Product Description

Academy Award nominee Mike Leigh (Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, Vera Drake, 2004), delivers the delightfully fresh and cheerful comedy Happy-Go-Lucky. Free-spirited and effervescent, Poppy is a schoolteacher whose unstoppable optimism guides her life. Bubbling forth with giggles, laughter and jokes, life's a bowl of cherries even when she comes across a few pits. Whether it's a cranky driving teacher or a fiery flamenco instructor, Poppy embraces life on the sunny side of the street. It's a joyous, feel-good film you'll find irresistible. Bonus features include: Behind the Wheel of Happy-Go-Lucky, Happy-In-Character, audio commentary by Director Mike Leigh

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8084 in DVD
• Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
• Released on: 2009-03-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 118 minutes

Amazon.com
Mike Leigh has made a career out of unusual films--who else would make a biopic about Gilbert & Sullivan?--but Happy-Go-Lucky may be his most unusual yet: A movie about a woman who is almost compulsively cheerful. Poppy (Sally Hawkins, star of the 2007 miniseries of Persuasion) may at first seem like the most annoying human being alive. She can't help but try to get a smile from someone who's ignoring her. When her bicycle gets stolen, she shrugs it off and decides to learn how to drive, which leads her to form a strange sparring relationship with her frustrated driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan). Meanwhile, she takes flamenco lessons, visits with her squabbling family, tries to help a troubled boy at the school where she teaches, and encounters a homeless man--but this bland catalogue of events doesn't capture how Poppy's relentless optimism acts as a rorschach test to the people around her, reflecting back their worst or best feelings about themselves. Poppy, whose natural impulse is to empathize, discovers she needs to draw boundaries between herself and a world that wants to interpret her cheerfulness in unintended ways. The result is a unique movie experience, one that defies conventional notions of what's dramatic yet grows more absorbing with every moment. Just as it's hard to imagine anyone liking Poppy at the start of Happy-Go-Lucky, it's hard to imagine that anyone doesn't care about her by the movie's end. --Bret Fetzer

Review
Awards Include: Berlin International Film Festival 2008 Winner Best Actress Sally Hawkins; Boston Society of Film Critics Awards 2008
Winner Best Actress Sally Hawkins;
British Independent Film Award 2008
Winner Best Supporting Actor Eddie Marsan; Golden Globes 2009
Winner Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical Sally Hawkins; Hollywood Film Festival 2008; Winner Hollywood Breakthrough Award Sally Hawkins;
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards 2008; Winner Best Actress Sally Hawkins; Best Screenplay Mike Leigh;
New York Film Critics Circle Awards 2008 Winner Best Actress Sally Hawkins, Winner Best Director Mike Leigh; Norwegian International Film Festival 2008 Winner Most Enjoyable Film (Theatre Owners) Bringer of Joy Award; Pula Film Festival 2008 Winner Golden Arena Best Director Foreign Film --imbd

Review
Sally Hawkins delivers an Oscar-worthy performance.- Thelma Adams, US Weekly
It's more than a movie, It's a Gift. 3 1/2 stars!; - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone --Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

Customer Reviews

Happy-Go-Lucky Combines Comedy with Intelligence.
"Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins."--Mike Leigh.

Many of the best films of 2008 were dark and melancholic (Revolutionary Road; The Reader; The Wrestler), with one rare exception: Happy-Go-Lucky. Writer/director Mike Leigh's (Secrets and Lies; Topsy-Turvy; Vera Drake) charming new comedy stars Sally Hawkins as Poppy, a thirty-year-old, free-spirited, North London schoolteacher with an infectious love for life. Over the course of the two-hour film, Poppy's genuine, happy-go-lucky nature is put to the test by a series of misadventures. After her bicycle is stolen, she decides to take weekly driving lessons. Her creepy, verbally-abusive instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan), proves to be Poppy's complete opposite. He is the morose, self-loathing embodiment of road rage, who could benefit from anger-management classes. Poppy's happiness is also put to the test by her flamenco dance teacher, her sisters, a homeless head-case, a school bully, and by her chiropractor. She takes life in stride with convincing equanimity. It would not require a stretch of the imagination to think of Poppy as a happy bodhisattva. Already a master of her own happiness, she sets out to use her Poppy-qualities to liberate other characters from their own unhappiness, and to bring a smile to the world. She succeeds.

Sally Hawkins is reason enough to experience this film, a film which will undoubtedly launch her career to new heights. Just as Audrey Tautou is synonymous with Amelie, Hawkins will become synonymous with Happy-Go-Lucky. Her performance is brilliant. She brings emotional depth and intelligence to Poppy, a performance which resulted in an award for Best Actress at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.

There are many things to love about Leigh's film--a film that lives up to its title. Happy-Go-Lucky is a film that would have never been by the Hollywood studios that consider male-driven movies by Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Knocked Up) and Adam Sandler to be good comedy models. In 2008, both Sally Hawkins and Anna Faris (The House Bunny) transcended that Hollywood formula with their fresh comic performances. It is no surprise that reviewers including Roger Ebert, New York Times critics Manohla Dargis, Stephen Holden, and A.O. Scott, New York Magazine critic David Edelstein, and Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan are now including Happy-Go-Lucky among their Top Ten Films of 2008. The film recently received a Golden Globe nod for Best Motion Picture-Comedy. Happily recommended as one of the best films of 2008.

G. Merritt

Plot, Good; Character Study, Great
This is all about Poppy, played by Sally Hawkins. Single in London. Positive, cheerful, and generally embodies the title of the movie. Every situation is to be faced with good spirit, a light attitude, and cheer.

At the beginning it seems that she will overrun a challenge like a tank running over a building in a WW II flick. Smiles. Banter. Humor. Irrepressible. Even when alone.

The challenges grow. A problem student. A vagrant in a deserted part of town. A doctor visit. A dance instructor with issues.

And then the new champion for Driving Instructor From Satan, played by Eddie Marsan. These scenes are classics. As in many movies confrontation is important to good comedy or drama. The theater I saw this in was laughing its collective heads off. The driving lessons make me smile even as I type this.

How Poppy reacts to each challenge - and how others react to Poppy - is the core of this movie. The plot is mostly a string of episodes. Mike Leigh does an outstanding job directing, finding a second level to each situation. Funny and happy. But also thoughtful and a little gritty.

Sally Hawkins should be up for an Oscar in 2009, but that is a whole other discussion.

Sally-Go-Lightly
Someones acceptance of this movie totally hinges on their tolerance of Sally Hawkins character. If you are charmed by goofy, never stop talking British eccentrics then you may like Happy Go Lucky.

If people who never shut up annoy you, people who will say anything just to be saying something, then this probably ain't the movie for you.

I was surprised because I'm a big Mike Leigh fan. Life is Sweet is an all time favorite and was far more off center and weird than Happy Go Lucky. It had plenty of weird characters that all became endearing and real by the end. I kept waiting for Hawkins character to become lovable the way the mom did in Life is Sweet, the way the bloviating Jim Broadbent did in Topsy-Turvy. Never happens. Happy Go Lucky by contrast is filled with a mix of either annoying characters (Hawkins, driving instructor, Flamenco instructor) or dull characters (co-workers, boyfriend, abused student, roommate).

Leigh's penchant for not working off of scripts goes wrong in this one and turns the movie into a bunch of patched together skits that do little to build a cohesive whole. It's telling that the best scene in the movie, her encounter with a homeless man, is the only time she has very little to say. Unfortunately, the scene is compromised because it is a totally forced situation. Just as in a slasher movie where people always do stupid things to get themselves killed, we are expected to accept that someone would actually walk down a dark alley in a bad neighborhood at night in hopes of making an interesting acquaintance. It reeks of plot device and undermines the scene.

The movie gets a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, Hawkins won a Golden Globe and universal acclaim. So obviously, I'm not seeing something everyone else did. You may want to rent it and judge for yourself...