No, ordering a DVD through the mail, for a movie I otherwise can't see, is nothing new, especially not this year. In 2022 alone I've ordered New York, New York so I could be a Scorsese completist in Settling the Scorsese, and Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life for even less of reason that reached critical mass: so I wouldn't have to move on to the next best movie I hadn't see on the Flickchart I was matched up with in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. There's been at least a couple other times I couldn't get my hands on a movie and just moved on, but since I really like Kore-eda I decided to go for it.
But it still felt a bit decadent to buy Happiness, my #1 of 1998, as it cost more than $35 including shipping from the U.S. That's a lot for a movie. Thankfully, I bought it for nothing with "thank you" points, though I suppose that's $35 worth of "thank you" points I couldn't spend on something else.
Of course, if it were just waiting for the movie to ship from the U.S., that would not be enough of a reason to write this post.
No, at that point I had to deal with a failed first attempt to watch the movie, two weeks ago, when I was already expecting to get a late post-9 p.m. start on the 2+ hour movie. When I couldn't get it to work, I had to pivot to the even longer There Will Be Blood, if I wanted to stay on my schedule of watching one of the 26 movies about every two weeks.
I'm using my old laptop to watch Region 1 movies on DVD nowadays, now that my multi-region DVD player is kaput. But this laptop itself is basically kaput. Even my son rejected it's inscrutably slow performance. (I'm an IT professional, I've looked at it a couple times, and even I can't figure out why it's so slow.)
But I'll wade through the slow performance on the rare occasion when I really need to watch a Region 1 DVD because I can't get the movie any other way.
When it issues inscrutable errors while trying to start the DVD, though, that's when I have to give up.
This post would be 10% more interesting -- making it still not very interesting at all -- if I could remember what the error was, but even googling the error did not particularly help. The computer was reading the DVD but then throwing up an error, and on that Monday night when I was now looking at an even longer 160-minute movie, I just had to quit trying or else I wouldn't be able to watch anything.
Fortunately, the reason I don't remember the error is that it was mysteriously gone this past Monday when I tried to watch the movie again. So watch it I did, and now I have only three more to go before I've watched all 26.
I was of course reminded of the reasons it's not available, like, at all. The subject matter is nothing if not confronting. We don't know what to do today with a portrayal of a pedophile that tries to showcase his humanity -- even when that same movie is also demonstrating his obvious monstrosity.
The thing is, Todd Solondz wasn't irresponsibly engaging in some sort of freak show for shits and giggles. I accuse him of sinking to that level in some later films, but not here. If you think his consideration of pedophilia -- as it is embodied in one otherwise normal-seeming father and husband -- is anything other than serious, I invite you take a good long look at Dylan Baker's character's final conversation with his son. If that scene isn't as serious as a heart attack, I don't know what is.
Each time I see Happiness -- this is now my fourth time, I believe, and first since 2013 -- I think it's not going to hold up from the last time I saw it. And then each time it does. Solondz does have a twisted sense of humor, of course, but he takes it out more on the other characters here than he does the pedophile. At the same time, he's not being cruel to any of them -- another standard he would fail to uphold in later works. He just recognizes that life can be a trainwreck of bad decisions and parodies of romantic love.
The last is exemplified in the character of Joy, played by two-time #1 Jane Adams (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). She starts out breaking up with Jon Lovitz' character, who turns the table on her enough to make her feel both like a shithead, and sort of like she wishes she'd never let him go. We think he really did get the upper hand, but life is cruel -- he kills himself within a week or two after that. The adrift Joy takes up a job teaching English to immigrants, and thinks she's found a sort of fairytale affair when a Russian cab driver student of hers, played by Jared Harris, takes her home for a night of passionate lovemaking. His immediate departure should be cause for concern, but she's still walking on air the next day when a) his wife comes and slaps her around in front of the whole class, and b) she realizes the guy has stolen some of her stuff. Still hopeful, Joy is in for a lot worse when her sister Helen tries to pass off Philip Seymour Hoffman's desperate maker of lewd phone calls on her. She gamely agrees to take his number, and we don't know what happens from there.
Unexpectedly, against all odds that I'd even be able to watch it, and against what always seems like steeper odds that I'll still like it as much as I did the last time, Happiness is in line to be a real contender in my year-end rankings.
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