Saturated with the inevitable cold that’s going round, I stay in and rent a new movie. I’m rather enamoured of the DVD vidcap function on my computer, where one can pause the movie complete with subtitles, and save the image. It enables you to quote the dialogue and visuals at once, being careful to avoid spoilers.
In fact, I think I can get away with showing stills from late in the movie without blowing the main plot developments, as long as they’re out of context and out of order. Proper trailers do that all the time. This still, for instance could be from the last scene, or the first. Actually, it’s from about 15 mins in. But that’s a one-off detail, don’t fret:
This is from “Happy Endings”, a US title made in 2005, released on UK DVD this week.
Summary: “The Opposite Of Sex” director Don Loos does more of the same in his unique style of self-aware black comedy. His favourite themes are all present and correct (blackmail, definitions of parenthood, abortion, adoption, gay relationships, family secrets) but this time they’re played out as a multi-plot ensemble piece. Lisa Kudrow is fantastic, Steve Coogan acts straight as a gay man (Cashback Mountain, anyone?), Maggie Gyllenhaal steals the film. Not as striking as “The Opposite Of Sex”, with which it’s inevitably compared, but worth watching for the performances, Coogan novelty factor, and Mr Loos’s unique meta-narrative title boards that punctuate the action. They’re in the same vein as Christina Ricci’s waspish voice-overs from that previous film:
In fact, this very night (Weds) also marks the “Happy Endings” UK cinema premiere as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Opening Gala night. While Ms Kudrow and Mr Loos are a few miles away at the Leicester Square Odeon, presenting the movie on a huge screen to a sold-out crowd, I’m watching it here at home on DVD. So it’s technically not quite “straight-to-video”, as the painful euphemism goes.
Things are changing in that respect, as it is. I’ve read a number of recent articles about the cinema versus DVD schedules now being on a par with hardback books versus paperbacks. Big screen distribution costs so much money, that in terms of recouping finance, a cinema release can often be just an expensive, luxurious, limited-edition advert for the later DVD version, where a profit margin is more likely.
(to be continued)
