Storytelling

Year: 2001

Actors: Paul Giamatti, Selma Blair, John Goodman, Franka Potente

Duration: 87 min

Fiction, the first half of Storytelling, opens with Vi having sex with her boyfriend, Marcus, who is afflicted with cerebral palsy. When they finish, Vi is anxious to leave, which Marcus suspects is because she no longer finds his handicap kinky.Marcus writes terrible short stories and, though Vi and her other creative writing classmates realize this, everyone flatters him because they are afraid of critiquing someone who is handicapped. Eventually, a classmate finally vocalizes criticisms before the black professor, Mr. Scott, unleashes a diatribe of insults ("Katherine is right. Your story is a piece of sh*t. You expressed nothing but banalities."). Marcus, hurt that Vi had not provided genuine criticism breaks up with her. Subsequently Vi meets Mr. Scott in a bar and she goes home with him. While freshening up in his bathroom, Vi discovers naked photographs of several of her white female classmates. "Don't be racist", she whispers to herself in the mirror. Upon exiting the bathroom, Mr. Scott asks her to take off her clothing and proceeds to sodomize her while demanding that she scream, "N*gger, f*ck me hard!" She returns to class, having written a thinly-veiled account of these events as a fictional short story. Her classmates immediately attack her with criticisms, calling the story racist, misogynistic, and the ramblings of a spoiled white girl.The second half Nonfiction stars Toby, a loser documentary filmmaker, and his subject Scooby, a directionless adolescent. Scooby is constantly at odds with his parents, a war that is waged nightly at the dinner table. Toby soon realizes that his documentary is aimless. It is revealed to the audience that Scooby is bisexual when he is shown apathetically allowing a male schoolmate to perform fellatio on him as he fantasizes about his parents set aflame. Toby's documentary soon changes from a respectful, educational documentary about high school students into a condescending, exploitative mockery of Scooby and his family. Scooby sneaks into an early screening of the film only to discover the audience laughing uproariously at the representation of his family. While Scooby is out, the family's ex-housekeeper, embittered by her recent firing, poisons his family with gas. Scooby returns to his home to discover that his family is dead and tells Toby coldly to not feel sorry for him because, "the movie is a hit."

Genre: Comedy   Drama   Romance