The long road to Happiness

I'm pretty dedicated to this whole rewatching my #1s project.

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. 

My 1998 film rankings (in 1998)

This is the tenth in a 2022 monthly posting of the 12 year-end rankings I completed prior to starting this blog, on the occasion of my 25th anniversary of ranking movies. I'm posting them as a form of permanent backup, plus to do a little analysis of how my impression of the movies has changed since then. I'm going in reverse order and will end with 1996 in December. 

As many of the years around this time were, 1998 was a year of transition for me. I finished up at my weekly newspaper job in Rhode Island in late July, and immediately left on a road trip across the country with two friends, seeing baseball games in 14 major league baseball parks. (It was supposed to be 16 but we had to skip our games in Detroit and Pittsburgh for various logistical reasons.) This got me back in time to start at Columbia Journalism School in early September.

It was truly a chaotic period for me. I moved out of my Providence apartment on literally the day we were leaving on our trip, and since I'd left such a small window of time to do so, I ended up taking trips back and forth between Providence and my dad's house outside Boston (an hour's drive) overnight -- that many trips being required to get all my stuff situated in his garage for temporary, and in some cases long-term, storage. Even this was not enough, and on my final trip, I had all sorts of large objects strapped to my roof and my vision almost totally obstructed by the remaining objects stuffed inside my car, such that I could only see the driver's side rearview mirror and half of the front windshield -- meaning any time I had to change lanes to the right, it was basically conducted on blind hope. Only then did I finally throw a bunch of stuff in bags to leave on a trip that was lasting the better part of a month -- and oh by the way, not really having enough money in my bank account to make the whole trip.

When I did head off to New York upon my return, it was without knowing where I would live. Yes I managed to screw that up somehow. I was deep on a waitlist for university housing, so I paired up with another guy who was similarly up a creek without a paddle as we looked desperately for apartments for about three days. In the end I ended up getting his reluctant blessing to abandon him and take a studio apartment we'd looked at together that was too small for two people, but was only nine blocks from campus and basically my ideal scenario. I never did find out where he ended up living.

Ah the joys of being 24. 

It was also an important year in terms of film criticism, as 1998 was the year they took me up on my offer to review one film a week for the section that appeared in all four of the community newspapers in the East Bay of Rhode Island. I was the reporter for The Barrington Times, but this insert also appeared in the newspapers in Warren, Bristol and Sakonnet. There was a picture of my face next to the reviews and everything. I'd start spending a disproportionate amount of time on these reviews relative to my actual paying work (though I don't think the quality of that work suffered). This might have given me an early clue about what I really wanted to do -- and about how useful journalism school might be in that ambition. (Answer: not very.)

Here are my favorite to least favorite films of 1998, as I ranked them in early 1999:

1. Happiness
2. Waking Ned Devine
3. A Simple Plan
4. Rushmore
5. Saving Private Ryan
6. Primary Colors
7. Babe: Pig in the City
8. Elizabeth
9. The Mask of Zorro
10. The Truman Show
11. Antz
12. The Butcher Boy
13. Buffalo '66
14. Dirty Work
15. There's Something About Mary
16. Life is Beautiful
17. Paulie
18. Deep Impact
19. Out of Sight
20. Two Girls and a Guy
21. The Last Days of Disco
22. Shakespeare in Love
23. Dark City
24. The Big Lebowski
25. The Wedding Singer
26. A Perfect Murder
27. The Horse Whisperer
28. Slums of Beverly Hills
29. Pleasantville
30. The Spanish Prisoner
31. Celebrity
32. American History X
33. A Bug's Life
34. Patch Adams
35. Hush
36. Les Miserables
37. Lethal Weapon 4
38. Enemy of the State
39. Dead Man on Campus
40. The X-Files: Fight the Future
41. City of Angels
42. Blade
43. Wild Things
44. The Big Hit
45. Armageddon
46. The Man in the Iron Mask
47. Godzilla
48. Madeline
49. Zero Effect
50. Baseketball
51. The Thin Red Line
52. Can't Hardly Wait
53. Mercury Rising
54. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
55. The Waterboy
56. Hurlyburly
57. U.S. Marshals
58. Almost Heroes

And here is the order in which those movies rank out of 6113 movies currently on my Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 6113 and the number of slots they rose or fell on my Flickchart compared to the other movies from that year that I ranked at the time. A positive number indicates a comparative rise of that many slots, a negative number a fall.

1. Happiness (167, 97%) 0
2. Rushmore (170, 97%) 2
3. A Simple Plan (215, 96%) 0
4. Out of Sight (330, 95%) 15
5. Saving Private Ryan (349, 94%) 0
6. There's Something About Mary (384, 94%) 9
7. Babe: Pig in the City (454, 93%) 0
8. Waking Ned Devine (465, 92%) -6
9. Elizabeth (636, 90%) -1
10. Deep Impact (641, 90%) 8
11. Paulie (794, 87%) 6
12. Shakespeare in Love (804, 87%) 10
13. Primary Colors (808, 87%) -7
14. Antz (893, 85%) -3
15. The Mask of Zorro (921, 85%) -6
16. The Butcher Boy (922, 85%) -4
17. Life is Beautiful (1046, 83%) -1
18. The Truman Show (1071, 82%) -8
19. The Wedding Singer (1138, 81%) 6
20. Dark City (1186, 81%) 3
21. The Horse Whisperer (1353, 78%) 6
22. Two Girls and a Guy (1609, 74%) -2
23. Dirty Work (1650, 73%) -9
24. Celebrity (2087, 66%) 7
25. Buffalo '66 (2270, 63%) -12
26. The X-Files: Fight the Future (2435, 60%) 14
27. A Perfect Murder (2447, 60%) -1
28. The Last Days of Disco (2507, 59%) -7
29. The Big Lebowski (2535, 59%) -5
30. American History X (2609, 57%) 2
31. Slums of Beverly Hills (2707, 56%) -3
32. The Big Hit (3499, 43%) 12
33. Blade (3524, 42%) 9
34. A Bug's Life (3615, 41%) -1
35. Pleasantville (3684, 40%) -6
36. Les Miserables (3806, 38%) 0
37. The Spanish Prisoner (3807, 38%) -7
38. Hush (3919, 36%) -3
39. Wild Things (3959, 35%) 4
40. Enemy of the State (4051, 34%) -2
41. City of Angels (4167, 32%) 0
42. Dead Man on Campus (4278, 30%) -3
43. The Thin Red Line (4741, 22%) 8
44. Madeline (4759, 22%) 4
45. The Man in the Iron Mask (4894, 20%) 1
46. Lethal Weapon 4 (4957, 19%) -9
47. Zero Effect (4971, 19%) 2
48. Can't Hardly Wait (5005, 18%) 4
49. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (5040, 18%) 5
50. Godzilla (5142, 16%) -3
51. Armageddon (5217, 15%) -6
52. Patch Adams (5218, 15%) -18
53. Baseketball (5252, 14%) -3
54. Mercury Rising (5550, 9%) -1
55. U.S. Marshals (5713, 7%) 2
56. Hurlyburly (5784, 5%) 0
57. The Waterboy (5933, 3%) -2
58. Almost Heroes (6022, 1%) 0

The writing of this post uncovered something that hasn't happened in a while, which is a film missing from my Flickchart. For some reason I had not been ranking The Waterboy, so I just added it for the first time. Obviously it did not do very well.

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Another Day in Paradise, The Cruise, Gods and Monsters, He Got Game, Smoke Signals
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Hi-Lo Country, King Cobra, Small Soldiers, Woo, Your Friends & Neighbors
Biggest risers: Out of Sight (+15), The X-Files: Fight the Future (+14), The Big Hit (+12)
Biggest fallers: Patch Adams (-18), Buffalo '66 (-12), Dirty Work/Lethal Weapon 4 (-9)
Stayed the same: Happiness (1st), A Simple Plan (3rd), Saving Private Ryan (5th), Babe: Pig in the City (7th), Les Miserables (36th), City of Angels (41st), Hurlyburly (56th), Almost Heroes (58th)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 53.71% (3 of 10 so far)

This might be my lowest ranked top movie so far, as Happiness is only 167th on my Flickchart -- and I've got a rewatch scheduled for the next few weeks that will assess whether even that is too high. Overall though it is a strong year compared to the nine others I've looked at, with the third highest average percentage on Flickchart so far. 

The biggest riser, Out of Sight, has definitely grown in my estimation over the years. I definitely liked it at the time I saw it, but it may have struck me as a bit post-Tarantino or something, and a comedown from the films of his I had liked the most. Especially with more than a decade of glowing mentions on Filmspotting to increase its profile in my mind, as well as one very favorable rewatch, I have now launched it upward so I believe is actually my highest ranked Soderbergh film. (Yes, within the past few years it has surpassed Erin Brockovich at #481.)

The other big risers are movies I retroactively think must have been better than I actually thought they were at the time. The X-Files movie now gets lumped in with the show, as I wave a hand over the whole thing and call it superior entertainment -- even if the show, of which I watched probably half the episodes, was clearly far superior. As for The Big Hit, I now imagine it must have been a fun, pulpy, star-studded crime movie when in reality it was probably more miss than hit. Maybe I'll rewatch that one at some point.

It's hard to believe Patch Adams could have dropped 18 spots because I remember really disliking it at the time. I knew from trailers that it was going to be a treacly mess, and it was, but I suspect it ultimately ended up doing more for me than I thought it was going to, which is the explanation for its generous #34 ranking at the time. Over the years I've righted the narrative in my head about this movie -- or so I think I have, without the benefit of a rewatch -- as I now use the movie as a bit of a go-to example of a movie that tries too hard to please. 

The drop for Buffalo '66 is undoubtedly the result of the problematic nature of director-star Vincent Gallo after this movie, as he made the tediously indulgent The Brown Bunny, in which Chloe Sevigny famously gives him a blowjob on screen, one whose every detail you see. He became defined as an empty provocateur and enfant terrible in my head, and the quite good Buffalo '66 has suffered -- in part because in hindsight, I can see the future Brown Bunny Gallo in that movie. 

I probably overrated Dirty Work in 1998, but the fact that it is one of the biggest fallers now seems sad in the wake of Norm Macdonald's death. 

Okay only two of these left. It shouldn't take a math genius to figure out that 1997 is up next in November. 

Todd Solondz: Bad taste never looked so bad

Todd Solondz is one of the "Hallowed 22." And by that I mean he directed one of the 22 films I have named as my favorite of their respective years, dating back to 1996 when I first started the practice. (And there have been exactly 22 different directors in those 22 years, as no one has ever directed more than one of my top-ranked films.)

Solondz got in pretty early in the whole shebang. He was the third director I presented this honor when I named Happiness my favorite film of 1998. He was a real dose of the eccentric after I'd handed my first two such honors to Al Pacino in 1996 (Looking for Richard) and James Cameron in 1997 (Titanic).

So you could say that Todd Solondz holds a special place in my heart.

But boy do I hate his movies.

I didn't imagine it would be this way, and it's not that I don't "get" Todd Solondz. After I saw (and obviously loved) Happiness, I then caught (and also liked very much) Welcome to the Dollhouse, his debut. I was on board with Todd Solondz and everything he was doing.

Then came 2001's Storytelling, which curdled my positive Solondz feelings right quick.

I don't suppose anything more outrageous really happens in this movie than in the others, but I could tell he was going for something more outrageous -- intentionally pushing buttons, seemingly only for that purpose. Yeah, I'm thinking of the bit about Robert Wisdom's Mr. Scott telling Selma Blair's Vi to repeat "Fuck me, nigger" while they're having sex. It just felt like empty provocation.

But that was actually the part of that movie I sort of liked. Its haphazard structure spends one third of the running time on the story of Vi and Mr. Scott and then two-thirds on a genuinely boring story involving Mark Webber. I don't even remember what it was about. I just remember it was boring and tedious.

I'm now learning that there was actually a third story featuring James van der Beek as a closeted football player. If Solondz stuck with these two other stories because he thought they worked, just imagine what a disaster this story must have been. (I think it was actually cut due to the explicit sex scene between men.)

Great Belle and Sebastian score, though.

I was so put off by Storytelling that I skipped 2004's Palindromes, and have not yet caught up with it in the 14 years since. I got the gist of what it was about, and how it featured like five different people playing the same character, and I just thought "No thanks." Apparently, it was already obvious to me that Solondz was continuing to stray from anything that was remotely digestible to anyone but himself.

I did watch Solondz' next film, 2009's Life During Wartime, as part of a series I wrote for another blog in 2013 in which I watched a movie set in each state. This one takes place in Florida. And it continues Solondz' "narrative sauciness," to put it generously, by functioning as a sequel to Happiness, only with the characters in that movie re-cast with different actors. Yep, sure Todd.

I don't hate Life During Wartime, but I think I give it a bit more credit than it deserves simply because of my feelings toward Happiness. It's an interesting failure. Its biggest problem is that it's incredibly stilted. Solondz has really lost his way in terms of directing actors.

I didn't intentionally skip 2012's Dark Horse. I knew it was Solondz and saw it available on streaming a number of times. Its running time was short, too. But no night was ever "the night" to watch it, and I still haven't seen it. I don't even know what it's about.

But for some reason I decided to come at his latest, 2016's Wiener-Dog, which I watched on Friday night, with a sense of optimism. I think it was something about the whimsical title, though I might have also subconsciously remembered that Greta Gerwig was in it. I didn't remember, until watching it, that Solondz was at it again; Gerwig's character is an older version of Heather Matarazzo's character from Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn Wiener. Can't you see the resemblance?

No one resembled anyone in Life During Wartime, which I thought was okay there, so I'm not going to get stuck on this one here. This was the least of Weiner-Dog's problems.

The most of its problems is what I considered its bad taste. Solondz has made his willingness to tackle taboo subjects -- rape, pedophilia, masturbation -- his calling card, and I obviously didn't mind in Happiness, which includes all three. But if you don't do something like this right, it just looks like you're trying to get attention, for all the wrong reasons.

The first of the four stories got me off on the wrong foot. The titular wiener dog has a nasty bout of diarrhea as a result of eating a granola bar with chocolate chips in it, and we get to see lots, and lots, and lots of dog diarrhea. But the amounts of dog diarrhea we see -- including a slow pan down a street strewn with it -- is probably what we'd see if a dog ate a chocolate cake or a whole bag of chocolate chips. Not half of a granola bar that, from the looks of it, had about three chocolate chips in it. So yes, if you're going to give me dog diarrhea, I'm at least asking for realism in my dog diarrhea.

But I probably should have started with the story Julie Delpy's character tells her young son about dog rape. I can't even remember her reason for telling it, though I think it had something to do with being a justification for getting the dog spayed. She goes on and on about how the dog she had when she was growing up was raped by another dog in the woods, and how this dog went around raping other dogs and giving them venereal diseases. The boy is like eight.

Funny, right? Oh Todd, you card.

Look, I'm not some blushing conservative who cannot listen to discussion of dog rape in a movie. But I just wonder what Solondz' point is. It's not delivered as humor by Delpy, or if so, it's an incredibly misguided idea about the delivery of what's meant to be comedy. It just seems to be another one of those instances of Solondz rubbing our noses in something naughty he's saying, the mere saying of which strikes him as some kind of victory. Be rude, be crude, but do it with a purpose other than just trying to show off that you are free from the shackles of other people's good manners.

The movie progresses on to three other boring stories, only the last of which I sort of liked. The second one involves Gerwig's character and a heroin addict played by Kieran Culkin, who go on a road trip to tell his brother, who has Down's Syndrome, and his brother's wife, who also has Down's Sydrome, about the death of their dad. Never mind that you would call someone to tell them about his own father's death, rather than make a long road trip there. Never mind the fact that the actors with Down's Syndrome do not seem to be very well served by this movie. The thing that annoyed me most about this sequence was that Culkin's character sees Gerwig's character in a convenience store, recognizing her as a person he went to school with, then blows her off rather rudely, then leaves the convenience store and pets the leashed wiener dog, then abruptly invites Gerwig's character to accompany him on this long road trip. Solondz would never want to give us an interaction between characters that feels realistic; oh no. To me, it just reads like something that would never happen, and what's the point.

The thing that annoyed me about the structure overall is that the movie sets us up to see how this wiener dog is passed between owners. See, Dawn Wiener works in a veterinarian's office, which is how she gets the dog initially after its near-fatal bout with diarrhea. Delpy and family took her to be put down, but Dawn saves her from this fate (despite the fact that she must have to do things like this on a daily basis), and that launches her story. All well and good, right?

Well no. After the dog is left with Culkin's brother and his wife, we have no idea how it gets in to the hands of Danny DeVito's miserable film professor, or then into the hands of Ellen Burstyn's miserable elderly woman. If you're going to start with a high concept of a dog passing between owners, and show us the first transition between owners, why just drop it after that? The answer is because Solondz does not hold himself accountable to any narrative conventions. He thinks his freedom from these conventions is what makes him great. I just think it's lazy, or worse, indifferent.

I did kind of like the last segment, but only because of this one weird fantasy sequence where Burstyn is confronted by a dozen eerie versions of herself as a young girl with brilliant red hair. The girl talks in a voice reminiscent of the twins in The Shining, and it's a discomfiting reminder to this character of the opportunities in life she passed up, leaving her as this shell of a person. But the scene lasts for about a minute, after which Solondz ends the movie with another of his bad jokes. I won't bother to tell you what that joke is.

As I write these words, I think Solondz, if he were reading this, would imagine me as being exactly the type of person he makes his movies to piss off. But see, I was not always that person. Possibly his most controversial film, when you combine its subject matter with the level of prominence that allows something to become controversial, is Happiness, my #1 movie of 1998.

I just think Solondz needs to do a better of job doing what he's trying to do, and he has not done so for 20 years now. He's capable of it. There's proof. But he seems more interested in squatting, shitting, and calling it art.

I need a lot less of Todd Solondz' diarrhea.

The best movie of 1998 finally gets revisited

In my 17-year history of ranking all the new movies I've seen each year, only three of my top-ranked movies are ones I've seen only once. Even my favorite film of 2012, Ruby Sparks, is something I've already seen again. (The night before I coronated it, as a matter of fact.)

Make that two I've seen only once.

Wednesday night I finally re-watched Todd Solondz' Happiness, which was my top film of 1998, the third year I kept the stats. That's 15 years since its release year, though only a little over 14 since I saw it.

You could say that Solondz' film is a classic one-timer; one of its main characters is a pedophile, and recently ejaculated semen is seen not once, but twice. (Neither time by the pedophile, at least, though one instance is from an 11-year-old boy.)

But I did love the movie, and I really should have re-watched it before now. (In case you're interested, the other two I haven't rewatched are the very first movie I crowned, Looking for Richard in 1996, and A Separation in 2011).

Perhaps I suspected Happiness wouldn't hold up. Although it seemed quite original and fresh at the time, how would it seem now, now that there have been scores of independent films featuring dysfunctional extended families working their way through hot-button issues?

Also, it qualifies as an early version of a term I've heard popularized recently: "hyperlink cinema." It's not really a positive term. It refers to movies where multiple story lines are threaded together, seeming at first to have no relationship to each other. Over the course of the narrative, we realize that this character has this connection to this character, who has this connection to this other character, who has this other connection to the first character. It's supposed to be profound. Lately, it's seemed like hack screenwriting. Happiness doesn't 100% qualify, because although the connections between these characters are there, at least the characters don't have to come together into some kind of big finale that's supposed to blow your mind.

Well, I'm glad to say that Happiness still felt fresh to me.

What's still fresh? WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD.

1) The sympathetic pedophile. By far the boldest thing Solondz does in this movie is introduce a character who rapes young boys (Dylan Baker), yet somehow is presented with enough complexity that you don't simply condemn him. Society reserves a spot somewhere below rapists and murderers for the pedophile, yet Solondz has the guts to present this man as the victim of an illness rather than a moral degenerate. In fact, Bill Maplewood is so unflinchingly honest with his son -- even confessing to his son without hesitation, and speaking to him with the frankness he would reserve for an adult -- that there's something morally upright about him. Which of course doesn't excuse the whole pedophilia thing. But if the goal of some filmmakers is to change minds, you might say Solondz succeeds at that better than most, if only because you want Bill to figure out a way to stop doing it, to save his own soul as well as the bodies and minds of his victims. Fifteen years later, I still haven't seen someone else pull off such an unlikely trick.

2) The explicit sex discussions with children. I can't find much information on Rufus Read, the actor who played young Billy Maplewood -- his IMDB page is as stripped down as they come. But he's playing an 11-year-old and certainly couldn't have been much older than that. Yet he asks his father what "cum" means, and waits around for the answer, which is nothing short of clinically accurate. Later, he asks his father about the crimes of which he's accused, and gets similarly frank answers. His final act of the movie is to jerk off while watching a woman sunbathing. The lower half of his body is of course not seen, but Solondz had to direct him to make some kind of motions that would simulate the convulsions of the real act, so the upper half of his body would respond correctly. The act culminates with a droplet of his splooge dripping off his balcony's white horizontal piping -- before it gets licked away by his dog. Not only is it pretty crazy content for a child character to be involved with, but the child actor couldn't simply be fooled into thinking it was something other than what it was.

3) The nice girl who always gets shit on. Yes, we meet Joy (Jane Adams) while she's in the process of rather callously breaking up with Allen (Jon Lovitz), but there's something about her -- probably the irresistible sympathetic nature of Adams as an actress -- that makes any apparent callousness seem purely accidental. At her core, she's a genuine person who genuinely wants to help people and do good things in the world. Yet she is repeatedly unlucky -- in all things, really, but especially in love. Not only does Allen kill himself (an act for which she is blamed both by him and by his mother), but she is robbed by a Russian-born cab driver (Jared Harris) who beds her and immediately leaves. Did I mention he's married and his wife assaults Joy? In an ordinary narrative, these occurrences in the plot would lead us to a moment of transcendence for Joy, in which her patient wait for a good person pays off. Uh-uh. The humiliations continue to pile on top of themselves. The only thing preventing her character from being an unremitting tragedy is that in the final scene of the movie, she doesn't seem overburdened by despair -- she just has the normal, healthy level of despair. Another nifty tonal trick by Solondz.

This list would be more impressive with five examples, but let's leave it at three.

Since I began writing this blog entry, I have watched Solondz' sequel to Happiness, Life During Wartime. It would have been great to incorporate that into this piece if it hadn't already been 75% written. As such, I think I need to chew on this one for a day or two, and maybe then I'll have collected some thoughts for a follow-up.

I was curious about whether Happiness is still my favorite film of 1998, so I decided to consult Flickchart to see what I have ranked ahead of it and whether I'd seen those movies at the time I completed my rankings. Flickchart tells me that it's actually ranked third, though that's really second, because Flickchart counts Run Lola Run as a 1998 movie -- my #1 1998 movie. Which it probably is, because that's when it hit German theaters, but I can't think of it as anything other than 1999. See, Run Lola Run was actually Happiness' successor, my top-ranked film of my next year of rankings.

Number 2? It's Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan, which I had seen at the time (and ranked #3). Now there's a movie I need to revisit -- though it would probably be my third or even fourth viewing. 

Number 2 on my year-end rankings between Happiness and A Simple Plan? Waking Ned Devine, which must have fallen in my estimation some, as it now ranks only eighth from 1998 on my Flickchart.

And that's probably enough reminiscing about the year 1998.