Reviews

The story of two guys on a road trip has been done umpteen times but this is a fresh take on the story. The situation is novel and the characters are novel, IMDb informs us that it is the first movie in which American Indians' role is so prominent. This movie is a good story well told.

The action of the film surrounds two young men of the Coeur d'Alene tribe and their trip from Idaho to Arizona following the death of one of the guys' fathers who lived there. This guy was very stoic, but his companion was talkative. Part of the reason the first guy was stoic was that he felt rejected by his father, who had left when the son was about 12. Initially he regarded the trip to settle his father's affairs as a mere chore. On the trip, the stoic guy came to grips with his relationship with his father. Once in Arizona the two meet the young women who had been the father's companion at the end of his life. She told how the father talked and bragged about the son, even though the son had never felt his father's approval. A key reason was that the father had once caused a fire that the son and his talkative friend were caught in. Unbeknownst to the son, his father went back in the burning building in an attempt to rescue the son, but he learned this from the companion. On the return trip the son is involved in an accident, and performs a valiant but unsuccessful rescue attempt. At this point, the father's attempt really sinks in, and he makes peace, with his father's memory in lieu of the father himself.

The film exemplifies the imperfect way in which we love our children, and the imperfect way in which our parents loved us. The father had his flaws and ultimately failed to live up to his responsibility to his family, but loved them nonetheless. The talkative companion reinforced the father's brusque but loving ways, as he was a storyteller in the best of the oral tradition common in American Indian culture, as he had stories of his own encounters with the father. His tales and the woman's recollection flesh out the portrait of the father, and helps the son discover who his father really was, and who he really is.

The main character in this picture runs a hamburger stand in Myrtle Beach, but she doesn't actually swim much. I think the title refers to her swimming in her baggy clothing, as this is yet another story about the tribulations of a hefty, less-than-attractive girl. Maybe the title refers to the way the girl is swimming through her young-adult life, as she owns half of the business and half of the house she lives in, but isn't making much of herself. You really wonder about her and this picture right until the end, but she shows some character.

The hamburger stand is on the beach, next to her best friend's nose piercing parlor. One summer a pretty new girl lands a waitress job at the burger joint and turns their lives upside down. The new girl tries without much success to bring the baggy girl out of herself, although she does go dancing a couple times, and later gets high with and even later beds a peddler of tie-dye tee shirts. The loss of Baggy's attention to the new girlfriend and boyfriend alienate the piercing-parlor lady. Her friend felt neglected, but she never really was, the baggy girl just wanted to branch out a little. Besides, the tongue piercer was mixed up with a crazy boyfriend with an imaginary buddy.

The movie turns at the very end, when the piercing lady is jailed after an altercation with her boyfriend and his imaginary friend. Our baggy dresser stands up to everyone to get the money to go bail her out. To me this reveals character that she must have had all along, but never showed. The jailbird was supposed to be everyone's friend really, and part of their community, so it is appalling that no one else supported bailing her out. No one else did however, but Baggy showed true loyalty.

The story starts with a 50-year-old laid-off Chinese factory worker dating an enormous, twice divorced tubby. Between the fact that there just aren't enough women to go around in China, and the dearth of women that are attracted to shiftless factory workers anywhere, this nasty looking, nasty tempered women seems a good matrimonial prospect to him. To win her affections he claims to be the owner/manager of the Happy Times Hotel, which is in fact, an abandoned bus he rents to adolescents seeking privacy for trysts. The girlfriend's latest husband saddled her with a blind stepdaughter, whom she palms off on our protagonist as masseuse who can work in his hotel.

The story becomes endearing when our man takes the 18-year old, it really brings out the best in him. He tells her that she is in a hotel and gets his friends to pretend to be massage customers, giving them his own money to tip her. At first he is clearly being kind so the girl will put in a good word with her stepmother, but very soon we can see his actions are selfless. He gives her his room and tells her it is hotel employees' quarters. He sells his television to get money for tips. When he runs out of money he and his friends give her blank paper, thinking she won't know the difference. All the while, the girl knows what the old man is doing, and plays along so he won't be disappointed. Through the picture, the girl expects her father to return with money to pay for surgery to cure her blindness, but in fact her father has bilked his ex out of money and left them. The old man hopes to raise the girl's spirits by fabricating a letter from her estranged father, but is hospitalized and never has a chance to read it to her. Before knowing that he is hurt, the girl ventures out on her own, leaving a tape recording thanking the man for his kindness. The transformation that the girl goes through is uplifting. When she first left her stepmother's house, she runs into the street, half hoping a car would hit her. At the end, she seeks her fortune on her own, determined to make it. I was pretty afraid for her at the end, venturing out, but freedom is scary sometimes. I really admire her for going.

Some people's comments said that they had hoped for a different ending, perhaps with the two ending up in love. That would have been horrible, to think that this girl could aspire to something better than him. He's nice enough, but he really doesn't have much to offer. Another commenter said the movie is a symbol of the Chinese people living under the communist regime. The blind girl symbolizes the supposed blindness of the Chinese people, who know full well what the old man, who symbolized the regime, are doing. The play money supposedly symbolized the false promise of riches by the regime. The girl's going off by herself in the end symbolizes the Chinese people's eventual cut of the regime's cord. I don't buy this interpretation, mainly because the final scene is a real key to this interpretation, and this ending was one that was reshot when early audiences disliked the original ending. Anyway, I'm not sure "Happy Times" is the way I would characterize the relationship of the Chinese people under Communist rule. I usually take movies at face value and don't hunt for symbols, but I thought the girl's blindness symbolized the blind spots that we all grow up with. She refuses to see her father's faults, but in the end she realizes that malefactor that he really is. Finally seeing this is why she can go out on her own, the kind old man played a big part in making her see it. Very uplifting.

This review contains SPOILERS, I'm trying to save you from seeing this movie.

I started watching this movie thinking I was going to like it. It looked like a coming of age tale, the 1950's Irish setting seemed appealing, the characters seemed interesting. The main character is a large, unattractive girl, Bennie, from a small town, and the story centers around her and her two friends, Eve and Nan. Eve was a simple girl with a moralistic bent, raised in a convent, while Nan grew up a sophisticated, big city girl in Dublin. The story really gets going while the three are at university. For a while it seemed like a sweet coming of age tale of some sort, but I should have been suspicious when all the excerpts of college lectures dealt with the sexual practices of savages, and with all the talk about sex, between the girls and between Bennie and her new boyfriend, a jock on campus and a pre-med major.

The movie goes along pretty innocently for quite a while. The girls were in school, and it looked like the girls were striving to expand their horizons, improve their situation. They go to a dance and are caught up with boyfriends. Then a lot of the action is compressed in the last half hour of the movie, turning the whole thing into a big, sappy soap opera. Nan services some guy, get rejected by the buffoon when they discover she's pregnant, then seduces Bennie's boyfriend in an attempt to trick HIM into marrying her. Eve finds out, approaches Nan with a bread knife, causing Nan to fall, get cut, and lose the baby. The boyfriend then returns to Bennie and she takes him back, and the movie ends as these two are finally about to go all the way. As it ends, you don't feel uplifted, Bennie hasn't learned anything or grown, she remains a big, unattractive girl, now with a boyfriend that knows he graze in greener pastures once in a while and she'll take him back.