#672 - Happiness Where Are You?
Added 2025-11-28 03:41:57 +0000 UTC
Comments
Yes actually we need to send a message to them that they’ll get. I always have to boost this show up to about 60% on Apple Podcasts.
Johnny 5
2025-12-06 08:44:13 +0000 UTCHappiness casting notable for politics: Marla Maples (married to Donald Trump 1993-1999) is the real estate agent who says “Divorce was the best thing that ever happened to me”. And shoutout to Jared Harris as Vlad too!
Goji
2025-12-04 07:37:15 +0000 UTCNot to be the "ooooh the audio" kind of guy but has anyone else noticed how much quieter the mixing of michael and us is compared to other podcasts? I have to raise the volume louder and then get my ear blasted by the next show autoplaying.
Santiago Rodriguez
2025-11-29 16:42:29 +0000 UTCThere's an aspect of this movie's most infamous scene where Bill admits his child predatory crimes to his son which I've repeatedly seen excluded from positive write ups about this movie that I've come to find suspicious. After Bill says that he would rape his son's friends but that he would jerk off instead of raping his son, his son starts crying. To me, that's where the movie went from pitch black comedy/social satire to revealing a bit too much about Todd Solondz himself. It's nonsense that any child, even the most sheltered and emotionally overly attached one, would feel that way about learning that his Dad doesn't want to rape him. I admit I was a late bloomer but at 11 or 12, I cannot even imagine me finding the idea of my father raping me anything but utterly repellant. It turns the movie into a 4Chan joke.
Dustin Koski
2025-11-29 16:38:16 +0000 UTCNotes on a scandal… broke or woke?
mary catherine
2025-11-29 13:32:42 +0000 UTCI saw this in the theater in ‘98 and found it a little disturbing that some fellow audience members found some fucked-up parts funny. In hindsight, they probably just thought those scenarios extremely absurd.
Zachary Smith
2025-11-28 23:34:52 +0000 UTCI haven’t revisited American Beauty since the very early 2000s, but I do remember feeling it was transgressive at the time. It really felt like we were getting somewhere with the anti corporate globalization movement, and rebelling against the idea of the white picket fence thing. In that sense, and since I was only 20 when it came out, I will defend it.
Johnny 5
2025-11-28 18:01:48 +0000 UTCYou discussed “Happiness” and still the Greg Proops clip is the most depraved part of the episode
Horseloverfat
2025-11-28 04:48:23 +0000 UTCAbout a decade ago I heard Solondz being described as a creator of “autistic cinema”, and I think I appreciate that element even more than all the transgression. And I think Palindromes (which, despite me personally preferring Happiness these days, might still be one of the most “Charli” movies ever made) might also show that autistic element as well as it shows the fucked-up-ness, especially in the Sunshine Singers sequences, and in that sense, it almost DOES feel empathetic in its own way (at least from my own fucked-up autist perspective). (Though I think with Happiness this “autistic empathy” is much more formal than literal, if that makes sense at all)
Charli Rogers
2025-11-28 04:04:33 +0000 UTC
