Customer Reviews

Happy Here and Now

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This movie is very surreal and confusing, but if you are a native of New Orleans, or grew up there, in some strange way you will appreciate this movie. It is an esoterical mess, but the black and white scenes and the scenes from from the city are some of the best in NOLA movie history. Seeing Ernie K-Doe was a real treat. It ain't A Streetcar Named Desire or even Heaven's Prisoners, but it has some redeeming qualities.

The best thing about this movie is Liane Balaban. Like her character, she is young fresh and unbowed unlike the other characters in this movie who all seem weary with disappointments. I think this movie is a time capsule of this disjointed internet meet cute time in America where everyone dreams but are too broke to really go anywhere and about how important the visual is as evidenced of the technology that transforms David Arquette so that his behavior and palate means something completely different with a different face. (But David Arquette's character is actually MORE attractive coming from his own face.)

This movie is just plain awful.It doesn't make any sense and it is so boring.It can't get much worse than this movie.On a scale of 1-10,I would give a 2.I would have given it a 1 but since David Arquette is in it,I'll give it one extra point.

First I must say that this film COULD have been good. You can rarely rely on the liner notes on a box these days. This one is billed as a "high tech thriller" with remarkable performances. The film boasts nothing high tech and mediocre performances. The best performances occur when the film flits to a black and white computer screen, which it does often, and the actors are playing some type of virtual reality game. The acting on the computer screen is the best part of the film. There is this surreal sense almost deamlike at times and because there is no dialog in these sequences these black and white dreamy asides work.
The acting is confusing, two separate characters have limps with no apparent reason. A third character has a patch over her eye from some type of surgery and the writer director Michael Atmereyda never goes deeply enough into any one character where we can get some understanding of what makes his characters tick. He could greatly benefit from a good screen writing class where he should learn the basics of what makes for a good script. Some storyboards might have been shown around and he could have asked ior a little help before he made this film.
There was potential and some very good ideas they just never developed. Think of it as a sort of "CRASH" type movie where everyone is somehow linked only in this script we never know how they are linked. There are way too many assumptions that the audience "gets it", when in fact, there's just not much to get. There are a few clever spots a Vandergraft generator that burns up and causes a fire that relates to an earlier fire sequence, a nightclub scene with a character that vaguely looks like Little Richard. I suppose there are enough odd elements to make this a tiny notch above a yawn. I would like to see more from this director as there are some genuine interesting ideas that dribble through this film. I would hope that this was a learning experience and that we get a better total package with his next effort. SG

There are bad movies, and there are badder movies. And then there are simply TERRIBLE movies. This is one of them, an indie that can only serve to prove that MOST (not all, now) indies are movies made by intellectuals who think they have something important or 'artsy' to say, but manage to say nothing. This abominable film is one of the worst movies I've ever suffered through. A plot that makes no sense whatsoever with performances that are stifling and unbelievable, and no semblance of coherency at all. David Arquette should start being a stay at home husband for Courteney, and Ally Sheedy needs to retire. As for Clarence Williams III, he should stay in retirement and watch THE MOD SQUAD or something more productive. Nothing saves this awful mess.

If you liked high school poetry class, you might like this movie. Both my wife and I hated it because the teachers always seemed to find some meaning in a poem that completely mystified us. I thought this movie was going to be a search for the missing sixteen-year-old sister of the main character. If she found out what happened, it must have been hidden just like those esoteric 'meanings' our teachers found in the poems they assigned. I thought the movie was still setting the background when it suddenly ended. What it was all about, I have no idea.

This is a movie for those who like to spout intellectual jibberish and think it means something. Or, maybe you have to be on some kind of illegal drug to make any sense of this movie?