Happy Here and Now

I loved this movie, but I can see how a lot of people would find it unfulfilling, if not disappointing. It doesn't have a wow-bam plot like we've come to expect from Hollywood films. It leads you to expect one, but instead it pulls a fast one and leaves you with a complex message much deeper than the story.

If you're a fan of the European masters Wim Wenders ("Lisbon Story"), Krzysztof Kieślowski ("The Double Life of Veronique"), or even some works of Robert Altman ("Short Cuts"), then you'll really like this. I'll even throw in Vincent Gallo ("Brown Bunny"), Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") and Rebecca Miller ("Angela") as similar directors.

If you don't know any of them, don't worry. The point is that this film, like the ones mentioned above, draws us in with a tantalizing plot (a young girl's searches for her missing sister within the surreal world of cyber chatrooms and New Orleans) but quickly diverges to a much broader message. Obviously I won't ruin that message for you because it is revealed only in the last few seconds, and very subtly at that.

But in essence, this is a film made up of fragments of different people's lives. The characters barely overlap, so you have to pay attention to several simultaneous subplots or you may get lost. What you should focus on, while watching the movie, is what these people have in common and how their parallel stories intersect.

The whole movie has the appearance of a dream. The director uses bizarre effects to detach us from reality, and that helps ease us into the cryptic fragments that are thrown at us, much the same way that your subconscious mind may throw fragments while you're sleeping. The dialogue is very poetic and meaningful, with references to great dreamers like Nikola Tesla, Blaise Pascal, and a few funk music gurus. I'm not familiar with New Orleans, but there seems to be a lot of home-grown history in this film, and not just the ritzy French Quarter stuff.

I watched this film mainly to see Liane Balaban (a.k.a. Moonie Potty from the hilarious "New Waterford Girl"). She delivers a good performance, but I think David Arquette steals the show as the part-nerdy, part-creepy character who seems to be hiding a dark secret. Clarance Williams is a great match for Liane, playing her offbeat detective partner. And Karl Geary does a charismatic job, dropping his Irish twang for a Cajun drawl.

See this movie if you're into odd art films like the ones I mentioned above. Even if you're not, give it a try. Just expect to be led into a puzzle whose solution doesn't necessarily have much to do with the plot. This is a film you'd probably want to see twice.

HAPPY HERE AND NOW is one strange film. I wish it were on DVD because I very much want to see it again. Encountering it a couple of years back at a festival of the Film Society of Lincoln Center "picks," I was thoroughly mystified even as, moment-by-moment, I enjoyed the movie. The ensemble cast is a really interesting grab-bag of performers (from Karl Geary to Ally Sheedy, Shalom Harlow, David Arquette, even Larry Fessenden), and the writing and direction is by Michael Almereyda, a moviemaker who keeps growing as he matures. What really knocked my socks off, however, is the ending: a phenomenal feat of film editing by Kristina Boden (and, one presumes, Almereyda) that, in a single continuous succession of splices, brings together the entire movie--theme, ideas, feelings, visuals--so beautifully and fully that I found myself in tears. It's the first and only time that film editing has ever had THIS effect on me! Please, someone, bring "Happy Here and Now" to DVD.

There is great potential in the premise and some of the characters, but no commitment to an engrossing story. The main character is as flacid as one comes, and it's mostly not the actress's fault. There is no delivery of any coherent message in each of the subplots that is taped together with scotch tape (no offense to 3M), And any direction each story goes in ends up in not only a dead end but a colorless, bland cosmos.

Not recommended for even those who go to movies to hallucinate. Unless you need some extra sleep. - A sleeper, in the literal sense.

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!"

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.