Richard’s “Canada AM” look at the early holiday movie “Love the Coopers” featuring more stars than on the top of the tree, “By the Sea” from Brangelina and the Oscar bait of “Spotlight.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
The Christmas season doesn’t start when The Bay puts up wreaths and ornaments for sale in mid-October or when Starbucks introduces the red cup. Nope. Paradoxically, on the big screen, Christmas begins in November with American Thanksgiving. This year along with the turkey and the yam-topped sweet potatoes comes sage Christmas advice from Grandpa Bucky (Alan Arkin): “Everyone thinks you can schedule happiness, but you can’t.” Listen and learn. It’s Christmastime at the movies so cue the yuletide family dysfunction.
Four generations of Coopers are headed to Mon (Diane Keaton) and Dad’s (John Goodman) place for Christmas dinner. What the kids and grandchildren and assorted others don’t know is that the rents are splitting after 40 years of marriage but want to give the kids “one last perfect Christmas” before announcing the divorce.
Among the guests descending for holiday vittles are an unemployed sad sack son (Ed Helms) and his children. Olivia Wilde as Eleanor, the philosophically inclined but reckless daughter accompanied by Bailey (Jake Lacy), an Iraq-bound soldier she meets at the airport and convinces to be her dinner date and a kleptomaniac sister (Marisa Tomei) who apparently can look to people souls. There’s more, like the excellently named Aunt Fishy (June Squibb) and Ruby (Amanda Seyfried), an angelic waitress at Bucky’s favourite diner, but there’s so many characters the movie starts to lose track of them and so does the audience. “Love the Coopers” is so jam pacekd with people it takes 20 minutes of narration to introduce them all. Imagine a Christmas tale written by Leo Tolstoy, with a dozen or more characters weaving in and out of the narrative—plus a dog flatulence joke!—and you get the idea.
Sting songs decorate the soundtrack as life times of regret and resentment boil over. Before you can say, “Pass the stuffing,” a litany of hardships—unemployment, divorce, empty nest syndrome, longing and underwear soiling to name a few—have been touched on and while there are moments of actual raw emotion they’re buttressed by enough schmaltz to fill eight CDs worth of Celine Dion Christmas ballads. For instance Eleanor’s meet cute with Bailey is the stuff of a solid rom com. Her out-of-control run through a hospital—knocking over patients and grieving visitors—is not.
There are too many stories happening at once—but don’t worry there’s “helpful” narration to explain the details—for you to become invested in the characters. Characters come and go and by the time they’re all in the same place story threads are left hanging like twisted tinsel on a wilted Christmas tree. Director Jessie “I Am Sam” Nelson tidies everything up in the final moments, putting a pretty bow on the package, while throwing story credibility out the window.
Much of “Love the Coopers” is as appealing as last year’s fruitcake, but in the odd moment where it leaves the emotional manipulation in the background and focuses on the story’s sense of melancholy and messages about the power of family, it casts a warm glow.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” “Vacation” and “A Lego Brickumentary” with host Marci Ien.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” “Vacation” and “A Lego Brickumentary” with host Marci Ien.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Rusty Griswold may have grown up but the humor of the movies that made him famous hasn’t. “Vacation” is a reboot of the “National Lampoon Vacation” series that featured Chevy Chase as the hapless patriarch, Beverley D’ Angelo as his wife, daughter Audrey (played in different movies by Dana Barron, Dana Hill, Juliette Lewis and Marisol Nichols) and Rusty (played variously by Anthony Michael Hall, Jason Lively, Johnny Galecki and Ethan Embry in different movies).
In the new film Ed Helms plays Rusty as a sweet-natured adult, father to James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins) and husband to Debbie (Christina Applegate). The family is falling apart and on the eve of their usual summer holiday, a boring trip to a camp that everybody hates, Rusty decides to try something different to bring his family together, a recreation of a childhood road trip with his parents to Walley World.
Anyone who remembers the original 1983 film knows the 2500-mile trip turned into a vacation from hell. It seems Rusty learned nothing from his father’s ill-fated journey. “From the moment we left nothing has gone right,” says Debbie. “Can’t you just admit this was a mistake?” From an angry GPS and a menacing trucker to an inappropriately well-endowed brother-in-law and an open sewer, the trip is fraught with problems.
If not for certain brand of anatomical humour “Vacation” would be about 12 minutes long. Remove the swearing and jokes about sexual acts—Wait! Don’t forget the bodily functions!—there wouldn’t be much going on here. Not that I’m a prude. Far from it. Some of it is genuinely funny. It hits many of the same notes as the original—the father’s verbal break down the extremely unseemly relatives (Leslie Mann and Chris Hemsworth)—but doesn’t have the same good-natured feel. It tries hard to inject some heart into the story in the last half hour but up until then is rough around the edges. Need convincing? Check out the fate of the pretty motorist in the sports car.
Co-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have a tendency to give away the jokes too soon, but Helms and cast sell the jokes, no matter how raunchy. Particularly good are Gisondo as the sensitive son James and Hemsworth who displays an until now unseen sense of comic timing.
Ultimately “Vacation” is about bringing the Griswold family back together, but it’s not a family movie.
Just got a press release from Warner Brothers trumpeting The Hangover Part 2’s king size box office gross. “The blockbuster comedy has now crossed $200 million worldwide,” it screams, “the fastest of any comedy to surpass that benchmark.” Right now the gross sits at about $205 million, a figure that is no doubt growing by the second, leading Warner Bros. Pictures President of Domestic Distribution Dan Fellman to predict that this Hangover will “last throughout the summer.”
Maybe it will. Still doesn’t mean it’s a good movie, or that the critics got it wrong.
Box office success isn’t always an indication of quality. Can you guess what Night of the Hunter, Metropolis, Blade Runner and Modern Times all have in common? Two things. They’re all classics, films regarded as important cultural artifacts and they all flopped on their original release.
Let’s try that again. What do The Day After Tomorrow, Rush Hour 2, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra share? Two things. There’s not a classic among them, and they all made at least $50 million on their opening weekend.
I don’t begrudge The Hangover Part 2’s gross. I’m sure Todd Phillips and company are nice people but no amount of box office business will ever convince me this is a good movie. Commercial and artistic success are often two mutually exclusive realms. Ask Van Gogh. He only sold one painting during his lifetime.
There are two schools of thought regarding threequels. The third part of any movie franchise might be, 1.) a waste of time, made primarily to cash in on the name brand value of the property (think “Godfather 3” or “Superman 3”) or 2.) an economical way of telling a story unencumbered with the weight of establishing characters or origin story (think “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” or “Goldfinger”).
“The Hangover Part III” certainly has name recognition and doesn’t waste any time in reintroducing the characters, but does it fall into category one or two?
The movie begins with Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) making a spectacular break from a Thai prison. Meanwhile in the U.S. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is out of control. A deadly accident with a giraffe sets off a series of events that lead to an intervention by his family and friends (Wolfpack members Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms). Just when it seems that Alan might pull his life together the Wolfpack is coerced into playing bounty hunter, searching for Chow and $21 million in stolen gold. If they fail, hapless Doug (Justin Bartha, who, once again doesn’t get to do any of the fun stuff) will be executed.
The second “Hangover” movie was an unfunny beat-for-beat carbon copy of the first. It contained all the elements of the first plus a monkey but it was too slavishly devoted to recreating the original to be anything more than a disappointment.
The new one is something else again. It’s a heist film, sans the monkey and most of the laughs. The “Hangover” movies have always been dark and edgy but this episode lays it on thick.
Much of he humor comes from playing well-established characters off of one another. Trouble is, director Todd Phillips has chosen to wrong two characters to focus on.
“I got a dumb sense of humor, bra,” says Alan. And how. There’s strange and there’s funny, and, as Alan, Galifianakis revels in the former more than the latter. Used sparingly he can raise a smile, but when the messy death of a giraffe is the comedic highlight of Alan’s storyline you know something is amiss. What’s funnier than killing a giraffe? Nothing apparently.
Jeong is also best enjoyed in small doses. Both actors are fearless, but taking risks doesn’t always add up to big laughs.
Cooper and Helms are relegated to the supporting cast, mostly there to react with a hearty “WT?” to the strange goings on.
And it is strange. The story is stuck in limbo somewhere between heist flick and comedy–with some attempted heartwarming moments thrown in for good measure–never really committing to either.
At one point Chou dramatically asks, “How do you kill what is already dead?” In terms of the “Hangover” franchise—which I thought had a fatal case of sequelitis after the second installment—you simply put the wrong people in the leads.
The action in “The Hangover Part 2” starts as so many bad benders do, with the simple words, “Come and have a drink with me and the guys” and ends after as debauched ride through the streets of Bangkok as has ever been committed to film. The first time around, in 2009, the day after the night before adventures of the Wolfpack—Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms—was fresh, even charming in an alcoholic haze kind of way. This time out the guys have all the charm of stale beer breath.
The set up is similar to the first film. This time around Phil (Cooper) and Alan (Galifianakis) are groomsmen at their buddy Stu (Helms) Thailand wedding. One thing leads to another and they wake up in a grotty Bangkok hotel room, minus one of the wedding party, Teddy (Mason Lee), Stu’s bride-to-be’s brother. To find him they must re-enact the first movie… er… turn Bangkok upside down.
“The Hangover Part 2” has a severe case of sequelitis. It tries to please the core “Hangover” audience by presenting a familiar—some would say photocopied—plot, but also introduces new, darker humor in an attempt to keep things fresh. Neither is really successful. The recycled plot points borrowed from the original—Stu writes a song about their adventures, there’s the Tyson tattoo, hookers and the mystery of a missing friend—don’t work as well the second time through and the movie’s dark tone dampens many of the laughs.
Ed Helms spends much of the movie screaming, “I can’t believe this is happening again,” and frankly, by the end of the first hour, neither can the audience.
Galifianakis brings most of the laughs to the movie, but his unbalanced brand of humour is hit and miss and the character Alan is better in small doses, not as the main fount of funny.
There is nothing as hilarious here as the first movie’s tiger in the bedroom or the closing credit’s Polaroids. If these guys decide to go for a third binge, perhaps they should call Dr. Drew first.
Almost everyone has done it once; woken up with cotton mouth, a headache, a mystery bruise or two and only a vague recollection of what happened the night before. Some call these symptoms the “wrath of the grapes” others call them by their real name—the hangover. Hangovers are always unpleasant, unless of course you’re not the one with the splitting headache. If I learned anything in my twenties it was that’s it always fun to laugh at someone who is desperately hungover, which is exactly what Old School director Todd Phillips is counting on with his new film about three groomsmen who lose their about-to-be-wed friend after a night of drunken debauchery.
The trailer sets up the movie nicely. It’s the aftermath of a wild Vegas bachelor party. There’s a tiger in the bathroom, a chicken in the living room, a baby in the closet and three very hungover groomsmen (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis). What’s missing is the front tooth of one of the guys and the groom. Nobody knows what happened to either of them. The hazy-headed trio have just a few hours to retrace their staggered steps from the night before, find their friend Doug (Justin Bartha) and, for God’s sake, get him to the church on time.
The Hangover is an extreme “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” movie. A boy’s weekend version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it’s the ultimate nightmare for anyone waiting at home for the guys to come home from a bachelor party. These three take part in every vice The Entertainment Capital of the World has to offer from drinking to drugs to marrying the proto stripper with a heart of gold to hanging out with Carrot Top. It’s packed to bursting with every Vegas cliché, a hybrid of all the Sin City movies that preceded it. Call it Leaving Viva Las Vegas Honeymoon.
It’s also the funniest thing to come out of Vegas since the Rat Pack ruled the Sands. Not that it’s for everyone. There are jokes here that would make Hollywood’s current king of crude, Judd Apatow, squirm in his seat. If 911 jokes (Too soon? Apparently not!), holocaust references and a scene with a baby being made to do something the Divinyls once sang about (look it up, it was top twenty in 1991) sound too outrageous, then this movie is not for you. If, however, you don’t mind muttering “That’s not right” while laughing out loud, there is much here to enjoy.
The big surprise is Bradley Cooper in a role that not only establishes him as a leading man after a long run as the good looking second banana in movies like Failure to Launch and Wedding Crashers, but also proves that he can be funny. Really funny. He’s a reactive comedian and doesn’t get many punch lines, but his response to finding a tiger in his hotel room bathroom is priceless.
The Hangover is a wild brain-dead movie about men behaving badly that breaks so many taboos it makes raunchy comedies like Knocked Up seem tame.
