Critic Reviews

First-time writer-director Michael M. Bilandic's tongue-in-cheek, bare-knuckles approach to his ultra-low budget paean to a dying breed is a welcome piece of independent filmmaking.

The most spot-on scenes show passive-aggressive hipster clerks snorting at Keith's flyers for a comeback fundraiser rave and a city suffocating on its own cool.

Set in cramped apartments and hole-in-the-wall storefronts in the East Village, Michael M. Bilandic's nanobudget comedy Happy Life plays like a poor schlub's "High Fidelity."

The film advances the "let's put on a show" genre into a grim and hopeless direction, just right for hard times. In different hands Happy Life might become a decent movie. Maybe it's best thought of as a demo.

The roughness of Happy Life's production values and the inconsistency of its amateur actors would be forgivable if it showed any heart, but this low-budget ramble about techno's glory days instead inspires relief that things have moved on.