Happy Endings movie: not so good

Ooh...not good.

i didn't know maggie g sang, it was really fine. she smiled a little too much at times, perhaps due to uncontrollable natural hotness, but i was impressed by how her character never came across as unequivocal about why she was the way she was; i.e., noxious, but not nec. always unmotivated by authentic human feelings, somewhere hidden. i know 'iago' wasn't exactly what geoff meant, but i don't think she was meant to be clearly that kind of thing at all; i.e. not just manipulating otis + dad to her advantage (certainly not trying to set one against the other).

seeing a comment on the homicide thread recently about max perlich having created some character made me think, i think, that it's both fascinating and now slightly to her disadvantage (at times; it can also be flipped) that lisa kudrow put so many of her mannerisms etc. into, or at least retained them from, her phoebe character. hmm.

i liked the feeling i got of being saved needless setup by the captioning device earlier on, but then later it was used in a let's say not overstated but not understated way to add depth to the narrative. take e.g. the scene where mamie/kudrow is watching nicky/bradford and then the caption says sth like that she hadn't before met anyone as mixed up as she was. it was weird: right before that i had been feeling, huh, why lead this into them getting closer while working together? lame movie logic. but then with the caption everything felt more justified.

a lot of the feeling of 'naturalness' depended, i think, on new events or occurrances, or new revelations of previously hidden character secrets or attitudes, hidden from the audience but narratively justifiable by how ordinarily these kinds of things are sprung on people. take for example the scene between the two couples in the restaurant, where the real reason they didn't have gil's kid is revealed.

i wonder if it isn't this deft 'natural' feel that made me generally ignore the contrivedness of the making-a-movie subplot (or rather the way in which all the very realistically acting characters ignored its contrivedness).

lots of good stuff on multivalent uses (and misuses) of sex, and on attempts to live authentically out of inauthenticity, that sits nicely below the level of 'message'.

the soundtracking was not so good. i couldn't readily imagine a much better alternative soundtrack or score, would have preferred far less music. but the dirty three parts were nice. maybe calexico fans who could recognize all the calexico thought differently, i dunno. the stuff with vocals was heavyhanded though.

the impulse to narrative completion at the end was a little too much - how much was gained by knowing how the characters ended up?

interesting that there is director-narratorial intrusion in the caption before the final 'just the way you are' sequence, to a degree i can't recall in the earlier captions: the narrator sez that he didn't know what happened to jude/maggie and that (sth like) 'this is the best i could see'. so she's by herself, or fronting a band, apparently ahem classy as opposed to before, and she's the one that sings the closing song (cuz you know it could have been just soundtracked).

but i'd be interested to watch closely who is looking at whom in that sequence, because i don't think the song is meant to clearly assert a message of love and acceptance or whatever. a lot of the failed relationships have something to do with secrets, but as far as i remember a lot of the secrets are taken to be signs that the people who keep them are not all they make themselves out to be, when in fact the things binding the people in the later-failed relationships together seem to be mutual acceptance of the people as they present themselves locally, in the way they act with the characters; think of the scenes with arnold/maggie g in bed. i suppose one way to take that would be to say that lots of the characters seem guided more by a principle like 'i love you just the way you appear to me', which would make the meaning of the final song kind of limited and pointed. but without going back to see again i'm not sure right now if all the characters accept or reject each others' revealed selves in the same ways.