Director: Josh Radnor (debut film)
Starring: Josh Radnor, Malin Akerman, Zoe Kazan
On Blu-Ray + DVD: June 21, 2011
happythankyoumoreplease is pretentious in all the wrong ways. It thinks it is clever, but it's really not. It thinks that it has an insightful and heartfelt story to tell us, but it doesn't really. It thinks that it puts off a cool, atmospheric vibe, but the only feelings I had after watching the movie were about how emotionally distant the entire movie felt.
happythankyou is a story divided into three fairly separate, interspliced pieces. One part of the film focuses on the relationship between a writer, Sam (Radnor), and a young orphan that gets lost on a subway. It is obvious that the boy hates his foster home, so Sam just lets him live with him for a while. Later on, Sam meets a girl named Mississippi (Kate Mara) who he forms a contract with to have what they call a "three night stand" in which Mississippi agrees to live with Sam for a three day period immediately after they meet. The second part of the film is about Annie (Akerman), a girl with alopecia (complete hairlessness) who has serious body issues. Annie goes through a generic romance story in which she hooks up with an ex-boyfriend while she ignores the guy right in front of her who really loves her. The third part of the film is about Mary Catherine (Kazan) and her long-term boyfriend as they go through an amalgam of relationship problems, including relocation issues, boredom, and pregnancy.
The main problem with that storyline, other than logic (really? you're not going to report this missing child to the police), is something I will unfairly refer to as Crash syndrome. Crash is a much better film, but it suffered from having so many different, loosely related stories going on at the same time. happythankyou does this too, and this decision means that none of the characters Radnor introduces us to really get fleshed out. If he had decided to focus his script on any one of these storylines (especially the first one), the film could have told us so much more about these characters and subsequently been much better overall. As it is, though, happythankyou suffers deeply from a lack of development.
My other problem with this film is how hard it tries to be cool. This problem starts with the title. It is explained within the film and that does help a bit, but there's still no need for these words to be jammed together and, at least to me, it is annoying, especially when I keep seeing these red squiggly lines under happythankyou. There are also about 15 musical interludes in this 90 minute film. If anything even remotely emotional happens on screen, I can almost guarantee you that the next three minutes will be shots of people staring into space while some indie song plays its entire verse. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy a meaningful interlude, even when there are lots of them. Away We Go, one of my favorite films of 2009, uses the interlude concept heavily, too, but they followed honestly emotional scenes and were usually contained to scenes where the characters were going places. happythankyou just doesn't do it right.
Not that everything in the film is bad. Despite a lot of dialogue that suffers from this same "coolness" problem, these characters do have a good amount of interesting things to say, too. This specifically refers to the two Sams, Sam and Sam 2 (Tony Hale, and yes, he is called Sam 2). Sam provides the little amount of story backbone there is in happythankyou, and because of this, a lot of his lines are actually pertinent to the overall movie. Sam 2, on the other hand, is probably the only character in the entire movie who felt like they could actually exist in reality. Hale plays the role of a goofball well, and that's exactly what Sam 2 is. He's also what makes the date scene with Annie the best scene in the entire movie. The acting overall is actually pretty good, and if this cast had been working with a better script, I have a feeling they could've made a great film.
One last thing I have to mention is the closing lip syncing scene. This is more of a critique of films in general that do this, but happythankyou falls victim to it, too. This scene was easily the worst of the film and may have affected my retrospective opinion of the film overall, and it's all because of the terrible lip syncing. This is supposed to be a very important scene to establish a real connection between two of the characters, but it completely failed because I was too busy being annoyed by this lip syncing. Why do films do this? Is it really that hard to find a good actor who can also sing? Or a good actor who can also lip sync well? I know this is a small thing, but it really bothered me in this movie and I needed to vent on this point.
happythankyoumoreplease thinks that it is a touching, meaningful film. The musical interludes and scenes of people staring might give you the impression that it really is a touching, meaningful film. The problem is that it isn't touching or meaningful. The three-pronged storyline undercuts any emotion the film could've evoked by leaving the characters flat, and this vacuity of emotion eliminates any meaning the film was going for. The people involved give it their best, but in the end, happythankyoumoreplease is just not a very good movie.
happythankyoumoreplease is pretentious in all the wrong ways. It thinks it is clever, but it's really not. It thinks that it has an insightful and heartfelt story to tell us, but it doesn't really. It thinks that it puts off a cool, atmospheric vibe, but the only feelings I had after watching the movie were about how emotionally distant the entire movie felt.
happythankyou is a story divided into three fairly separate, interspliced pieces. One part of the film focuses on the relationship between a writer, Sam (Radnor), and a young orphan that gets lost on a subway. It is obvious that the boy hates his foster home, so Sam just lets him live with him for a while. Later on, Sam meets a girl named Mississippi (Kate Mara) who he forms a contract with to have what they call a "three night stand" in which Mississippi agrees to live with Sam for a three day period immediately after they meet. The second part of the film is about Annie (Akerman), a girl with alopecia (complete hairlessness) who has serious body issues. Annie goes through a generic romance story in which she hooks up with an ex-boyfriend while she ignores the guy right in front of her who really loves her. The third part of the film is about Mary Catherine (Kazan) and her long-term boyfriend as they go through an amalgam of relationship problems, including relocation issues, boredom, and pregnancy.
The main problem with that storyline, other than logic (really? you're not going to report this missing child to the police), is something I will unfairly refer to as Crash syndrome. Crash is a much better film, but it suffered from having so many different, loosely related stories going on at the same time. happythankyou does this too, and this decision means that none of the characters Radnor introduces us to really get fleshed out. If he had decided to focus his script on any one of these storylines (especially the first one), the film could have told us so much more about these characters and subsequently been much better overall. As it is, though, happythankyou suffers deeply from a lack of development.
My other problem with this film is how hard it tries to be cool. This problem starts with the title. It is explained within the film and that does help a bit, but there's still no need for these words to be jammed together and, at least to me, it is annoying, especially when I keep seeing these red squiggly lines under happythankyou. There are also about 15 musical interludes in this 90 minute film. If anything even remotely emotional happens on screen, I can almost guarantee you that the next three minutes will be shots of people staring into space while some indie song plays its entire verse. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy a meaningful interlude, even when there are lots of them. Away We Go, one of my favorite films of 2009, uses the interlude concept heavily, too, but they followed honestly emotional scenes and were usually contained to scenes where the characters were going places. happythankyou just doesn't do it right.
One last thing I have to mention is the closing lip syncing scene. This is more of a critique of films in general that do this, but happythankyou falls victim to it, too. This scene was easily the worst of the film and may have affected my retrospective opinion of the film overall, and it's all because of the terrible lip syncing. This is supposed to be a very important scene to establish a real connection between two of the characters, but it completely failed because I was too busy being annoyed by this lip syncing. Why do films do this? Is it really that hard to find a good actor who can also sing? Or a good actor who can also lip sync well? I know this is a small thing, but it really bothered me in this movie and I needed to vent on this point.
happythankyoumoreplease thinks that it is a touching, meaningful film. The musical interludes and scenes of people staring might give you the impression that it really is a touching, meaningful film. The problem is that it isn't touching or meaningful. The three-pronged storyline undercuts any emotion the film could've evoked by leaving the characters flat, and this vacuity of emotion eliminates any meaning the film was going for. The people involved give it their best, but in the end, happythankyoumoreplease is just not a very good movie.
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