This movie was TERRIBLE! No stars!

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2007)

"When the sea was calm, all ships alike showed mastership in floating." -William Shakespeare
The summary was what I said, verbatim, after leaving a theatre in Portland with some dorm friends. Choosing to do so at such an early point in my college friendship career, (everybody else loved it and I therefore was outcasting myself) was an unfortunate decision I still can't come to terms with. The movie was embarrassing because it was aiming for some Todd Solondz lugubriousness while maintaining a pop cadence. I didn't feel any of the visceral depression and longing for suicide while being intellectually provided enough to realize that it would all be for the attention that Solondz gives me. I just thought it was cute. Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, and really whatever film Solondz makes is worth the severity, this film seems to me to be complacently on the fence between authentic experiential loss and the let's go dancing and then get the car washed type facade that I respond to in such vivid disgust. Valerie Dayton and Jonathan Faris are good filmmakers, I think the video for the Smashing Pumpkins' 1979 is the best of its genre. But what we have here is some imitatively dysfunctional, yellow-colored Sufjan Stevens sounding celluloid bilge. Could be for you, though. Heck, you probably saw it and loved it, and are brainstorming a nasty rebuttal.