Solondz’s latest movie, Storytelling, continues on with his favorite subjects: school, home, and the misfits of everyday life. And he’s broken Storytelling into two sections called "Fiction" and "Nonfiction."

The first story, "Fiction," is the shorter of the two, but the one I liked best. It’s about Vi (Selma Blair), a young college student in a creative writing class. The students write short stories and then suffer the abuse of feedback from their peers followed by ridicule from their pompous Pulitzer Prize-winning professor. As he did so well in Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz shows the injustice and indignity leveled daily in our school systems.

Despite the professor’s condescending attitude, he intrigues Vi. As we learn in the first scene in the film, Vi likes to experiment. So, through a series of events Vi ends up in a compromised position with her professor and the story builds to a sexual episode between Vi and him that’s so bizarre (and obviously offensive to a few people who left the theater at that point) that when she turns the real-life event into a short story for her class no one believes such a thing could happen. And instead of sympathizing with her, they lambaste her for writing such offensive material. This is undoubtedly Solondz’s way of reminding us that truth is almost always stranger than fiction -- and much harder to watch.

The longer and more ambitious "Nonfiction" puts us back in high school with Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber). Scooby smokes pot in the bathroom, plays music at ear-splitting levels in his home ("Island Girl"), and can never see eye to eye with his parents, particularly his father (John Goodman). The only thing he knows about his future is that he wants to be famous. But, he doesn’t have a clue how to get there.

Scooby ends up being the subject of a low-budget documentary film about how stress impacts high school students entering college (indie-film fans will love seeing Mike Schank from American Movie in a small role as a cameraman). Solondz uses this setup to expose the ironies and indecencies that thrive in America’s middle-class families. And, just like he did in Happiness, he manages to sneak in just about every politically incorrect and taboo subject that people like to pretend don’t exist but can’t be ignored because they’re headline news almost every day.