Todd Solondz
Wiener-Dog tells several stories featuring people who find their life inspired or changed by one particular dachshund, who seems to be spreading a certain kind of comfort and joy. Man’s best friend starts out teaching a young boy some contorted life lessons before being taken in by a compassionate vet tech named Dawn Wiener. Dawn reunites with someone from her past and sets off on a road trip picking up some depressed mariachis along the way. Wiener-Dog then encounters a floundering film professor, as well as an embittered elderly woman and her needy granddaughter—all longing for something more.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Abe is a man who is in his thirties and who lives with his parents. He works regretfully for his father while pursuing his hobby of collecting toys. Aware that his family doesn't think highly of him, he tries to spark a relationship with Miranda, who recently moved back home after a failed literary/academic career. Miranda agrees to marry Abe out of desperation, but things go awry.
Friends, family, and lovers struggle to find love, forgiveness, and meaning in an almost war-torn world riddled with comedy and pathos. Follows Solondz's film Happiness (1998).
Aviva is thirteen, awkward and sensitive. Her mother Joyce is warm and loving, as is her father, Steve, a regular guy who does have a fierce temper from time to time. The film revolves around her family, friends and neighbors.
College and high school serve as the backdrop for two stories about dysfunction and personal turmoil.
New York City. Melvin Udall, a cranky, bigoted, obsessive-compulsive writer, finds his life turned upside down when neighboring gay artist Simon is hospitalized and his dog is entrusted to Melvin. In addition, Carol, the only waitress who will tolerate him, must leave work to care for her sick son, making it impossible for Melvin to eat breakfast.
An unattractive 7th grader struggles to cope with suburban life as the middle child with un-attentive parents and bullies at school.
This film focuses on the trials and tribulations of Ira (Todd Solondz), who is an unsuccessful playwright trying to find himself in New York City.
Angela de Marco is fed up with her gangster husband's line of work and wants no part of the crime world. When her husband is killed for having an affair with the mistress of mob boss Tony "The Tiger" Russo, Angela and her son depart for New York City to make a fresh start. Unfortunately, Tony has set his sights upon Angela -- and so has an undercover FBI agent looking to use her to bust Tony.
Solondz’s 1985 student short film “Schatt’s Last Shot” provides an ideal entry point to his unflinching universe of dark comic despair. A young Solondz stars in the 10-minute short as geeky high schooler Ezra Schatt, a neurotic, primitive headcase of the young Woody Allen variety. Buried under thick, unseemly glasses and an endlessly dazed expression, Ezra’s worst enemy is basketball. Unable to make a single basket under the brutal pressures of his vulgar gym teacher (“You’re shit, Schatt!”), Ezra also fails at both impressing the cheerleader of his dreams and realizing his aspirations of attending MIT.
The story follows a young male protagonist as he recalls the babysitters of his youth.
His first film shot with sound, Feelings is a two and a half minute movie made as an NYU film school assignment in 1984. Solondz himself takes the lead role of a sensitive young man who finds he can no longer endure life without his beloved. Photographed by Andy Day, the film is set to Todd Solondz's personal rendition of the song "Feelings" by Morris Albert.
Centers on an extremely jealous 11-year-old boy obsessed with his mother. When the delusional youngster and aspiring Broadway star plots to kill his father and set his mother up with a lodger, things do not go as he plans. His mother and the new man fall wildly in love, forcing the child to rethink his strategy and frame the paramour for his father’s murder.
