Review of Happy Endings (2005) by Chads. — 11 Sep 2005

Don Roos uses title cards as a replacement for a voice-over, which are usually done in the first-person, but his commentaries are written in third-person, and had they been narrated, "Happy Endings" might've resembled Rebecca Miller's "Personal Velocity".

Roos gives the moviegoer a choice; you can either read the fine print, or ignore the added information without any fatal hinderance to your understanding of the narrative. By ignoring the title cards, the characters have more ambiguity.

But if you read silently to yourself, you're participating in the film. You're the narrator. Roos' experiment might be unnecessary(unnecessary because he steals some of the spotlight from the great Maggie Gyllenhaal, the underrated Lisa Kudrow, and the unbeknownst Tom Arnold), but the conceit works if you have a hypothesis for its justification.