SYNOPSICS
Margarita Happy Hour (2001) is a English movie. Ilya Chaiken has directed this movie. Eleanor Hutchins,Larry Fessenden,Holly Ramos,Barbara Sicuranza are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2001. Margarita Happy Hour (2001) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.
Set against the backdrop of the underground music and art scenes in New York, "Margarita Happy Hour" is a film about life after the party. Five "disreputable" young women meet in the late afternoon hours of half price drink specials and jabber uninhibitedly about life, libidos, and lactation. The heroine of this real life "Sex and the City" quintet is Zelda (Eleanor Hutchins), an artist and unwed mother struggling to hold on to her persona as sexy, rock star-seducing siren. To make ends meet, Zelda works as a porno-mag illustrator and shares a communal Brooklyn loft infested with drug-addled hipsters and scene queens. Her once fiery romance with her boyfriend Max (Larry Fessenden), a street-fighting, caffeine fueled washed-up poet is on the rocks as he struggles to live up to the challenges of modern fatherhood. To aggravate matters, Zelda's best friend Natali (Holly Ramos) moves in to recover from the damage of her rock'n'roll lifestyle. At first, Max is angered by this intrusion ...
Margarita Happy Hour (2001) Trailers
Margarita Happy Hour (2001) Reviews
Honest Look At Single Mothers
"Margarita Happy Hour" works well as both a movie and a sociological slice of life. It's "Sex and the City" as set in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I was torn between sympathy for the downtrodden club-hopping single moms and calling "Judging Amy'"s social worker Mom to get their babies away from them. I see-sawed between tears and gasps -- in a decidedly down-scale take on "Ladies Who Lunch" was this one really gonna let that toddler sip out of her cocktail glass? Would the electronica turntables ever be turned down so the baby could get some sleep? But then a mom was really trying to get her sick baby on Medicaid. But this isn't quite seven years later for the girls of Larry Clark's "Kids" (a movie that made me sick for two weeks after viewing) -- this multi-ethnic group seems to be somewhat voluntarily poor, as they and their both sex significant others -- who are shown to be as childish with no impulse control as the babies whose names are just miniatures of their mothers-- are sort of artists and writers. At least one girlfriend does question whether it's appropriate for the central woman to take her toddler with her as she drops off her illustrations at the pornography magazine she free-lances for. Writer/director Ilya Chaiken is particularly effective with her seamless flashbacks as we gradually see how the lead characters got into their situation, using the metaphor of a circular trap of behavior and feelings. What is clear, despite the tawdry surroundings, is that these women genuinely love their babies and the children are finally their salvation (the credits include a list of the children of the cast and crew that inspired them). So there's a somewhat hopeful if not completely believable conclusion. As a very small indie movie probably only music by their friends could be afforded on the soundtrack, which is mostly loud and not melodic, so the sound hurts when the visuals do too. (originally written 3/23/2002)
A depressing exercise about escape to hope
As indie films go (let's face it, some are dreadful), this is an impressive debut for writer/director Ilya Chaiken. The characters and situations are 'real,' and the set pieces are well-thought-out and executed. Eleanor Hutchins, as Zelda, more or less carries the movie, and she gives a sympathetic and believable performance. All the actors, in fact, acquit themselves very well. My problem is a simple one: the film is unrelentingly depressing, which, I guess, is what it's supposed to be. Some critics have praised its humour, and I wondered what movie THEY were watching. The ending gives us a kind of flash of hope, but that's all it is: just a flash. You just KNOW that one of the characters is going to end up tragically; it's telegraphed in the first 15 minutes. Zelda has a boyfriend, Max, who is, improbably, a published poet. (Why do so many of these films feature some kind of outcast writer or artist?) A poet, by definition, uses the power of words to elevate emotion. Max is a barely literate, furiously disaffected boor who is more interested in snorting coke and inciting fistfights. How a bright, talented, lovely young woman like Zelda would give this scruffy schlub the time of day strains credulity. Five women meet once a week for cheap Margaritas in a Brooklyn restaurant ('happy hour,' an immediate contradiction), and treat us to rounds of chatter liberally laced -- nay, SPLATTERED -- with the famed 'F' word. They cannot speak two consecutive sentences without using 'fuck' as all eight parts of speech. Nice trick if you can do it. It becomes so obviously excessive that one of the women (my thanks to writer/director Chaiken) takes offense because her son is sitting beside her. I'm not a prude or a religious zealot, but I love and respect language and get really irritated by people who abuse it, on-screen or off. It's a pandemic of linguistic murder. In this film, I really wonder why knowledgeable, educated, insightful, sensitive women in their late-20s might couldn't aspire to something higher than mindlessly imitating the pointless, juvenile and idiotic linguistic redundancies that mark the profanity of men-children. This element of women's so-called 'liberation' turns into its opposite: liberation for these women seems to consist of acting and talking like their post-pubescent man-child boyfriends. This is a contradiction I witness ALL the time, and I don't quite understand why women don't seem to realize how it diminishes them. This movie, for me, is essentially about alienated people (i.e. unwed mothers) dreaming of escaping from a stifling environment. The theme has been done to death, but Chaiken still gives it enough refreshing spin to make it worth watching.
New rising star: Macha Ross
The movie was truly great and exceeded many of my expectations. While only a supporting actress, Macha Ross, was able to capture my attention with each line she delivered. I am hoping to be able to see this movie on the big screen again.
Fine Piece of Independent Film Making
This is a fine independent film. The performances were very good. The women and men staring in the film gave this sometimes over wrought script humanity and humor. The direction was excellent. I thought that the film suceeded both in communicating the humanity of the characters without losing a coherent visual style and mode of communication. I hope this finds a distributor.
Disappointing drama
I was expecting too much, perhaps, but this independent feature pretty much sums up all that can go wrong with non-mainstream cinema. The story of a group of twenty-something mothers who drown their sorrows in brightly coloured margaritas at the local bar EVERY SINGLE DAY, Margarita Happy Hour has no plot and a group of characters so utterly unattractive and uninteresting that you'll have stopped caring what happens next after the first ten minutes. Larry Fessenden, a fine filmmaker in his own right, is unable to elevate things much as Max, the useless schmuck of a father who prefers to spend his spare time snorting coke and getting into fights. The only actress of note is lead Eleanor Hutchins, whose expressive face does more for the film than the entire script.