Happy Christmas (2014)

The low-key plot of Joe Swanberg's latest film is set in motion when a young woman breaks up with her boyfriend, and moves in with her brother, his wife and their toddler son. On Jenny's first night under Jeff and Kelly's roof, she displays her irresponsible tendencies when she goes to a party and gets seriously wasted, requiring her brother to be roused from his sleep to drive her home. Contrite over this bad beginning, Jenny suggests productive ways for Kelly to balance her creative impulses with the duties of motherhood. Unfortunately the dysfunctional behavior also persists, causing friction within the household which leads to more disruptions and minor confrontations.

'Happy Christmas' extends Swanberg's move away from the ultra-basic conventions of the 'mumblecore' school, but it's still a resolutely Indie production. The film's events are depicted with subtle humor as it focuses primarily on Jenny, and her relationship with her sister-in-law. Anna Kendrick portrays the feckless Jenny as charming, vulnerable, selfish and manipulative, while the support cast back her up with nice performances. Kendrick's nuanced character study is echoed by the story's understated resolution.

Fmovies: 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 😂

I don't know what to think about this movie. The first impression was that it was a home movie because of the picture quality (16mm), lack of lighting, shaky shooting and strange camera movements.

Anna Kendrick was showing her white teeth all the time when smiling thousand times exactly same manner which was odd. Perhaps she had new teeth and wanted to show them. These overly white and too perfect teeth look funny here in Europe because they don't look natural.

And why an Earth was this called Happy Christmas? I wanted to give only one star of ten just to warn people if they think that this was some kind of Xmas-movie and more over a happy one. Well. The kid was nice and that's why I watched the movie to the end.

Happy Christmas fmovies. This film is a Jungian metaphor for the banality of human existence, and our constant need to redefine our social roles in the world to justify our nature. We wear masks not to hide who we are, but to convince others that our behavior is okay. The breadwinning father submitting to his freeloading family. The hardworking housewife/mother owning her role so she doesn't have to face life as a failed writer. The irresponsible sister passing out at a party so no one will discover what a horrific babysitter she is. The babysitter who embraces his job simply because his actual (floundering) profession as a pot dealer is at odds with his other "profession" as a noise band leader. Perhaps he could justify his coexisting real jobs by continuing to sell pot and changing his musical aspirations to a Grateful Dead cover band, or continuing his noise-band venture, but selling meth instead. Perhaps most disturbing, is the two-year old, who displays superior intelligence to all of the other characters, but prefers to languish in barely sensible utterances and soiled diapers so he doesn't have to be responsible for the travesty of being the most entertaining character in this potpourri of retarded existentialism.

Camera work is ... did they use a fourth grader? Colors are bad, long moments of nothing (dark black room) for no reason, long shot of woman doing laundry. dialog....they didn't even try, I'm going to look up the name of the screen writer and run from that in the future. I can't imagine who they got to direct, but RUN if you see the name again! I couldn't make it passed fifteen minutes and I only hung in that long because it was clear that the actors were giving it their best shot. What a waste! In a sea of garbage produced by the industry, this wasn't interesting enough to hate.

Joe Swanberg who wrote, directed and played one of the leading roles in this his latest film is known for his improvisational independent films. Although I liked, as other reviewers have noted his recent movie "Drinking Buddies", I felt this film's improvisations failed in that the dialogue was too stilted, awkward, and filled with what appeared to be inside jokes that the cast would laugh at, ignoring basically the viewers that were watching. Thus the whole thing just got more and more annoying for me as it progressed.

The plot centers on the loving couple of Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) and Jeff Spelling (Swanberg) and their adorable son Jude welcoming to their home, in Chicago around Christmas time, Jeff's sister Jenny (Anna Kendrick), after she just broke up with her boyfriend. Once Jenny enters the scene, they'll be a lot of scenes involving pot smoking, drinking, sex, and explicit sex talk. They'll be other plot elements involving Jenny's irresponsibility and her attempts along with her friend Carson (Lena Dunham) to convince Kelly to devote more time to her writing and to get help with the raising of her son.

All in all, as mentioned, I just felt the improvisational approach here just didn't work, and the movie ended up having little entertainment value for me.