As director Todd Solondz himself concedes in a bonus interview for Criterion’s long-awaited release of 1998’s Happiness ($34.99 4K, $27.99 Blu-ray, $13.91 DVD), the film “never would have been financed today.” This perspective seems to be the consensus, owing to shifting social mores, to increased institutional adversity to risk, and I suppose to wokeism. Down to brass tacks, a … [Read more...]
Amid sadism of ‘Wiener-Dog,’ Solondz finds meaning in mortality
Greta Gerwig and the pooch in Wiener-Dog. (Photo by Linda Callerus) Wiener-Dog may be Todd Solondz’s most Solondzian movie ever, and there is no image more Solondzian than his tracking shot of a seemingly endless train of dog diarrhea on a city street, scored to Debussy’s Clair de Lune. It’s simultaneously elegant and nasty, beautiful and repulsive, the cheekily contrapuntal … [Read more...]