THE HAPPY POET plays at Regal Cinema, Winter Park Village, tomorrow, Saturday 4/9 at 9.30pm, as part of the 20th annual Florida Film Festival. It’s also playing twice on Wednesday. [Details]
Do not go and see ‘The Happy Poet’ after a big meal. It is a very low-key film with long periods of silence, mumbled dialogue, and the only incidental music is the same one guitar chord, repeated throughout.
How you feel about the film will depend on how you feel about ultra independent films with low-stakes stories about characters who you find it hard to root for. I know a lot of people lap that stuff up, but not me, man. The film’s press release says “if it were French, it would get an Oscar” which may be true, but even so, I did not much care for it.
To writer/director/editor/star Paul Gordon’s credit, the film is not annoyingly quirky – a recurring trait of this kind of film. On the contrary, all the characters are well-grounded and believable, free of irritating tics that I’ve seen in films like this before. And some of the dialogue is pretty funny. But it’s all deadpan, has an ending that doesn’t really fit (maybe it’s supposed to be ironic, in which case I dislike it even more), but when your lead character is basically an emotionless blank slate, it’s hard to root for him.
By Samir Mathur
Contributing writer
Do not go and see ‘The Happy Poet’ after a big meal. It is a very low-key film with long periods of silence, mumbled dialogue, and the only incidental music is the same one guitar chord, repeated throughout.
How you feel about the film will depend on how you feel about ultra independent films with low-stakes stories about characters who you find it hard to root for. I know a lot of people lap that stuff up, but not me, man. The film’s press release says “if it were French, it would get an Oscar” which may be true, but even so, I did not much care for it.
To writer/director/editor/star Paul Gordon’s credit, the film is not annoyingly quirky – a recurring trait of this kind of film. On the contrary, all the characters are well-grounded and believable, free of irritating tics that I’ve seen in films like this before. And some of the dialogue is pretty funny. But it’s all deadpan, has an ending that doesn’t really fit (maybe it’s supposed to be ironic, in which case I dislike it even more), but when your lead character is basically an emotionless blank slate, it’s hard to root for him.