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.

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.Please check out our WEBSITE for all the reviews of the recent releases.

It was shockingly awful. Anna Kendrick plays a character that has literally no good qualities about her. I'd say it's a nod to how well Kendrick can play an unlikable character, but it's just so infuriating to watch this movie. The irony in the title is really obvious, given this movie is depressing and it pertains to Christmas for about 15 seconds before the movie ends. It's just a movie that shouldn't have been made. No one learns anything, nothing is gained or lost in the end, it's just the story of a horrible person being horrible to the last person that can tolerate her.....and then it ends. 1/10, will unplug the TV if it means saving someone from watching this awful awful movie.

"Mr. Pants is here, Mr. Pants would disapprove."-JennyOkay i'm not going to lie and pretend that i was very excited to see this movie, i mean it got some decent buzz back in the beginning of the year at the "Sundance Film Festival" but after that i was basically forgotten. This is from the same guy who directed last year's Drinking Buddies, a pretty good movie that's probably regarded as one of 2013's best independent films. Though Swanberg's(the director) last picture was surprisingly decent as i said i still just couldn't be bumped to see this one even though it had decent critic love, i mean it's hard to get excited for something that has no publicity and the marketing that it has is trash, i mean that has to be one of the worst looking posters i have seen and the sappy name Happy Christmas didn't help either.Happy Christmas is Directed by Joe Swanberg and it stars Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, Mark Webber, Lena Dunham and Joe Swanberg. "Irresponsible 20-something Jenny arrives in Chicago to live with her older brother Jeff, a young film-maker living a happy existence with his novelist wife Kelly and their two-year-old son. Jenny's arrival shakes up their quiet domesticity as she and her friend Carson instigate an evolution in Kelly's life and career. Meanwhile, Jenny strikes up a rocky relationship with the family's baby sitter- cum- pot dealer."Well thankfully Happy Christmas is not as terrible or out of place as it's marketing, Jesus that poster is just bad, but it's still far from being anything great, this is one of those pictures that's a good time but ultimately is unmemorable and i will have forgotten this one by the end of the week(probably being a little bit generous).Drinking Buddies was one of last year's most talked about independent films, it was up there with something like Frances Ha in terms of talk but the fact is that i now realize that after having been released for over 90 days the movie only grossed a disgustingly low 343.000. dollars. An independent picture that was such a success critically and talked about only earned that! That's explains the why Joe Swanberg, wasn't able to move to something bigger because this film's budget has to be much lower than his previous work. The budget must have been really but really small, you can see that by it's run-time and by it's technical quality that's rather unimpressive.But for such a small budgeted, little and limited picture Joe Swanberg is still able to offer it's audience something that's far from being terrible, by all means, Happy Christmas is never dramatically powerful and to say the truth there are not a lot of legitimate laughs in here but it's a film that's always able to be entertaining and it manages to keep a smile on our faces for the grand majority of it's run-time.Happy Christmas is a movie that ultimately never surprises it's audience and it never really stands out but it also doesn't let you down. Again it's not ever that funny but it's always at least amusing, the performers here are lovable and real and that's probably the film's biggest stand out, the fact that it manages to sell these characters as real people, and because they are real people, we oddly seem to relate to them and be engaged by their stories and about what they have to say, though they at times seem short on things that they have to say.Again you wont find anything memorable nor one of the year's best pictures in this movie, but Happy Christmas is certainly an entertaining and amusing enough of a watch, you wont regret if you see it i think, it's a movie that's easy to follow during it's short 80 minutes run-time but unfortunately also easy to forget.Rating.C