Happy Here and Now (2002)

Pretty actors, good actors.No story.I was very disappointed by this film. Not because I like shoot em ups - I don't - but because it had no clarity at all. It reminded me of how I felt when I had a really bad fever once and became delirious. Nothing made sense and I was having to fill in the gaps for myself all the way through. I would have had a better time just staring at a blank wall and making my own film up in my head. The experience made more sense when I checked the background of the director/writer of the film and found he was also behind Cherry 2000!!A film that was on a week or so ago on cable and which was agreed by my family to be the worst and most annoying film we have ever sat through. Its most annoying trait was echoed by Happy Here and Now - in that both films keep on promising to get better if you just keep on watching. You have the feeling that it must be going somewhere and any moment it will all fall into place and make sense. After all they wouldn't spend all that time and money on a complete pointless waste of effort would they?Umm.... Yes. They would.

Mysterious, elliptical film that at first I didn't know what to make of, but I found it really lingered in the mind afterwards and was ultimately one of the most memorable films I saw at the 2002 Toronto International film festival; a really unique play between the real and the imiation of the real and the blurring between them. Funny, strange, affecting; I didn't understand all of it, but I liked it.

As a native of New Orleans, when I heard that a movie was being made here that would involve (singer) Ernie K-Doe, my inner monologue was one protracted groan. We are used to having Hollywood portray the city along familiar lines -- lots of gumbo, voodoo and Mardi Gras as a daily occurrence, and maybe a black guy in a cowboy hat as a member of law enforcement. The Big Easy is a perfect example of such a cliche-peppered representation.I put it together a few days later that the director was the director of Nadja, one of my favorite vampire movies, so I thought, well, maybe this guy will get it.And get it he did, getting down with the superamazing and description-defying Ernie K-Doe, sort of the Muhammad Ali of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues. His club, the Mother-in-Law Lounge, served until his death as sort of a pagan night church that improbably brought Orleanians of widely varying stripes together to backchorus his songs.The central thread of HAPPY HERE AND NOW is the confounding side of New Orleans, a wall against the main character finding information about her missing sister. But the magical, unyielding city offers compensatory joys -- second line parades, Ally Sheedy as an older New Orleans kookster/auntee, and hula hip hop in people's apartments.Have you ever seen a movie set in New Orleans that has NO scenes in the French Quarter? This may be the first. Capturing the oddness of the city in scenes such as David Arquette's character working as a termite man who puts huge tents over Victorian houses, director Almareyda captures the soul of America's bottom, a mystery, overlaid onto a tale which is loosely a "mystery" (where's the missing sister).A discrete and oblique joyful noise leads the viewer to these Pied Piper's New World caves, revealing everyday oddness as beautiful.

Now let me clarify that I love art films. I love abstract ideas. I love seeing and hearing things on screen that make me go,"Wha????, and then go "oohhhh...i get it." But this is no Godard. This film, well, I just don't know. Is it in art film? Is it an excuse to display the gritty, third-world beauty of New Orleans, and the array of characters that lie within? Or is it a low-budget independent film that juggles from one concept to the other, never bothering to connect the dots because, well hell, there wasn't really a solid script in the first place, and never a real purpose to the story(how's that for a run-on sentence)? i guess my problem with this film is that, though it may have been low-budget, they still spent a a good deal on its production and actors, but didn't bother making an actual story with what they had. I was intrigued by the film and the ideas it was portraying. And if the whole film would have been as beautifully-abstract as the final dream sequence, or even the beginning (the music score, by David Julyan is great!), I would have wept--in a good way--like a child. I saw this at the New Orleans film fest in a packed house of audience members happy enough to see people and places they recognized: Ernie K. Doe, Bud's Broiler, etc. But perhaps they loved it...who knows?The ideas, talent, and potential are there for a good film. But as a whole, the film makes you go, "hmmmmm....interesting....NEXT PLEASE!"