Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Happy Endings

(2005)

I have to put this movie on my list of things I’ve seen because I try to be complete. But I can’t review it. Professional reviewers aren’t supposed to admit stuff like this, but I’m just a guy who writes what he thinks about movies, and I’m going to admit that when we saw this last night I was feeling exhausted and a bit depressed and I’d had a mild headache for two days. I kept thinking I should be liking the movie more than I was, that it just wasn’t coming together for me though all the elements were there. That could be because the movie wasn’t assembling it all well, or it could be because I was just feeling lousy. I’m not going to bad-mouth a movie I saw under those circumstances, so take this as an entirely neutral and useless “review.” (I will say that I found the auctorial asides revealing future events and the screenwriters’ opinions seemed lame, and a distraction.) Maybe Lee will have something to add. She seemed to be enjoying it. [It wasn’t THAT bad. The characters weren’t very engaging, except for Jude, played by the always amazing Maggie Gyllenhaal. We talked about her a lot afterward.]