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List Price: $24.98 | | Label: New Line Home Video
Salesrank: 11646
Released: July 16, 2002 |
| Our Price: $4.37 |
| Used Price: $4.76 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
From Todd Solondz the critically acclaimed director of Welcome to the Dollhouse comes a film comprised of two separate stories set against the sadly comical terrain of college and high school past and present. Following the paths of its young hopeful/troubled characters it explores issues of sex race celebrity and exploitation.Running Time: 87 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 794043554421
Description of Storytelling:
Todd Solondz, director of the acclaimed Welcome to the Dollhouse and the controversial Happiness, continues pushing the envelope of social decorum with the merciless and casually cruel Storytelling, his most ruthless satire of suburban complacency. Broken into two unrelated chapters, "Fiction" follows college girl Selma Blair through a degrading encounter with her resentful writing teacher (Robert Wisdom), while the more sprawling and scattershot "Non-Fiction" circles around the mutual exploitation of a fumbling documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti doing a near-parody of director Solondz) and his clueless subject, a suburban high school slacker named Scooby (Mark Webber). The squirmy laughs are laced with humiliation and the satire is acidic and cynical; in the world of Solondz, victims and victimizers alike are petty, selfish, vindictive, and thoughtless, and empathy is strictly rationed. Though sharply written and well directed, this misanthropic vision is strictly for daring filmgoers and Solondz fans. --Sean Axmaker
Storytelling Reviews:
...storytelling 
2008-03-27 - Well. Not a film that I would recommend to anyone except serious film buffs who can stomach some pretty rough material. I barely made it through one scene...however, it's tamer than Solondz's previous films.
One can sense that Solondz is merely attacking his critics, and is using satire to do so. He pulls no punches, and as usual, remains as cynical as ever. The performances are great all around. The film is split into two parts, "Fiction" and "Non-fiction", which seem unrelated at first. It's not until after the film ends, that you can pick up on the subtle connections between the two. Once again, not a film that I would recommend to just anyone, but if you are familiar with Solondz at all, it's worth a shot...however, there are two scenes here that are rough and a bit gratuitous in nature. One could have been edited out all together, as it seemed to exist only for shock value and worked against the context of the film itself. That is my only criticism.
Trite stories told badly 
2008-03-25 - The purpose of this review is to save someone 87 minutes of life. Spend that time elsewhere than with this film.
Before writing this review, I required myself to read all 68 previous reviews of the film posted on [...]. I usually allow myself this privilege only after I write a review. I want to record what I need to say before I allow others their fair say. I want to trust what I think, what I feel; I no longer want others--be they scholars or celebrities or athletes or family or friends--to think for me. Let me think, let me express, then let me consider the thoughts of others.
This time, though, my thoughts were so clear. This is trash--vulgar trash.
Am I surprised that people loved this movie? Yes. How did they record their impressions? One wrote about the "Sartrean power struggles" in the movie. If that phrase makes sense to you, perhaps this movie will also.
So I cast my vote with the haters of this movie, the critics who are forced to give it one star because we are not allowed to give it no stars, the critics who wrote the following:
"Less real than Sponge Bob Squarepants. . ."
"There isn't a laugh in it. . ."
"Arrogantly refuses to tell a cohesive story. . ."
"Simply mean-spirited. . ."
"More the illusion of substance. . .than substance. . ."
"It. . .offended me, bored me, confused me. . .very rarely did I feel entertained."
Save yourself.
Everyone always has a story to tell.
2008-01-17 - Todd Solondz's `Welcome to the Dollhouse' showed comic/absurd promise; his masturbation scene in `Happiness' overstepped the boundary of film taste but got everyone's attention. While I didn't enjoy "Storytelling" as much as I did the Director's two previous films, "Happiness" and "Welcome to The Dollhouse," Solondz continues to amaze with his depictions of just how awkward true life really is. As always, he masterfully shows the oft times tactless, cynical, transparent motivations of everyday suburban life and combines them with outrageous situations, giving a humorous view into the myriad of interesting quirky characters he creates. As with Happiness, Storytelling has no background characters. Each character gets fully explored in a way that no matter how familiar or foreign a specific character's behavior might be to you, you can't help but understand their motivations. Solondz can develop over 10 characters in 88 minutes while most conventional Hollywood films fail to portray just one in any given 3 hour "epic".
Selma Blair and Leo Fitzpatrick give incredible performances in the first segment of this film titled "Fiction". John Goodman is at his best here in the film's second segment "Non-fiction", not to mention it was a good to see Julie Haggerty in it.
One of the film's most honest moments (and there are MANY) comes in the beginning of the Non-Fiction segment, during a phone call Paul Giamatti gives to a female classmate he hadn't spoken to since high school. While hilarious, I couldn't help but feel bad for his character, which gets fleshed out in the almost confessional tone of the conversation (which of course, he blunders).
I don't want to dig far into the plot because the elements of shock and surprise that are Solondz bread and butter should only be revealed by others, suffice it to say I recommend this movie very highly. I look forward to anything this director does.
Different and disturbing 
2007-08-30 - Storytelling is another highly enjoyable, if typically disturbing work from the New York director Todd Solondz. His films, from his first breakthrough `Welcome to the Dollhouse' to the recent `Palindromes', have all been thoughtful and controversial dark comedies. In my view, the comedic moments have become a little scarcer and less funny in his last two films (this one and Pallindromes), but the philosophical ruminations have been taken to another level. Here, as in Pallindromes, the director explores in a highly original way, the seemingly inescapable but ultimately cruel and futile need of individuals to impose artificial narrative structure on the lives of themselves and others. As the abusive black tutor in the first of the film's two `stories' puts it : `Our stories run better when they have a beginning, a middle and an end, but as soon as we try to frame them in words and meanings we must admit that they become fiction'.
Solondz's world is a dark one, a world in which all human relationships are abusive Sartrean power struggles, where even our very identities are attempts to fix `the other' into a false straitjacket in order to increase our own power to define and control the world. These battles are fought often enough through primitive means of physical or sexual abuse, but they are always ultimately decided by the more sophisticated armouries of words, labels and meanings. His films provoke and unsettle above all because he refuses to fix himself to any one moral interpretation or `camp', right or left, and even dares to challenge the left's sanctity of the victim/abuser relationship. Solondz has been criticised for raising the unspeakably ugly head of paedophilia above the dinner party discussion table yet here he explores the female `converse' of negrophilia in a similarly stark and honest manner. The black male tutor at the creative writing school has a penchant for sexually degrading his young white female students. We are shown, however, that he is only in a position to exploit his perversion because those same women (like all the white females in the school) sexually objectify and fetishise a racist and harmful stereotype of the Afro-american male as a violent brute with a huge penis. That the holding back of the black American male in contemporary society is no longer the result of the evil racism of the white American male, but in fact lies now more in the grotesque sexual appetites and fetishes of American women is a typically bitter pill for the left leaning cinema goer to be asked to swallow. But for this hugely talented film director, nothing should be black and white and any attempt to pretend otherwise is mere storytelling.
A Masterpiece. A Really Terrific Movie.
2007-02-18 - Todd Solondz is a talented filmmaker and I can say that after seeing only one of his films. I saw "Happiness" a few months ago and appreciated it for how smart it was. It was disturbing, disgusting, but smartly written despite all the vulgarity (something I normally never have a problem with). When discussing "This Film is Not Yet Rated" he mentioned a scene from that film was from "Storytelling" a movie I had never heard of. I rented it that day and saw that it was written and directed by Todd Solondz, so I expected the same kind of thing. When the film ended I just thought...Wow. This is a great film. Unique, provocative, funny, and very intelligently written. I loved it. It's separated into two parts, two mini-movies if you will. The first is "Fiction" and the second is "Non-Fiction." At least, those are those titles, which are ironic in the same way the title of "Happiness" is. The movie runs 82 minutes. I expected them to be 40 minutes apiece. Oddly enough, "Fiction" is 27 and "Non-Fiction" is 55. A lot of writers would fear doing something like this, but Solondz doesn't want to fill something in just because it's expected. Both films end exactly when they should and not a single scene seems unnecessary. Here's a synopsis of both:
FICTION:
A college student named Vi (Selma Blair, looking beautiful) has been "dating" Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick, "Kids"), a man with cerebral palsy. After he writes a short story based on their relationship and is told by the professor, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom) that his story sucks. Since Vi told him it was good, he's disappointed and breaks up with her. Vi goes to a bar to "get drunk and get laid" and finds Mr. Scott there. This leads to two things...A terrific ending and a (dare I say it) great "erotic" scene.
NON-FICTION:
In this story, a loser documentary filmmaker named Toby (Paul Giamatti) sets out to make a documentary about teenagers. He finds the perfect specimen (at least, the only one who will participate in it) in Scooby (Mark Webber), a gay Conan O'Brien wannabe. Scooby lives with an overbearing father (John Goodman, in top form), a strange and possibly mentally challenged mother (Julie Haggerty), a popular brother Brady, and a little demon-child intelligent younger brother named Mikey. Several sub-plots abound in this story, including Brady having a football accident and Mikey's attempts to get their nanny Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros) fired. The ending is one of the best endings I've seen in a long time.
Out of both stories, I like "Non-Fiction" the best. Both are terrific, containing great acting and well-written story lines that never faulter. But "Non-Fiction" is just a masterpiece all its own.
Giamatti, Goodman, Webber, and Ontiveros are superb. The dialogue is so funny and so meaningful. I can't rave enough about this movie. Both endings make so much sense; they're almost poetic. This film is a masterpiece, a movie that truly deserves to be seen by a larger audience. Even if you didn't like "Happiness" or any of Solondz's other work (I now want to see more of it) I urge you to see this film. This is an American comedy that ranks right up there with
Sideways, Election, and About Schmidt.
GRADE: A
