Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013) Reviews

• A dark comedy based on one teenager's tweets!

  fb_galaxy52014-09-21

  A story about a high school senior named Mary living the odd school life, figuring out love, and trying to understand herself. And in the process, Mary and her best friend, Suri, are working to finish their high school yearbook also. While the story about a teen figuring out herself is nothing here, the concept and the imagination in this movie are fascinating. This movie is created based on 410 tweets of a Thai teenager named Mary Malony (@marylony). In the movie, each tweet would show up in the middle as the screen to reflect on the context at the given moment, or a direct quote. While most tweets are seemingly random, few of them display some deep emotion and thought. The start of the movie is quite seemingly random like the tweets itself. It is full of random humors that I found quite amusing. By the way, if you do the math --- 410/120 gives you about 3-4 tweets per minute! Anyways, as the story progress into the second act, we slowly start to see a more cohesive story about Mary, either through the act or the tweet that serves as an inner monologue. However, as Mary starts to come into some resolutions about her relationship, the viewer is thrown into the third act filled with a deeper introspection of Mary. Of the three acts, I think the third part feel like the most powerful part story-wise, but least connected to the tweets. In the end, I feel it was a bit incomplete. It is understandable. The writer's hands are tied, since he has to creatively imagine the story and integrate the teenager's mentality and sometimes cryptic tweets. In the same that Boyhood is fascinating conceptually, but not mind-blowing. Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy is a creative approach to writing a story with lots of humors and easter eggs -- references to other movie titles, a Wong-Kar Wai style shot, a movie title in the story itself, etc. While there are lots of Thai movies in romance and action, it is quite rare to see a film with this type of quirky dark comedy/drama. Personally, this movie has not beat Last Life in the Universe, but it sure came quite close to it.

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