On Movies: Director's choice: Jump out window or laugh

When last seen, the various sad and messed-up New Jersey suburbanites of

Todd

Solondz's

1998 indie

Happiness

were, well, still very much sad and messed up. The three sisters in the piece were played by

Jane Adams

,

Lara Flynn Boyle

, and

Cynthia Stevenson

. There was a shrink with pedophilic urges, portrayed with eerie calm by

Dylan Baker

. The bulky loner, Allen, was spookily inhabited by

Philip Seymour Hoffman

, making obscene phone calls and masturbating into the night.

And here we are, a dozen years later, and the whole merry bunch are back.

But with new actors - Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, and Ally Sheedy as the sisters, Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar from The Wire) in the Hoffman part, Ciaran Hinds in Baker's, and so on. Life During Wartime opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse.

"I never imagined that I would ever revisit these characters or storylines," says Solondz. "I thought that was it. Done. Finished, move on. . . . But obviously my imagination wasn't fertile enough, because, in fact, 10 years later I found myself writing the first scene, and saying, 'Is there a movie? Is there stuff to explore in there?' "

The answer, apparently, was yes. Working that same deadpan seriocomic tone, but with a more pronounced political edge (the ashes of 9/11 are definitely wafting through here), Solondz's new picture is unsettling, illuminating, funny, but no walk in the park.

"It's not a replication, it's got its own life," says the filmmaker, sporting green-framed eyewear, cool Converse All-Stars, and an all-around hip nerd look on a recent swing through Philadelphia.

"If you're looking for the same experience, you'll be disappointed. . . . It is a kind of variation, what I call a quasi-sequel."

Solondz, 51, teaches in the graduate program of NYU's film school and can talk professorially about how he deliberately designed and shot the opening scenes of Life During Wartime to echo the style and tone of its precursor, "as if you're watching the same movie, but just that you have different actors."

But watch out, because Solondz is being tricky:

"I did that so the audience can have a certain level of comfort, and then, of course, you have to pull the rug away. You always have to be ahead of the audience, throw them a curveball, so things aren't quite where you assume they're going. . . . I didn't want to be beholden to the literalness of what had been established. And so that gave me a lot of pleasure, to try things that I couldn't otherwise do.

"That said, if you haven't seen any of my prior work . . . you can follow the story on its own terms. And it's hard to say what's better - to know my work or not. There's a plus and a minus, because I think if you do know the earlier work, you'll take pleasure in connecting the dots and seeing the way things vary. But at the same time, it can make you more self-conscious, which perhaps would make it more difficult to engage in the movie itself. So, it's hard to say."

Solondz found the idea of recasting with a new troupe of players a liberating experience, he says.

"For example, I love Dylan Baker, I do, but I felt that I wanted an actor that had a certain kind of gravitas, a certain kind of weight, a dead-man-walking, ghostlike, spent-shell-of-a-husk-of-a-soul type, that I felt that Ciaran could embody more readily."

And then there's Paul Reubens - yes, Pee-wee Herman - in the part of the dogged suitor that Jon Lovitz had in Happiness.

"He's a very funny character," says Solondz. "But Paul also has a whole history that lends an extra layer of pathos and poignancy and sorrow [to the role]. . . . Audiences, I think, are so unaware of what he's even capable of."

Solondz describes his movies - the 1995 Sundance winner Welcome to the Dollhouse, 2001's Storytelling, and 2004's Palindromes - as "sad comedies." He says that the balancing act of incorporating the mournful and the ironic, the grim with a grin, has become an instinctive part of his writing process.

"You do develop a certain confidence with experience," he explains. "But you always have to be questioning, you're always measuring. . . . In some way it has to feel that the comedy and the pathos, yes they are intertwined, but is it in the right balance? So I'm mindful. . . . The movies walk a fine line. . . .

"I don't think the response has even changed very much from Dollhouse to now," he adds. "Half the audience laughing, and the other half thinking, How can you laugh? This is so sad.

"But for me it's both, concurrently, and that's the prism, I suppose, through which I experience and express my sense of the world."

And, he notes, his movies would be "unbearable" if they were not, on some level, funny.

"You can take pills, or jump out the window, or you could laugh. So I like to laugh, I do, at the cruelty that we experience."

The Wright director for "Scott Pilgrim." First came Shaun of the Dead, the mad-genius genre homage to zombie pics. Then came Hot Fuzz, the lunatic salute to cop movies. And now comes Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, English director Edgar Wright's adaptation of the graphic novel about a twentysomething Torontonian and his reality-challenged world of rock-and-roll and romance, video games and vegans, manga and martial arts, sitcoms and sex.

"It's like a Nintendo version of Billy Liar," says Wright about his latest and most elaborately staged production, demonstrating that he not only knows Japanese video games but the British New Wave classics, as well.

With the title role going to Michael Cera, Scott Pilgrim, which opened this weekend, is crammed full of pop-cult references and motifs, toggling back and forth between comic-book captions and gamer mow-downs, between heartfelt scenes of true love and battle-of-the-bands histrionics. In the film, young Pilgrim must face off against the seven exes of the girl he loves.

"Because your hero is essentially like a fantasist, there's a legitimate reason to incorporate all the other media," says Wright, who even goes so far as to throw in an out-of-nowhere Seinfeld nod. "It's how he would like to live his life. Your narrator for the film, your central protagonist, is a complete daydreamer. And it's almost like you're watching his fabricated, dreamlike version of events."

Wright - who has written the screenplay for the coming Peter Jackson/Steven Spielberg collaboration on The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn - likens the superhero fight scenes in Scott Pilgrim to the song-and-dance numbers in a movie musical:

"You know, in musicals people break into songs, and in this they break into fights. But at the end of the song, nobody ever comments on the fact they just sang a song. . . . In Grease, they don't say after 'Summer Nights,' 'Oh my god, that was amazing, that routine on the bleachers!'

"So that was the idea, that this is a way of establishing the rules of the universe. People break into fights, like it just happens, and they go on with their business."