Storytelling (2001)
Country: US
Technical: DeLuxe Toronto 87m
Director: Todd Solondz
Cast: Selma Blair, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Julie Hagerty
Synopsis:
A student writer uses a real life experience to sharpen up her creative output; then a documentary filmmaker uses a suburban family as subjects in an embittered exposé of the pressures undergone by high school students.
Review:
A two-part study, from a fiction and nonfiction standpoint, of the dangers inherent in using real experience as raw material for artistic endeavour. As one character says, whether it's true or not, as soon as you write it down it's fiction, and the same goes, of course, for filmmaking. A lesson in more or less willed exploitation, then, and one to which Solondz is well accustomed, since his 'truth is stranger than fiction' narratives have often been accused of upping the ante in terms of shock factor to advance an unrealistically baleful vision of humanity.
Country: US
Technical: DeLuxe Toronto 87m
Director: Todd Solondz
Cast: Selma Blair, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Julie Hagerty
Synopsis:
A student writer uses a real life experience to sharpen up her creative output; then a documentary filmmaker uses a suburban family as subjects in an embittered exposé of the pressures undergone by high school students.
Review:
A two-part study, from a fiction and nonfiction standpoint, of the dangers inherent in using real experience as raw material for artistic endeavour. As one character says, whether it's true or not, as soon as you write it down it's fiction, and the same goes, of course, for filmmaking. A lesson in more or less willed exploitation, then, and one to which Solondz is well accustomed, since his 'truth is stranger than fiction' narratives have often been accused of upping the ante in terms of shock factor to advance an unrealistically baleful vision of humanity.
Country: US
Technical: DeLuxe Toronto 87m
Director: Todd Solondz
Cast: Selma Blair, Robert Wisdom, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Julie Hagerty
Synopsis:
A student writer uses a real life experience to sharpen up her creative output; then a documentary filmmaker uses a suburban family as subjects in an embittered exposé of the pressures undergone by high school students.
Review:
A two-part study, from a fiction and nonfiction standpoint, of the dangers inherent in using real experience as raw material for artistic endeavour. As one character says, whether it's true or not, as soon as you write it down it's fiction, and the same goes, of course, for filmmaking. A lesson in more or less willed exploitation, then, and one to which Solondz is well accustomed, since his 'truth is stranger than fiction' narratives have often been accused of upping the ante in terms of shock factor to advance an unrealistically baleful vision of humanity.