Happiness - Rating: 9

The film Hapiness featuress the character Joy who lives under a black cloud where weirdly bad things happen to her.  Her sister's husband sits at the head of his perfect suburban family dining room table, except he's a serial rapist pedophile.  These and other assorted emotionally crippled, sexually repressed, sad, wounded murderers, thiefs and abusers get together for a few laughs in this brilliant film.  I've discovered another indie film hero, Todd Solondez, the apparent master of the dark comedy.  I guess the story goes that after scoring big at Sundance with Welcome to the Dollhouse (reviewed earlier on these pages) in 1996 he was offered money-making Hollywood big star vehicles to direct but didn't sell out.  He instead wrote and directed Happiness in 1998, an obviously non-suburban-cineplex film.  This is a dark, daring, pull-no-punches masterpiece.  I only relatively recently heard of this guy, now I have a couple more of his films on my list.  He had a film at Cannes this year called Life During War Time.  Don't know much about it.