I have to seriously psych myself up for Todd Solondz. I love him and fear him. He is like the Charles Addams cartoon of the giant sleeping under the crazy quilt of Midwestern states. I know he'll crush me whenever he does something.
I think the major problem I have with Solondz is the way he's marketed. He doesn't make "black comedies", he makes "films that make you so uncomfortable you have to laugh to keep yourself from crying", but that doesn't make for a pithy soundbite.
What separates Solondz from other cringe comedy is he focuses extremely hard on the cringe and not enough on the comedy. It's like a 97/3 ratio, while other cringers (did I make that word up? If I did, I'm sorry) like Larry David understand that you need to make people laugh if you're going to tell them the truth about themselves. Self-deprecation is also vital. Solondz comes off as much too point-and-laugh above-it-all for my tastes.
This movie is the most straight up funny, mostly because he stars in it and does a Woody Allen impression the whole time. It's basically an 80s Wody Allen movie if the people were just as self involved as a real Woody Allen movie but were poor, unsuccessful and (mostly) untalented.
Also it's a musical.
He's completely ashamed of it and won't re-release it, so it's VHS only; even the torrent of it is kind of shit. I think I lost my tape, and that really bums me out. It's the only one of his movies I've wanted to watch more than once or twice, but that might be because most of my friends in my 20s went to art school so it hits pretty close to home.