I've blogged before about being at the Toronto Film Festival when the Todd Solondz film "Happiness" premiered. It was highly anticipated. It's a grotesquely misanthropic movie, a film that puts the viewer in the position of rooting for a pederast as he tries to drug and anally rape his son's playmate.You know, I quite like Happiness - it's one of the few movies I own - and I did not find myself rooting for the child molester at that point.
Perhaps I'm some sort of sick freak.
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I'll say this having not seen the film nor read the source documents. Hey, when has that ever stopped me.
But it seems that when many people, even people we otherwise thing of as rational, are confronted by sex, their frontal lobe shuts down and they have no ability to address any substantive issues outside of the sex thing.
I remember the people, not just wingnuts, writing about brokeback mountain. There was a fairly tasteful, what, four minute buttsecks sequence, in the middle of a film that raised very interesting questions and offered some viewpoints very much worth considering.
Guess what we heard about ad infinitum?
I recommend Happiness: Dreher's right that it's grotesquely misanthropic, but it's very very funny and your own problems feel a little more small and ridiculous next to the damaged individuals it's populated with.
I must say that it is a bit hard to be funny about this as it all too familiar.
Movies is for death and 'splosions not thinkin'.
I recommend Happiness, too. Unlike Dreher, I neither rooted nor rated for the pederast when I saw it.
Perhaps I'm some sort of sick freak.
You say that as if it's a BAD thing.
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