Product Description

From Todd Solondz, the critically acclaimed director of Welcome to the Dollhouse comes a film comprised of two separate stories set against the sadly comical terrain of college and high school, past and present. Following the paths of its young hopeful/troubled characters, it explores issues of sex, race, celebrity and exploitation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40703 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2002-07-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 87 minutes

Features

• From Todd Solondz, the critically acclaimed director of Welcome to the Dollhouse comes a film comprised of two separate stories set against the sadly comical terrain of college and high school, past and present. Following the paths of its young hopeful/troubled characters, it explores issues of sex, race, celebrity and exploitation.Running Time: 87 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY

Amazon.com
Todd Solondz, director of the acclaimed Welcome to the Dollhouse and the controversial Happiness, continues pushing the envelope of social decorum with the merciless and casually cruel Storytelling, his most ruthless satire of suburban complacency. Broken into two unrelated chapters, "Fiction" follows college girl Selma Blair through a degrading encounter with her resentful writing teacher (Robert Wisdom), while the more sprawling and scattershot "Non-Fiction" circles around the mutual exploitation of a fumbling documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti doing a near-parody of director Solondz) and his clueless subject, a suburban high school slacker named Scooby (Mark Webber). The squirmy laughs are laced with humiliation and the satire is acidic and cynical; in the world of Solondz, victims and victimizers alike are petty, selfish, vindictive, and thoughtless, and empathy is strictly rationed. Though sharply written and well directed, this misanthropic vision is strictly for daring filmgoers and Solondz fans. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
Another disturbance of the peace from the writer-director Todd Solondz, who made "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness." This time, we get a movie split in half, the first part of which concerns a creative-writing student (Selma Blair), thin and white, who dumps her disabled boyfriend and, for good measure, sleeps with her black professor. In the second half, we trace the exploits of a documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) who wants to unearth what the youth of today are doing with themselves in high school. The answer is, more or less, nothing, although we do come across one slacker who would like to be on TV. In short, Solondz presents two tales meant to winkle out the cultural encounters that embarrass us the most, and then twists the knife and leaves us squirming harder than before. It's clever enough, and you could gash yourself on some of the lines, but, when a director is as resolutely ungenerous as Solondz, the end can only come as a relief. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Solondz grinds in the bitterness
While Todd Solondz' previous film, Happiness, was an acidic--and mordantly funny--attack on suburban life, Storytelling goes one "better" (if one can say that) and pushes the director's penchant for vitriol to the max.

The two unequal components of the film, Fiction and Non-Fiction, are meant to be complementary, but do not function as such. The first, Fiction, is mercifully short, juxtaposing the intense contempt of a black prize-winning writer, relegated to the role of a fiction writing prof in a two-bit college, with his snide, spoiled, white, know-it-all students, almost all girls. He unequivocally blasts their work. In a powerful revelatory scene, the black man vents his tremendous frustration on one of the white girls whose attempt to forge a relationship with a boy in the class, stricken with cerebral palsy, fails because of his own fears of inadequacy. Her sexual frustration absolutely must have an outlet, and so she turns to the only other available male she knows.

The phrase "mercifully short" is used because the characterizations here are flat and one-dimensional. In retrospect, Solondz may have done this intentionally to illustrate his own tremendous disgust at the rage inherent in societal conventions that destroy what should be (or at least is meant by) civilized behavior: racism and 'sub-human' categorization of those with physical afflictions. The bitterness is so deep in this short piece, it leaves a really strong taste; you can feel this down in your gut. Not only is it not pleasant; it's not that entertaining. He makes his point by smashing, not hitting, the viewer over the head.

The second piece, Non-Fiction, is much more fully realized, and chronicles the simultaneous activity of a schleppy documentary film-maker (Paul Giamatti in one of his best roles, bar none) with a bizarre dysfunctional family, played convincingly by John Goodman and Julie Hagerty as the parents, Lupe Ontiveros as the beleagured domestic, and some talented newcomers in the roles of the sons. Here Solondz does a masterful job of combining hypnosis, a sports-related disastrous injury, and death by gas with a jaundiced view of what "entertainment" in America really means. A closet gay teenager who aspires to be the next Conan O'Brien is picked by the hapless filmmaker as his subject--clearly a choice driven by desperation--and an outrageous twist of fate ultimately leaves the filmmaker at loose ends and the teenager even more rootless than he is normally.

This piece is without question one of Solondz' best works and, at the same time, is a denunciation of typical American suburban life even more bitter (if that's possible) than that depicted in Happiness. It would have been truly great to see this expanded to feature length. Rumor has it that Solondz actually shot three segments for the film. The third was not used; perhaps it will turn up in a future work, or in the inevitable DVD release.

Overall this is a curious two-part film which is saved by its second story. No film maker in the United States working today has as much hatred for American mores as Solondz, but, as shown in Happiness and the Non-Fiction part of Storytelling, his intensely black humor/ferocious irony makes his work compelling.

A movie that never flinches
Todd Solondz's funny and controversial films examine sordid suburbia. They are witty, satirical stories but also unflinching in their use of controversial subjects like rape, pedophilia and other "uncomfortable" subjects that most mainstream films would never have the nerve to address, much less use in a comedic context. So, you either love his films or hate them (as the other reviews here will attest.) I happen to love his films.

It might be best to watch his previous film, "Happiness", before watching "Storytelling" as "Storytelling" seems (to me) to be the film maker's personal response to the criticisms that his other films have elicited. "Storytelling" is composed of two, separate stories titled "Fiction" and "Non Fiction". "Non Fiction" features a documentary film maker (clearly representing Solondz)who's a downtrodden geek, accused of exploiting his subjects.

His films make you laugh but also uncomfortable about laughing. I think he's an exciting voice in American cinema, far removed from the formulated drek that's cranked out by the studios. Highly recommended!

Everyone always has a story to tell.
Todd Solondz's `Welcome to the Dollhouse' showed comic/absurd promise; his masturbation scene in `Happiness' overstepped the boundary of film taste but got everyone's attention. While I didn't enjoy "Storytelling" as much as I did the Director's two previous films, "Happiness" and "Welcome to The Dollhouse," Solondz continues to amaze with his depictions of just how awkward true life really is. As always, he masterfully shows the oft times tactless, cynical, transparent motivations of everyday suburban life and combines them with outrageous situations, giving a humorous view into the myriad of interesting quirky characters he creates. As with Happiness, Storytelling has no background characters. Each character gets fully explored in a way that no matter how familiar or foreign a specific character's behavior might be to you, you can't help but understand their motivations. Solondz can develop over 10 characters in 88 minutes while most conventional Hollywood films fail to portray just one in any given 3 hour "epic".

Selma Blair and Leo Fitzpatrick give incredible performances in the first segment of this film titled "Fiction". John Goodman is at his best here in the film's second segment "Non-fiction", not to mention it was a good to see Julie Haggerty in it.

One of the film's most honest moments (and there are MANY) comes in the beginning of the Non-Fiction segment, during a phone call Paul Giamatti gives to a female classmate he hadn't spoken to since high school. While hilarious, I couldn't help but feel bad for his character, which gets fleshed out in the almost confessional tone of the conversation (which of course, he blunders).

I don't want to dig far into the plot because the elements of shock and surprise that are Solondz bread and butter should only be revealed by others, suffice it to say I recommend this movie very highly. I look forward to anything this director does.