This movie is not worth the time it takes to watch it. There is no plot and nothing happens. It's just a lot of disconnected, incomprehensible scenes strung together in a pseudo-"arty" way so that the filmmakers can pat themselves on the back about how "artistic" and "important" they are. The characters are sometimes one person and sometimes another person and all the scenes with the computer are just techno-babble garbage. Ooh, and let's put a completely pointless eye-patch on one of the female characters, just to make it interesting and kind of creepy. Except it's NOT interesting at all. On the other hand, since it was made about 10 years ago, Ally Sheedy looks less ravaged in this than she does lately.

Just subtle enough to be very interesting. You have to work for this one -- and I'm not completely sure I really got it. It's like a long alcohol soaked night in New Orleans: reality fades and the line between living and dreaming evaporates. Clever in concept, it pushes you to grow: it nurtures you. Like a gardener nurtures the flora, pinching off a leaf here and hacking off a branch there. What a trip to see Clarence Williams III in this thing doing an outstanding job! But hang on to your hat: the music is gonna grab you and rattle you like a bag of bones. It is Killer. I think I've walked every one of the locations used and I want to go back to NOLA to sweat and stagger again. Yep; this one's going to haunt me for awhile. Thank you David Arquette.

HAPPY HERE AND NOW is one strange film. I wish it were on DVD because I very much want to see it again. Encountering it a couple of years back at a festival of the Film Society of Lincoln Center "picks," I was thoroughly mystified even as, moment-by-moment, I enjoyed the movie. The ensemble cast is a really interesting grab-bag of performers (from Karl Geary to Ally Sheedy, Shalom Harlow, David Arquette, even Larry Fessenden), and the writing and direction is by Michael Almereyda, a moviemaker who keeps growing as he matures. What really knocked my socks off, however, is the ending: a phenomenal feat of film editing by Kristina Boden (and, one presumes, Almereyda) that, in a single continuous succession of splices, brings together the entire movie--theme, ideas, feelings, visuals--so beautifully and fully that I found myself in tears. It's the first and only time that film editing has ever had THIS effect on me! Please, someone, bring "Happy Here and Now" to DVD.

Now let me clarify that I love art films. I love abstract ideas. I love seeing and hearing things on screen that make me go,"Wha????, and then go "oohhhh...i get it." But this is no Godard. This film, well, I just don't know. Is it in art film? Is it an excuse to display the gritty, third-world beauty of New Orleans, and the array of characters that lie within? Or is it a low-budget independent film that juggles from one concept to the other, never bothering to connect the dots because, well hell, there wasn't really a solid script in the first place, and never a real purpose to the story(how's that for a run-on sentence)? i guess my problem with this film is that, though it may have been low-budget, they still spent a a good deal on its production and actors, but didn't bother making an actual story with what they had. I was intrigued by the film and the ideas it was portraying. And if the whole film would have been as beautifully-abstract as the final dream sequence, or even the beginning (the music score, by David Julyan is great!), I would have wept--in a good way--like a child. I saw this at the New Orleans film fest in a packed house of audience members happy enough to see people and places they recognized: Ernie K. Doe, Bud's Broiler, etc. But perhaps they loved it...who knows?The ideas, talent, and potential are there for a good film. But as a whole, the film makes you go, "hmmmmm....interesting....NEXT PLEASE!"