Where do you begin with a movie like Happiness? For starters, I would not recommend watching this on a plane. The performances were mostly fantastic, but there were two scenes in the first hour that made me switch to something more suitable for the environment.

Happiness is called a black comedy. There is some comedy involved but I think the black is doing the heavy lifting in that category. Holy smokes, it deals with some subject matter that can make people quite uncomfortable, including myself. I mentioned the performances being great, but the actors are playing some really vile and horrible people that do some abhorrent things while the cheeriest music is playing in the background. It's a unique experience.

After the first hour and the scene with Phillip Seymour Hoffman engaged in masturbation while dialing random numbers and then with Dylan Baker engaged in something similar with a magazine that should never be used for that purpose, I hated this movie. I hated the people. I hated the story. I'm glad I took the break and returned to it, because between my first session on the plane and finishing the movie I read a quote from Roger Ebert. The full quote can be found below, but essentially the message was "the movies are like a machine that generates empathy." Happiness gave me an opportunity to see a filmmaker exploring these people and by me watching it I got to understand the crazy people who share this voyage around the blue marble we call home. I still hated them, but I better understood them.

My rating reflects that. I can't say it's great, but it is interesting. I also will never watch it again so long as I live.

>"We are all born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We are kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people, find out what makes them tick, what they care about. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them."