chipolata
Wednesday 29th May 2013 8:36pm
31,376 posts
Quote: Tim Walker @ February 15 2011, 2:26 AM GMT
Watched Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz's sequel to his (very) black comedy Happiness, which I thought was brilliant, daring and at time brutally funny.
The sequel, however, is absolutely abysmal. Bad enough that it's 2 hours of bad storytelling, awful dialogue and disjointed direction, but Todd Solondz's brilliant idea was to film the sequel with different actors in all the original roles. This is a sequel which doesn't stand alone and relies on the audience having watched and appreciated the first movie. So why make it more difficult to relate to the sequel by substituting new actors giving very different performances inconsistent with their original characters? With the same cast it just might have been easier to forgive how badly thought out the sequel is. Without them, it's impossible.
A total disaster of a movie.
I just watched this, Tim (not that you care, or are even reading this). But I didn't think it was that bad. It's not a patch on Happiness and certainly has it's problems - it is disjointed and more than a little soul-destroying - but there's enough bleakly funny scenes to make it worth watching.