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Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: HAPPY ENDINGS (DVD MOVIE)
EAN: 0031398183723
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: Lions Gate
Manufacturer: Lions Gate
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Lions Gate
Region Code: 1
Release Date: November 15, 2005
Running Time: 128 minutes
Sales Rank: 31873
Studio: Lions Gate
Theatrical Release Date: 2005
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Happy Endings weaves multiple stories to create a witty look at love family and the sheer unpredictability of life itself.System Requirements: Running Time 128 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: R UPC: 031398183723 Manufacturer No: 18372
Amazon.com:
'It's a comedy, sort of,' a title card announces at the start of Happy Endings--just after Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) has been hit by a car. So it is, but talk about an unhappy beginning! Never fear, writer/director Don Roos will fulfill the promise of that title in several unexpected ways. The story then flashes back to 1983 for Mamie's life-altering encounter with her stepbrother. Mamie and Charley (Steve Coogan) will struggle with its consequences for the rest of the film. Does her teen pregnancy explain the fact that she became an abortion counselor or that he came out of the closet? Roos doesn't say, but nor does he judge. He loves his characters--foibles and all--in his ambitious, Altman-esque follow-up to the acerbic, yet heartfelt The Opposite of Sex. As before, Kudrow is the center around which the other plotlines revolve (and her uptight, yet likable Mamie couldn't resemble TV’s Phoebe less). In the end, though, Maggie Gyllenhaal's seductive Jude and Tom Arnold's sensitive Frank are Roos' most inspired creations. Their relationship is one of contemporary cinema's oddest and most touching. The happy ending for one will be real, the other imaginary, but everyone will earn the one they get. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Classic indy-type effort
Lots of hand-held shots and relationship-driven drama get around a limited budget. The knowingly self-referential indy filmmaker also has an important part in one of the three Pulp-Fiction-style relationships that eventually intertwine, somewhat incoherently.
Was the movie worth the investment in time? Yes, it's good enough for that. Lisa Kudrow and Tom Arnold are great in their roles. I wouldn't make a monetary investment in the movie though. It's not *that* good.
Rating:  - Multiple Plots And Intersecting Characters Make This Relationship Comedy An Ambitious Success
When Don Roos' "The Opposite of Sex" dropped into theaters almost ten years ago, I instantly became a fan. That film featured Christina Ricci's first grown-up character and easily her best and most fully realized performance to date. Wicked and cynical and bitterly funny, it is a film that manages to strike an unusual balance. Taking the coming-of-age genre, turning it upside down with great doses of political incorrectness, but ultimately grounding things with a realness--it is a deft comedy that stands the test of time. Taking a detour with the Paltrow/Affleck weepie "Bounce," Roos fashioned an earnest if not particularly entertaining film. Finally, after a five year hiatus, Roos returns with another film--the coyly titled "Happy Endings." An ambitious, and heavily populated, ensemble comedy--"Happy Endings" may be gentler in spirit than "The Opposite of Sex," but it is no less worthy.
In the film's opening moments, a woman is frantically running down the street and is plowed into by a car. The accident appears to be serious, but as we pull away from the wreckage--the film announce itself as a comedy. It's hard not to appreciate that! However, I was still fearful that this was going to be one of those impossibly quirky pictures that people seem to love so much. But I needn't have worried. Telling multiple intersecting stories, "Happy Endings" puts together an unlikely cast including Lisa Kudrow, Jesse Bradford, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, Tom Arnold, Laura Dern, Steve ... Read More
Rating: - 3.5 stars really. Excellent performances with a muddled script
As others have indicated, HAPPY ENDINGS just has a few TOO MANY storylines going on. It is inevitable that some of them get short shrift. I'd say the story line about the lesbian couple working on having a child that might or might not be the offspring of one partner in a male couple feels just a little contrived and a bit uninteresting. That's a bit of shame, because the result is that Laura Dern is wasted.
The primary "plot" deals with Lisa Kudrow's character, who gave up a child for adoption as a teenager, and is now confronted with the possibility of knowing what happened to her child...but in order to do so, she must work with a blackmailing documentary filmmaker wannabe. Confusing? Well, it's not confusing when you watch it, but it also doesn't make much sense. She becomes interested in both the making of a documentary and the loony-tunes filmmaker himself. The way this film progreses and the work they do on it is not constructed very convincingly...and while I REALLY like the work Lisa Kudrow does, this plot point was meandering at best.
But the performances ARE very lively and convincing for the most part. Kudrow is very good indeed, as is Maggie Gylenhaal. And I want to give kudos to Tom Arnold. This man is often thought of as a mere bozo or an idiot, and he has indeed played that part in many awful movies. But once in awhile, he does something to make me wish more directors would give him more to work with. TRUE LIES was a great movie that he nearly stole. ... Read More
Rating:  - The moral to the story of this film is...
Trying to create an art film by pretending to question what they pretend are not actually the very controversial topics that they are (i.e. abortion, homosexuality, invitro fertilization, etc) within many subplots...this film ultimately fails by purposely failing to make a main plot out of any intellectual points of question brought about in the story.
It is almost like the director Don Roos had just taken a screenwriting class and was trying to incorporate various taught film mechanics into an independent film. The captioning that is spread throughout the film is almost cliched and ultimately leads the viewer down deadends.
Does Mamie regret not aborting the son she later meets after the whole movie is intertwined with what blackmail she goes through to meet him? She seemed to have no intention of hunting down her given-up child before being blackmailed to do so. After she does meet him, which is shown without any audible dialogue or real interaction, there is nothing more shown about the subject, other than her dancing at the end and he is in the room.
All we know is that she nervously claims not to be "pro-life" after Jude derides her for referring to her fetus as a baby. The only real reaction we are given is overblown and questionable.. after she runs out of the boy's home and is subsequently hit by a car. We are told at the beginning that she is not dead, and we are shown this at the end. But to just be "not dead" at the end is not a very good character analysis. ... Read More
Rating:  - A brilliant beginning and middle can only reap a happy ending!
I have to say that `Happy Endings' will go down as one of the most fulfilling experiences I've had with cinema this year. At the film's closing I was left content and approving, never once feeling gypped or left wanting. I was completely satisfied, which is funny because I've read a few reviews where people loved everything but the ending, but to me you can't go wrong ending on a close-up of the wonderfully talented Maggie Gyllenhaal singing us a lullaby.
`Happy Endings' (a title made in reference to the act of making a massage customer EXTRA happy) is a collage of people's lives interacting and eventually coming together for a `happy ending'. We have Mamie (Kudrow) who at a young age was impregnated by her step-brother Charley (Coogan) and since then they've had very little contact. Charley is now `out of the closet' and living with is boyfriend Gil (Sutcliffe) whose best friend Pam (Dern) and her lover Diane (Clarke) have just had a son (Pam being the mother) and are starting to ware on Charley's sanity. Mamie on the other hand is involved with massage therapist Javier (Cannavale) and is not the slightest bit happy with her life, and that only gets worse after meeting Nicky (Bradford) who claims to know where her illegitimate son (the one she had with Charley and then gave up for adoption) is and wants to reunite them under the circumstance that he can film it for his documentary submission into film school.
Then we have Jude (Gyllenhaal), a young attractive floozy who joins a ... Read More
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