Movie Review: Love The Coopers (2015)

Also Known As: Christmas With The Coopers  

Genre: Dramedy  

Director: Jessie Nelson  

Starring: Diane Keaton, John Goodman, Marisa Tomei, Alan Arkin, Amanda Seyfried, Timothée Chalamet, Ed Helms, Jake Lacy, Anthony Mackie, June Squibb, Olivia Wilde  

Running Time: 107 minutes  

Synopsis: Christmas Eve is approaching, and four generations of the imperfect Cooper family are gathering for dinner. Sam and Charlotte (John Goodman and Diane Keaton) are hosting but also hiding their disintegrating marriage. Their black sheep daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) meets a soldier (Jake Lacy) at the airport. The Cooper's divorced son (Ed Helms) is struggling with unemployment, while his teenaged son (Timothée Chalamet) is pursuing his first crush at the mall. Charlotte's sister (Marisa Tomei) is arrested for shoplifting and has an encounter with a police officer (Anthony Mackie), while Charlotte's father Bucky (Alan Arkin) has an argument with his regular diner server (Amanda Seyfried). 

What Works Well: With notable determination, this Christmas movie seeks a contrarian stance, avoiding feel-good vibes and zooming in on all that is wrong with the lives of the Coopers. Charlotte is doing her best to pretend and get on with the Christmas spirit, but all the family members are flailing as their character faults and life failures are revealed. The simple message of celebrating normal imperfection is straightforward and well-intentioned, and the opening two thirds offer the added enjoyment of guessing all the family connections. The quality cast and numerous mini-plots ensure the movie never dawdles in any one place for too long.

What Does Not Work As Well: After a lot of hard work to represent flawed characters, the resolutions run away from difficult outcomes and just surrender to traditional endings. With so many stories to tell, some of the more interesting secondary characters, notably Amanda Seyfried's diner server and Anthony Mackie's police officer, are shortchanged.

Key Quote:

Bucky: That feeling like you've landed in the wrong life. Everybody feels that way.

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Movie Review: Cedar Rapids (2011)

An independent small-scale comedy, Cedar Rapids creates a clever premise with potentially interesting characters, but then quickly runs out of ideas.

Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is a naive but well-meaning insurance agent who has never left his small Wisconsin hometown of Brown Valley. He enjoys sexual encounters with his former school teacher Macy (Sigourney Weaver), although he is much more serious about the relationship than she is. Tim's boss Bill (Stephen Root) is adamant the agency maintain the coveted "Two Diamond" rating awarded by the regional insurance association.

When star agent Roger unexpectedly expires, Bill dispatches Tim to the industry conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a mission to impress association president Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). On his first ever trip to anywhere, Tim meets a trio of seasoned insurance agents: the kind Ronald (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), boorish Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), and frisky Joan (Anne Heche). They expose him to conference-style fun, but Tim soon discovers some hard truths.

The world of nondescript conferences in nowheresville towns where salespeople congregate provides potentially rich soil for humour. Screenwriter Phil Johnston, director Miguel Arteta, and co-producer Alexander Payne conjure up a good foundation for laughs, with most of the film taking place at the mundane cookie-cutter hotel.

But once the place and people are introduced, Cedar Rapids quickly stalls. Tim's naive disposition is too easy a target, and he quickly succumbs to alcohol and pot, leading to all the usual and predictable misadventures. Uncomfortable nude encounters, skinny dipping, drunken sexual liaisons, and wild parties with prostitutes ensue, the film ticking off a checklist straight from the horny teenager comedies of the 1980s.

Ed Helms as Tim is essentially a blank canvass allowing events to be drawn on him. It is left to the veteran conference attendees to enliven the film, and thanks to a strong cast enough energy is injected to provide bursts of entertainment. John C. Reilly gives Ziegler a few good layers to peel away, while Anne Heche is the married-too-early mom who uses the conference as the one annual opportunity to live a different life. Isiah Whitlock Jr. is less well defined, while Alia Shawkat as the local whore with a heart of gold has nowhere to take her character.

Most of the laughs come from Reilly going all out with the churlish mannerisms of Ziegler as loud, rude and with a ready insult for any situation. He is a common but unwelcome conference presence, lingering like the sickly chlorine smell of the hotel's indoor swimming pool.

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Movie Review: The Hangover (2009)

A group of friends head to Las Vegas for a wild bachelor party. Doug is the groom-to-be; Phil is his hip friend; Stu is his dentist friend shackled by a domineering woman; and Alan will become Doug's brother-in-law.

In Vegas, they wake up in a trashed hotel room (really trashed -- there is a rather angry tiger in the bathroom), with no memory of what happened the previous night. Oh, and Doug is missing.

The Hangover bolts together the currently hip bromedy genre with the occasionally successful technique of starting the story at the end. Rather than working backwards through time or using flashbacks, The Hangover never shows us the actual events of its central night. Rather, we join the ride as Phil, Stu and Alan try to find out what happened during the fateful few hours, while frantically looking for the missing Doug before his bride-in-waiting flips.

They also are facing the consequences of their actions, except that they have no memory of what their actions actually were. The characters and the audience together uncover the missing events, as Phil leads the group in following clues as diverse as a baby in a closet; a medical wrist-band; and Stu's missing tooth. Needless to say, they are being chased by an Asian gang, and one of them is now unexpectedly married (remember, this is Vegas) to no less than a tarty stripper (Heather Graham).

The film's story and structure are a solid foundation for a good comedy, and The Hangover is helped enormously by memorable if not quite original central characters. Phil (Bradley Cooper) is the cool friend who takes on an unlikely leadership role, while Stu (Ed Helms) is the conservative dentist fighting the shadow of an oppressive relationship. But the character of Alan (Zach Galifianakis) as the brother-in-law-in-waiting is wonderfully different. Suffice to say that Alan will always say and do the unexpected in the most awkward possible way, but he's so well developed as a character that his massive eccentricities soon emerge as consistent with his personality.

Under the guidance of patchy director Todd Phillips, The Hangover tries to generate a thick wall of jokes and funny events, and given the vast quantity, a large proportion does fall flat a bit too often. Much of the comedy is poorly developed, lacking in subtlety and sometimes just plain painful rather than funny. But the parts that do work, such as the rooftop gathering and the hotel room wake-up scene, are excellent.

Despite the uneven execution, The Hangover is worthwhile viewing, providing equal parts comedy and clever film-making.







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