Happy Christmas

This is a film I would like to forget, a complete waste of time. The only entertainment I found in this came from watching the performance of the little boy, Jude Swanberg, who was very cute and amusing.

Also, while I was trying to keep track of the number of times Lena Dunham was using the word "like", Anna Kendrick started trying to outdo her. I just stopped counting. I was like, is she like making like fun of her like, or like just like unconsciously like copying her like way of like talking?

I saw an old interview with Lena Dunham and she really did talk that way all the time.

I've just checked out a more recent interview, and she seems cured now, thank goodness.

In Happy Christmas Anna Kendrick plays Jenny a young twenty something who comes to stay with her brother for the holidays after a break up. The director Joe Swanberg casts himself as her brother Jeff. His wife Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) is reluctant to have Jenny stay with them and their infant son, knowing her "wild" behavior. Her first night there Jenny goes to a party with her friend Carson (Lena Dunham) and gets hammered drunk. So much to where she needs to be picked up and is unable to babysit like she promised the following day. Stepping in for the babysitting we meet Kevin, (Mark Webber) your friendly neighborhood babysitter, musician and small time pot dealer. Jenny and Kevin soon spark up a romance. Jenny then tries to repair her earlier wrongs with her sister in law, Kelly by helping her get back into writing and shaking off the doldrums of being a stay at home mom. Together with her friend Cason, the three girls try to collaborate on a trashy romance novel.

I liked Drinking Buddies, the director Joe Swanberg's previous film. If anything it was fun to see a little behind the scenes of a craft beer business and see Ron Livingston in an indie film. Happy Christmas is a disappointing follow up. The title is incidental, this is not a Christmas movie. Unless you like to watch unfunny, non-irreverent holiday family dysfunction. The film is very low budget, think early 90's independent films. Grainy film stock and a ton of unfunny, what seems like ad-libbed dialog. The director takes to the old indie film look like a hipster listening to vinyl records. Just to be pretentious. I appreciate independent film as much as the next guy, this just doesn't have anything to be enthusiastic about. Lena Dunham tries to add her own bit of irreverence to this movie. But as each disappointingly unfunny new season of HBO's Girls comes out, I am becoming increasingly aware that it was Judd Apatow's influence in season one that gave it good, not Lena. If you are fan crushing on Anna Kendrick or you are looking for a new Christmas classic, don't bother. Anna Kendrick's usual adorable charming spark is dulled to a faint glimmer like that of a tiny Christmas tree light on the saddest of Charlie Brown trees. Even for the minimal effort this film takes to watch on Netflix it isn't worth the time.

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This movie is the most boring movie I have ever seen. How is a baby a better actor than the mess of schlumps in it. You people give white people a bad name. I swear we are not as boring as this movie portrays. Please don't watch this movie. There. My paragraph is a better script for a movie than what I just watched 😂

Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) and Jeff (Joe Swanberg) are happily married with infant son Jude in Chicago. Jeff's younger sister Jenny (Anna Kendrick) moves in with them. She's irresponsible and makes a drunken scene at her friend Carson (Lena Dunham)'s party. Kevin (Mark Webber) is the manny. She convinces Kelly to make some life changes.

Director Joe Swanberg is doing his improvisational thing. Lynskey is great. Jenny is supposed to be the flighty irresponsible sister. I don't think that's Kendrick's natural range. She has made a career out of try-hard uptight girls. I can see her trying to expand her range. I think she is capable. I don't think the character is written completely right. If she's irresponsible, she needs to do more than getting drunk and smoking weed. During her sexual encounters, she reverts back to her uptight persona. She needs to let loose and go crazy with this character. This movie has a simple story without much drama. It needs to go a little crazier to heighten the intensity.

Happy Christmas was made with only three film crew members, not including the director, in case you were curious the level of 'indie-ness' in this film.

Joe Swanberg writes, directs and stars in Happy Christmas, the ensemble indie film that touches on the real life minor predicament that occurs during the holiday.

Recently broken up with her boyfriend, Jenny decides to crash at her brother Jeff's and his wife Kelly's house in Chicago while she considers laying roots in the city for a change of pace. She drinks and smokes away her sadness while she desperately tries to distract herself, coping terribly while hanging out with her old friend Carson and new friend Kevin.

Happy Christmas is a film for fans of the typical indie genre film. It utilizes real life cinematography and puts a microscope to the real life problems within the mundanities of life. This is not some film about profound transformation or extraordinary circumstances. In fact, Happy Christmas is so ordinary in its subject matter that 20-something viewers should see themselves or their friends in this film.

If you, as a typical movie viewer, enjoy to put a mirror to real everyday life then you should give this film a shot. If you typically watch films to escape or put yourself into a film beyond your routine existence, then you should stay away, far away.

Happy Christmas is a grainy film to watch, and was probably not shot in 1080p and then upscaled. this yields a mildly pixelated appearance which is nauseating on anything larger than a computer screen. Most of the film appears to be shot using hand-held or a steadicam operator which is extremely distracting as the film sight line moves along the edges of the frame. My guess is the techniques employed for the cinematography of Happy Christmas were deliberate to truly capture the reality in vision.

Though Joe Swanberg is listed as the screenwriter of the film it seems as though most of the dialogue was improv-ed, and poorly. Mark Webber who plays Kevin and Anna Kendrick who plays the self-destructive Jenny are the most natural and believable of the bunch. Otherwise the scenes are stiff and slow with a lot of awkward pauses from the dull and banal conversation topics. The star of the film is baby Jude, real life son of director Joe Swanberg, who is so comfortable and natural that you can't help but be enamored by his energy, alas if only the whole film was like him.

Happy Christmas is a narrative nonevent of a film that will be contemptibly boring to some and realistically introspective to others.

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