journal features

movie review - Happiness

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Sydney, 2000.02.15

This is a bleak affair about a family of three sisters and the various people floating around them. As the title suggests, the characters are miserable, and many of their deeds are desperate if not outright horrible. The pace is a touch slow, but there are several points where this movie's got your utter attention as it inexorably glides towards one terrible conclusion or another.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)