Part 1 - A young aspiring writer with a cerebral palsied writer boyfriend both attend writing class taught by a seething, viciously critical novelist.
Part 2 - A schlubby wannabe documentary filmmaker finds his perfect subject: an abjectly apathetic teenager living in privilege with his volcanic father, dithering mother, jock brother and supremely smug, tactless baby brother.
There's nothing in movies more frustrating to me than when a director/writer finds fertile soil and only digs two inches deep. They're precocious enough to stumble upon a great subject but they're content(or shamed or frightened into) going on autopilot from there, lazily applying whatever moldy stylistic preconceptions they made their name with, their auteristic "trademarks", if you will(in director Todd Solondz' case, it's awkwardness, embarrassment, and pain heaped upon pain). I don't have a problem with Solondz' unpleasant modus operandi so the self conscious apologias and justifications found here are superfluous for me - what I wanted out of the film is a deeper examination of the themes of race, fetishistic exploitation, and lack of compassion Solondz is so quick to point out but not address to my satisfaction. His indictments of other films(American Beauty, American Movie, whose resident burnout Mike Schenk gets a cameo here) are impassioned but unconvincing. On the whole though, I think I mainly had a problem with what's not here. Truth is, there was great acting all around, and it was suitably provocative.
Part 2 - A schlubby wannabe documentary filmmaker finds his perfect subject: an abjectly apathetic teenager living in privilege with his volcanic father, dithering mother, jock brother and supremely smug, tactless baby brother.
There's nothing in movies more frustrating to me than when a director/writer finds fertile soil and only digs two inches deep. They're precocious enough to stumble upon a great subject but they're content(or shamed or frightened into) going on autopilot from there, lazily applying whatever moldy stylistic preconceptions they made their name with, their auteristic "trademarks", if you will(in director Todd Solondz' case, it's awkwardness, embarrassment, and pain heaped upon pain). I don't have a problem with Solondz' unpleasant modus operandi so the self conscious apologias and justifications found here are superfluous for me - what I wanted out of the film is a deeper examination of the themes of race, fetishistic exploitation, and lack of compassion Solondz is so quick to point out but not address to my satisfaction. His indictments of other films(American Beauty, American Movie, whose resident burnout Mike Schenk gets a cameo here) are impassioned but unconvincing. On the whole though, I think I mainly had a problem with what's not here. Truth is, there was great acting all around, and it was suitably provocative.