Happy Here and Now (2002)
I wasn’t happy here and now when
watching this turkey. I was Bored in the Movie Theater.
I guess bored may not be the proper term. For much
of the film I was at least interested to see how in
the fuck all this random stuff was going to come together.
When It didn’t, I was “Disappointed in the Movie Theater."
I don’t understand how this film
won a special jury prize for a narrative film at SXSW
in 2003. There is no narrative. What you have
here is a diverse group of eccentric characters held
together with the thinnest of threads. If films were
a geometric shape, “Happy Here and Now” would be all
desperate angles. Nothing fits together here. When,
in the middle of the film, the mystery takes a left
turn and the protagonist visits the house of the suspicious
– for no fucking apparent reason in the world – you
know the film has lost its path.
Here are the characters, in case
you care (actually if I don’t write about the characters,
there’s little else to write about). There’s a fireman
who sees a co-worker killed in an explosion. When
his friend’s widow visits him wearing an eye-patch
due to a botched laser surgery, he avoids her. There’s
a girl whose her sister has disappeared. There’s her
alcoholic aunt played by Ally Sheedy (who promptly
disappears after she gets her paycheck). There’s a
group of goofs who run a radio station out of their
house. There’s David Arquette playing David Arquette
as a character who may know something about the missing
sister. There’s an older black guy named Bill who
is helping the girl look for her sister (Bill is apparently
so good with computers he can trace where someone
resides by the IP address of their webcam). There’s
a guy named Quinton played by a gay named Quintron.
There’s a black R&B star who runs a bar named Ernie
K-Doe. (Character schmaracter, he’s a real person!)
All of these people live in New
Orleans so it is okay for them to be eccentric. Anytime
we doubt the seriousness of any of the characters,
director Michael Almereyda simply cranks up some N.O.
sounding old school R&B and – viola – the film has
local flavor and the appearance of Cajun realism.
But this script, which Almereyda
also wrote, has no semblance of reality. It has no
plot. There’s lots of mumbo jumbo about people using
webcams and using cyber-disguises to pretend they’re
someone they’re not but that’s about it. Other than
that, there’s endless riffs by Arquette (or Karl Geary
playing his on-line alter-ego) about Nicholi Tesla,
Blaise Pascal and termites. For fans of eccentric
dialogue, the film is a practical poem. For fans of
film, however, there is much to be desired.
There is a cool ending though. But
it’s too much too late. “Happy Here and Now” is a
jigsaw puzzle without borders. The picture isn’t much
to look at either. Perhaps some pieces were lost on
the cutting room floor. Then again, maybe they were
never there in the first place.
Notes:
With Clarance Williams III, Shalom
Harlow, and John Sinclair.
Arquette is a producer.
K-Doe was famous for a song called
“Mother-in-Law.” He apparently died in 2001. Find
out more at http://www.k-doe.com/
Viewed in Austin in March at the
2003 SXSW
Film Festival
