Thinking About 'Happy Here and Now' and Making Discovery a Routine
On Michael Almereyda, New Orleans, and seeking new movies.
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Dear Moviegoers,
Rarely do I get to watch a previously unknown to me movie from a favorite filmmaker of mine. Director Michael Almereyda makes the kind of resourceful and experimental films that I wish to have shot during my teenage years (besides prank videos and Jackass knock-offs). His somewhat recent movies, Marjorie Prime and Escapes, were both surprising to me in how conflicts of memory and storytelling were presented - another rare feat of filmmaking virtue to me.
Be still my heart, Almereyda had, to my proud and prior knowledge, made a picture in the New Orleans area in the mid to late 2000s. Criminally under-known and almost completely unavailable, New Orleans Mon Amour is a dramatic romance set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Its non-release status comes as a failure of the independent cinema dream, which is a fate that plenty have experienced. Looking at his catalog, Almereyda has gone through this before and, surprisingly, with a second New Orleans flick.
Made a few years before Mon Amour, before the storm that changed everything, Happy Here and Now ran through festival accolades and premieres, before being theatrically dumped a few months AFTER Katrina's landfall. This is a stunning scenario of circumstances, as there's an intriguing duality, a tale of two cityscapes, that is felt strongly in his two big easy films. Happy Here and Now is both about change and was produced on the cusp of great change, while Mon Amour has a sadness for what was and an excitement for what could be.
Huh.
As I stated above, Happy Here and Now is rare in that I had no idea of its existence, despite having elements of importance to me. I rented an Amazon Prime stream, only to be puzzled by the heavily pixelated and difficult-to-see digital grain. The DVD, which I'm happy to now have, is slightly clearer, but also hazy. This "aesthetic" or unfortunate video processing plays into the story itself, believe it or not. David Lynch's Inland Empire and his other online digital experiments share both low-resolution visuals and high-revolutionary vision with Almereyda's tale of internet evangelism and collective loneliness shared between true individuals, making for a cocktail of timely production. There are no coincidences, just magic? Sure.
Huh.
This article hasn't been and isn't a review as it's a celebratory appreciation and affectionate affair with how one of my favorite filmmakers made two films in and about my nearby major city on both sides of a national tragedy that, in synchronized measures, challenge notions of setting cliche and non-linear videography. And, more importantly to me, it all represents the strange and lovely joy of searching and discovering new movie showings that one can have.
As Happy Here and Now makes clear, "The internet is where I'll meet my wife." It's also where the video store of now can be found. Algorithms be damned, keywords and message forums still have treasures just waiting to be revealed and to be plundered. Almereyda's New Orleans, a city with a tone of scandalous mystery and colorful characters, spoke of this future of the World Wide Web in a messianic and overly optimistic prophecy. While some things came true, other things are yet to be seen.
The messenger of such thoughts, a sincere but sad figure that may be an avatar for Almereyda himself (played by David Arquette in perhaps his best performance), isn't completely to be trusted or followed. He's at the center of the movie's troubles and is too wrapped up in his own head, living a false but admirably real life within internet chatrooms. A city of such partying and togetherness is the backdrop for those rebels who can't find happiness outside of their shotgun homes. Only inside the computer can they go deeper into themselves, using tech to build both facade and honesty. The true self letting go. Free.
And so, rambling on, I have come to what I already know, which is to expect the unexpected and to trust in the fact that everything can't be absolutely understood. Nothing is finite, and there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Almereyda's films have their own philosophies. Every director does. Every film should. And cinephiles need to explore beyond what they "know."
New Orleans has one video store, and it was only recently formed. Let the enlightenment continue.