Happy Endings There was attempt to do something original here, unfortunately, the experiment failed. It's more of a graphic novel with moving pictures than it is a film. We're spoodfed ridiculous amounts of exposition via placards that pop up on the side of the screen like fun bubble facts from a video. And what makes it worse is that it's not an objective, ominipotent narration, but a narration that's written in the spoken vernacular with a definite point of view. If it has a definite point of view, who's writing it? Some mysterious omnipotent subjective narrator that we never meet. And we know it's not God, because of the lame attempts at being clever and funny. And just when you think it can't get worse, the fun facts tell us things in the distant past, the distant future, the characters' thoughts, and even what's going on with the bodily functions of some of the characters. Oh man. The story lines aren't very good either. I could not see Mamie going along with the extortion and the other shanigans that goes on after. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. Most of the dialog was confusing, implausible or just lame. For example, Lane tells Jude, "I still don't see the problem. In a month, you tell the old guy it's his... and then when you deliver, it's like this really big preemie... that just happens to look like both of them. We're not reinenting the wheel here." Yeah, it's the old have sex with the son, have sex with the father and you don't know who got you pregnant. We all know that routine, right? Who hasn't been down that road? It's so ridiculous. The storyline with the lesbians and male gay couple is not much better. It's way too purposely convoluted. It's like the filmmakers are digging to find ways to unnecessarily complicate the storyline. And then there's the hallmark of trendy and lazy filmmakers - the corny montages set to trendy pop music to tell us how to feel. And the split screen thing seemed like it was only there to show that they could do it. And why was Mamie running willy-nilly at the end? When I heard the title, it made me think of that hackneyed joke about massages and I thought the filmmakers were above referencing a stupid, overplayed joke like that. But, sure enough, that's what they were doing. It reminds me of "Coyote Ugly", another waste of film. Virtually every actor in this film is great, but they can't save a script this absurd. It's just so much schlop.
Review of Happy Endings
