Happy Christmas (2014)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Thanks for the memories!

Sorry, this movie sucks

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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.

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.

In Happy Christmas Anna Kendrick plays Jenny a young twenty something who comes to stay with her brother for the holidays after a break up. The director Joe Swanberg casts himself as her brother Jeff. His wife Kelly (Melanie Lynskey) is reluctant to have Jenny stay with them and their infant son, knowing her "wild" behavior. Her first night there Jenny goes to a party with her friend Carson (Lena Dunham) and gets hammered drunk. So much to where she needs to be picked up and is unable to babysit like she promised the following day. Stepping in for the babysitting we meet Kevin, (Mark Webber) your friendly neighborhood babysitter, musician and small time pot dealer. Jenny and Kevin soon spark up a romance. Jenny then tries to repair her earlier wrongs with her sister in law, Kelly by helping her get back into writing and shaking off the doldrums of being a stay at home mom. Together with her friend Cason, the three girls try to collaborate on a trashy romance novel.I liked Drinking Buddies, the director Joe Swanberg's previous film. If anything it was fun to see a little behind the scenes of a craft beer business and see Ron Livingston in an indie film. Happy Christmas is a disappointing follow up. The title is incidental, this is not a Christmas movie. Unless you like to watch unfunny, non-irreverent holiday family dysfunction. The film is very low budget, think early 90's independent films. Grainy film stock and a ton of unfunny, what seems like ad-libbed dialog. The director takes to the old indie film look like a hipster listening to vinyl records. Just to be pretentious. I appreciate independent film as much as the next guy, this just doesn't have anything to be enthusiastic about. Lena Dunham tries to add her own bit of irreverence to this movie. But as each disappointingly unfunny new season of HBO's Girls comes out, I am becoming increasingly aware that it was Judd Apatow's influence in season one that gave it good, not Lena. If you are fan crushing on Anna Kendrick or you are looking for a new Christmas classic, don't bother. Anna Kendrick's usual adorable charming spark is dulled to a faint glimmer like that of a tiny Christmas tree light on the saddest of Charlie Brown trees. Even for the minimal effort this film takes to watch on Netflix it isn't worth the time.If you enjoyed this review, please check out my blog at yourturntopick.com

"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