondz film isn't a "spiritual sequel"
First off, while I'm not a fan of everything Solondz has done, I consider Happiness one of my all-time favorite films. Thus, I was really looking forward to Life During Wartime, but after the film was over, I ended up wishing that Solondz had just left Happiness alone. It feels like a direct-to-video exploitation release, or maybe even an especially polished but ultimately off-model fanfic selection in an alternate universe where Happiness somehow holds the stature of Harry Potter.
I am OK with the decision (probably forced, given the current stature of folks like Philip Seymour Hoffman) to recast everyone involved. But given that this is effectively billed as a spiritual sequel, it's hard to get past some of the resulting serious discrepancies in performance and character. Ally Sheedy, Allison Janney, Claran Hines and Michael K. Williams all turn in otherwise-good performances that unfortunately have very little in common with their characters' original personalities, making believable continuation impossible. Dylan Snyder's Timmy represents a new character that effectively replaces the role of Billy in Happiness, but he's nowhere near as believable or likable as that character was.
Shirley Henderson, in particular, totally misses the tone and purpose of Jane Adams in the role of Joy, who was perhaps the only "sympathetic" character in the original (other than Billy). We no longer experience Joy as a sweet, lovable granola-crunchy dreamer and world-worn lifelong loser. Instead, Henderson comes off as some kind of generally-emotionless whispering wee faerie with none of Adams' warmth or ability to generate pathos. I do, however, greatly enjoy Paul Reubens' spot-on performance in the place of Jon Lovitz's original Andy-- although Andy's role in this movie is now inexplicably central, given how little he really mattered to Joy past the first half-hour in Happiness.
It's hard for a Happiness fan to get past the labored and extremely drawn-out exposition that results from all these character discrepancies. You get the feeling that Solondz is having to take unusual pains to catch us up on the story, and to get us to buy New Actor Y in the role of Old Actor X. The movie starts to finally lift up out of these dregs in the last half hour or so, just in time to make us wonder what the point was, and/or why he didn't just create an entirely new universe with his entirely new cast to save himself (and us) all the trouble. I can't imagine a viewer who has never seen Happiness would find its first two-thirds any more satisfying for all the effort.
Most troublingly for those who can't help but compare (and appropriately so, given the "spiritual sequel" billing), Happiness is a darkly hilarious movie, with most of the humor coming from the unspoken sadness and/or maliciousness of its desperate characters' interactions. Life During Wartime simply isn't funny, and isn't similarly "subtle." It's melodramatic, almost soap-opera-like in tone, with few of the wonderfully dissonant, squirm-in-your-chair moments that made Solondz' '90s works so entertaining (and so fun to show to the uninitiated). It often feels like we're being hit over the head with the "purpose" of each character in Wartime, rather than letting their actions / words simply speak for themselves as it was in Happiness.
This might have been a somewhat OK movie if it had been a fresh start with no baggage from Solondz' masterwork. Obviously, it's hard for any director / producer / screenwriter to escape from their widely-beloved past works if they choose to do something different. But in this case, Solondz actually *chose* to bring that baggage along, and dares fans of the original to make comparisons (as is immediately evident from even the opening scene and credits to anyone who remembers Happiness). I'm not sure if this was a cynical effort on the part of Solondz-- who has had documented troubles getting funding for his 00s movies-- to cash in on the relatively small Happiness fanbase, giving them a movie that they "have to see," even though these two films ultimately have very little in common.
Solondz' more recent work in general has been disappointing to me, but his misguided effort to "continue" Happiness has been by far the biggest and most bitter disappointment yet, failing to add anything new, interesting or even tone-appropriate to the universe he wants us to revisit. I desperately hope he's done making "spiritual sequels" now, and will have something really new to say (hopefully as funny as his old stuff) when his next project rolls around.
Velvet Goldmine (1998)
Actually, this is merely OK
I saw this movie during its original 1998 run and liked it a heck of a lot. I recently took the DVD home from my local library for a repeat viewing and found it lacking in a heck of a lot of ways. Since it places style over substance, I don't think the film has dated very well at all, which is frightening since it's only six years old; somehow it feels much older than that, which is not a good thing in a film that tries to preserve an already-dated movement for all posterity. In particular, the "music video" sequences are not only pretty anachronistic and/or pointless but look absolutely silly now. There are sizeable goofs, gaping plot holes, what little plot there is trods on and on, and in general I feel like I'm being spoon-fed and cliché-beaten far too often while watching this film. The Tommy Stone character, a sort of ridiculous, generic 80s pop-superstar caricature whose musical style or appeal is never shown or explained whatsoever (while every third person on the street is wearing a Tommy Stone mask-- they didn't even do this for Michael Jackson, yo!), is pretty indicative of how this film goes wrong.
Ewan McGregor's performance, as almost everyone has pointed out, is pretty great... although he DOES look way too much like Kurt Cobain, and I think his character paints Iggy Pop in a far-too-positive light. He also upstages pretty much everybody else on screen, including the essentially unlikeable reporter that so many others here seem to enjoy. Everybody else turns in flat or laughably overdone performances (sometimes both!).
The soundtrack to this movie *is* really great and is the only thing that keeps the film from totally collapsing. Lots of especially choice Eno cuts, a bunch of equally wonderful stuff from T. Rex and Roxy Music, some pretty well-done nuevo-glam facsimiles from my boys in Shudder to Think (no one else would have been nearly so capable!), an all-star cast for the on-screen bands (holy cow-- "the Wylde Rats" include original Stooge Ron Asheton... not to mention Mike Watt, Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, and Don Fleming!), and even a couple of period covers that SHOULD have come off as sacrilegious travesties but manage to largely succeed.
This movie is, I will admit, one of the very few movies that can make gay life look slightly interesting and even a little arousing from a mostly-heterosexual viewer's perspective. But I think that, had the actual subject (glam rock, of course!) been less interesting and the music less well-done, this movie would have been a major dud. I do sort of take issue as well with the "work of fiction based on real-life characters" thing, because-- as with the equally fictional Amadeus-- many folks will go into this movie knowing next to nothing about the artists on whom the characters are closely modeled, and will leave thinking that SOMETHING like this must've actually happened.
Oh, and for a really good time, freeze-frame the DVD every time a newspaper article is shown on-screen and check out the actual text of the article (I was especially amused by the "story" on Slade's cocaine arrest). It's a pretty stunning example of the lack of attention to detail that plagues the film throughout.
M Is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991)
ugh
I'm not familiar with Greenaway's other work; I mostly experienced this for Louis Andriessen's score (I'm a fan, and this isn't his best work, but it does have its moments). As for the film itself, let me say this: I like difficult art, and difficult cinema. I spend many hours justifying the existence of difficult art to others who are not quite so adventurous. I enjoy emotional distance and ambiguous meaning, taken even to Euro-trash extremes. And yet, I found this film to be the worst, most pretentious piece of crap I've ever seen in my life. It is very unattractive visually, and the film has dated very, very poorly in terms of its overall look. (Yes, you can tell this was made for TV...) Greenaway never knows when to get out of the way and let the images just breathe on their own... there is far too much information on screen at all times. If a first run through his completely awful text (which might pass as "edgy prose" in my junior high diary), set to Andriessen's music, wasn't enough for you, don't worry... he'll display the whole thing from start to finish in a slow side-scroll that features such high-tech effects as digitally-generated drop shadow. And his attempts at "choreography" are so banal in spots that you'll want to laugh out loud. Now I absolutely have to see another Greenaway film to see if they're all this bad. As for yourself, don't bother.