Blind Prophecy

Personal stuff first…

I found out yesterday that I’ve been accepted as a new board member for the GLBT Community Center of Utah. The Center also runs the Utah Gay Pride Festival. I know I just committed myself to a lot of hard work, but I’m excited about this and the ideas I can bring to the board. One of my first objectives is to get them using some form of parliamentary procedure – right now their meetings are a mess of wasted time and impractical to the busy individual.

Park City Day #2…

Spent the first half of the day getting media credentials and reviewing press packets. I’m officially credentialed as the press for Sundance, Slamdance and as a media sponsor of the Queer Lounge. Michael and I decided that more lanyards equals more importance, so we’re up to three! We need to stop in and pick up our creditals for the Freedom Cinema Festival as well.

After picking up our credentials, we ate at the Wasatch Brew Pub on Main Street. There were several tempting items on the menu, but I just snacked on nachos. The beer was good, though. We stopped by Starbucks for mochas so that we could fit the cliche. Michael and I were both dressed in all black with turtlenecks and carrying Starbucks… we looked and felt like L.A. interlopers on the community.

We spotted Robert Redford in the Sundance Catalog store right across from the Queer Lounge. We were going to wait and see if we could talk with him, but he was surrounded by a gaggle of people, and we got bored with waiting for our opportunity.

We went to our first press screening of the film Happy Endings. This is one of the big budget films that Sundance picks as a Premier – and I had a great time watching it on opening night – although I was sitting between two rather pompous windbags who were engaging in a name-dropping contest. I’m not impressed by reporters who are trying to convince me that they’re really important.

I want to mention that Sundance got the guys from JibJab to create hilarious parody trailers that play prior to the movies. The one we saw last night was in the style of those “Bud Light Salutes All-American Heros” commercials – it was an homage to the “independent man.”

Anyway, Happy Endings in the latest flick from Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex, Single White Female and Boys On The Side). The amazing cast includes Lisa Kudrow, Tom Arnold, Jesse Bradford (Bring It On, Swimfan), Bobby Cannavale (Will’s cop boyfriend in Will and Grace), Laura Dern, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter (Joan of Arcadia) and David Sutcliffe (Testosterone, I’m With Her).

Happy Endings is a comedy that’s not afraid of controversial subjects. The film was like a top ten list of things that make far-right Republicans squirm… homosexuality, step-sibling incest, abortion, masturbation, drug use… and that’s not spoiling you because it all happens in the first 30 minutes of the film!

Basically, there are three stories happening in this film – and of course they begin to intertwine. Mamie (Kudrow) is being blackmailed by Nicky (Bradford) into helping him make a documentary. He won’t tell her about the son she gave up for adoption unless she agrees to help him get into film school. She instead talks him into making a film about her boyfriend (Cannavale) by pretending that he’s a sex worker. The name of the film comes from the code used by massage therapists who are really prostitutes (“Do you want a massage with a happy ending?”).

Mamie’s step-brother, Charley (Steve Coogan) and his boyfriend Gil (Sutcliffe) have begun to suspect that the 2-year-old son of their lesbian friends (Dern and Sarah Clarke) was concieved using the stolen sperm of Gil.

Otis (Ritter) works at Charley’s restaurant. Desperate to keep his sexual orientation a secret from his wealthy father Frank (Arnold), he invites Jude (Gyllenhall) to join his band and she convinces him to have sex with her just once. After that, she sets her sights on his father and tells Otis that if he doesn’t help her extort his father, she’ll reveal his secret.

If you can’t guess yet, the theme of Happy Endings is all about secrets and shame. Nicky sums it up at one point. (I’m paraphrasing badly) “I think that these women go to him because they live not great lives, not bad lives, but medium lives. They need a secret. They like to feel that shame. It gives them some excitement.”

In counterpoint, the idea of honesty is introduced early. Jude (the least honest character in the film) appears onstage to sing a karaoke rendition of Billy Joel’s “Honesty (Is Such a Lonely Word).” Of course, as the secrets begin to come out, it does end some relationships and make others stronger.

Caveat: the film also ends with Jude singing a Billy Joel tune (“Just The Way You Are”) in what was a disappointing and IMO unnecessary finale where Mamie dances with her step-brother and imagines all the main characters again. It felt too long and I really just wanted to start seeing the credits and get out of there.

Anyway, the film did manage to pull off one major surprise. (This is a serious spoiler, so if you don’t want to know, get out now. Turn back! You’ve been warned!) Mamie’s long-lost son is not any of the people you think it is. First you suspect in might be Nicky, but they dispell that idea rather quickly. Then, you assume that it’s going to be Otis, if you beleive in the economy of characters rule. It’s not. It turns out that her son is Nicky’s younger brother and we don’t even meet him until the moment when the secret is revealed. That I wasn’t expecting – but it seemed more honest and less contrived than I was expecting. Hooray for Roos managing to avoid the obvious.

One of the interesting devices of this comedy was rather new to me, although I’m familiar with it in novels. Say you’re reading a novel being told in third person, but suddenly an undefined narrator pops in with a first person observation on what’s going on. When I was an English major, we called this the intrusive narrator. Well, Roos essentially gives himself a role in the movie by popping in occaionally with commentary in the form of title screens. It’s not as distracting as you’d think. In fact, some of the funniest lines come from these narrative interuptions. (i.e. “As a gay man, you can’t help but feel good about yourself when your urologist says, ‘Yeah, I pick you.’”)

Despite the controversial topics (prostitution, open marriages, gay porn, infidelity…), this is not a teen-gross out film. Sure, there are some low-ball one-liners (“It’s like a penis, only bigger”) but most of the comedy is sophisticated and more than a little dark. But if you’re looking for the cheap thrills – Jason Ritter and Jesse Bradford both have at least one scene in which they appear wearing only white cotton briefs. Oh, and the women (and straight men, I guess) there a flash of Kudrow’s nipple early on, and a more explicit shot of Maggie Gyllenhall’s boobage later in the flick.

As far as the acting goes, it was great fun to see several actors playing against type. Kudrow’s character is serious almost to a fault. A depressed counselor in an abortion clinic, even when she’s trying to have fun, she comes off as reserved and skittish (this is not Phoebe from Friends in other words). Don’t worry, it’s still a comedy, but Kudrow’s role is more of the fall guy, the one who things happen to throughout the film. Tom Arnold is also remarkably subdued in the flick. Instead of smart-ass wisecracks, he’s funny in situational comedy. Bradford’s Nicky is an emotionally damaged young man who mistakes “Independant Filmmaker Cool” for charming, and backs it up with a whole bunch of insane. After playing a gay, Italian-New Yorker cop in Will and Grace, Cannavale’s character in Happy Endings is an immigrant from Mexico with a hispanic accent, the slightly creepy (hetero) sex appeal of a gigolo and a very short fuse on his temper. Even Ritter does a 180 from his Joan of Arcadia persona – clumsy, babbling, shy, and uncertain as the closeted Otis.

Although I thought parts of the movie dragged (the gay men challenging the paternity of the lesbians’ son storyline wasn’t half as interesting as the other two), I laughed out loud on several occasions and left the theater in a very good mood. When all is said and done, what else do you need from a comedy?

Anyway, it’s about time to drive up the hill again. Se ya’ later.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys