Happiness
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“My Best Ability, In Terms of Acting, Is To Know Everything About My Character.” Dylan Baker, Back To One Episode, 287
Dylan Baker is the definition of a consummate actor. For over three decades he has delivered so many incredible performances in series like The Good Wife, Damages, Hunters, films like Happiness, Selma, Spider-Man 2, and his latest, LaRoy, Texas, where he plays a professional killer. He talks about his approach toward playing despicable people, some who other actor’s wouldn’t touch. He takes us back to his beginnings, and the acting instruction that changed his work and which he still uses today. He tells a story about how the legendary theater director Nikos Psacharopoulos had a big impact on his early […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Apr 16, 2024 -
“The Price of Making a Movie is That I Have to Direct It”: Todd Solondz on Happiness
Todd Solondz’s indelible Happiness was released 25 years ago today. Filmmaker is reposting here its interview with Solondz, the cover story of our Fall 1998 issue. — Editor Winner of the Critic’s Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Todd Solondz’s startling new Happiness is not only one of the most challenging and invigorating independent films of the year, it’s also, by virtue of the strange politics of its release, a talking point for prognosticators everywhere concerned with the co-option of indie-film attitude by corporate-controlled majors and mini-majors. Ambitiously weaving five separate tales of modern alienation, romantic woe, and shocking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 16, 2023 -
Clip Premiere: Thomas Balmès Sing Me a Song
Releasing tomorrow, January 1, 2021, on digital platforms is Thomas Balmès’s Sing Me a Song, which finds the French documentarian returning to the town of Laya in Bhutan, the scene of his excellent 2014 documentary Happiness, to learn how one of its subjects, an eight-year-old monk named Peyangki who’s now a teenager, is dealing with the late arrival to his monastery of the internet and social media. Needless to say, the combination of adolescence and technology has created profound changes in Peyangki’s life — changes that provide insight into the ways in which these forms of communication have changed all […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 31, 2020 -
Park City Critic’s Notes #3: On Happiness, Web Junkie, Love Child and the Peril of Electronic Screens
A couple nights before the Sundance Film Festival commenced this year, I came home one evening hoping to squeeze in at least a couple of pre-fest screeners before I went to bed, knowing I had a full day of hack journalist duties awaiting me the next morning. While taking the train back from the Filmmaker offices and walking through a dreary Bedford-Stuyvesant evening, I dreaded what I thought I would discover upon returning home: a subletter — a young aspirant sportswriter whose presence in our home had only been announced by one of my more regular roommates the day before […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 19, 2014
