**Warning** Semi-Spoiler AlertWell folks, I had my hopes up for this movie. Due to the cast and some of the reviews. But...The story line was too convoluted. The characters were not very likable. And ultimately, the "endings" were not happy at all. I go out of my way to look for under-appreciated or even quirky movies because I enjoy a broad spectrum of genre's. I was expecting something different but entertaining. Unfortunately, although the film was different, it was also difficult to get myself to stay through to the finish. The biggest problem was, from my observation, the director had a "message" he was trying too hard to push on the public. He went out of his way to make some of the characters dysfunctional and downright mean, in an effort to make his point. Ultimately, not only was the message false, but it made for poor film making.

It's 1983 Los Angeles. Mamie Toll is 17 and her mother marries a rich restaurant chain English guy. She has sex with her new stepbrother Charley Peppitone and later supposedly gets an abortion. Nineteen years later, Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) is a divorced abortion counselor dating masseuse Javier (Bobby Cannavale). Charley (Steve Coogan) runs the only restaurant left over from his father and he's gay now with Gil (David Sutcliffe). Gil's lesbian high school friend Pam (Laura Dern) and her partner Diane (Sarah Clarke) have a son Max and Charley starts to suspect the paternity. Restaurant worker Otis (Jason Ritter) is a closeted gay from his father Frank (Tom Arnold) and dealing with his band singer Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Manipulative filmmaker Nicky (Jesse Bradford) tries to blackmail Mamie for $25k to give the present name of her son who she didn't actually abort.The characters are all interconnected in modern familial ways. There are probably too many characters and stories. The stories meander in sometimes usual ways. I like some of the acting. Tom Arnold surprises me by doing real acting. I don't particularly like the closing texts for each character. It becomes more or less like a laundry list of their futures. That only accentuates the problem with this movie. Every character has to have a plot and I am suppose to care about them.

Happy Endings There was attempt to do something original here, unfortunately, the experiment failed. It's more of a graphic novel with moving pictures than it is a film. We're spoodfed ridiculous amounts of exposition via placards that pop up on the side of the screen like fun bubble facts from a video. And what makes it worse is that it's not an objective, ominipotent narration, but a narration that's written in the spoken vernacular with a definite point of view. If it has a definite point of view, who's writing it? Some mysterious omnipotent subjective narrator that we never meet. And we know it's not God, because of the lame attempts at being clever and funny. And just when you think it can't get worse, the fun facts tell us things in the distant past, the distant future, the characters' thoughts, and even what's going on with the bodily functions of some of the characters. Oh man. The story lines aren't very good either. I could not see Mamie going along with the extortion and the other shanigans that goes on after. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. Most of the dialog was confusing, implausible or just lame. For example, Lane tells Jude, "I still don't see the problem. In a month, you tell the old guy it's his... and then when you deliver, it's like this really big preemie... that just happens to look like both of them. We're not reinenting the wheel here." Yeah, it's the old have sex with the son, have sex with the father and you don't know who got you pregnant. We all know that routine, right? Who hasn't been down that road? It's so ridiculous. The storyline with the lesbians and male gay couple is not much better. It's way too purposely convoluted. It's like the filmmakers are digging to find ways to unnecessarily complicate the storyline. And then there's the hallmark of trendy and lazy filmmakers - the corny montages set to trendy pop music to tell us how to feel. And the split screen thing seemed like it was only there to show that they could do it. And why was Mamie running willy-nilly at the end? When I heard the title, it made me think of that hackneyed joke about massages and I thought the filmmakers were above referencing a stupid, overplayed joke like that. But, sure enough, that's what they were doing. It reminds me of "Coyote Ugly", another waste of film. Virtually every actor in this film is great, but they can't save a script this absurd. It's just so much schlop.

Warning: The second paragraph of this review contains some comments that some might possibly consider a "spoiler."This essentially is a movie about the issues of abortion, adoption, test tube babies and other unconventional procreation, marital and relationship issues, including sexual orientation and a phony marriage for immigration purposes. It is not an advocacy movie; rather, it explores in a serious but semi-comic manner how decisions affect a menage of lives.There is a pregnancy resulting from a coupling of a boy and a girl who technically is his step sister although they are from two different sets of parents. There is a child born to a lesbian couple using a sperm donor, whose father may or may not be one of a gay couple who are friends of the lesbians. There is a woman who never saw the child she gave up for adoption and supposedly didn't want anything to do with except ***POSSIBLE SPOILER**** we learn that she notifies the adoption agency of her changes of address. One woman sleeps with a supposedly gay boy and later dumps him for his father. ***END SPOILER*** Throughout these serious dramatic episodes, the screen writer provides us little light messages that tell us, the audience, a little about how things will turn out and in essence not to take everything too seriously, despite the seriousness of action.I thought the way the film jumped around in time and story line and eventually tied everything together was well done, and the text "asides" seemed like innovative resurrection of a technique from silent film days.I particularly liked Lisa Kudrow's performance (another role she selected that runs counter to the comic character she created years ago for the TV shows "Friends" and "Mad About You.") Maggie Gyllenhaal was also excellent as the scheming temptress. Tom Arnold was also very good.