Trailer: Love the Coopers, a Family Christmas Story with Diane Keaton, John Goodman, and Olivia Wilde
Posted on August 26, 2015 at 2:12 pm
Rent This Instead: A Better Ed Helms Raunchy Comedy (that isn’t “Hangover”)
Posted on July 31, 2015 at 3:05 pm
“Vacation” is a gross, dumb disappointment. If you want to see Ed Helms in a much better raunchy comedy, try the neglected gem Cedar Rapids
Vacation
Posted on July 28, 2015 at 6:44 pm
I didn’t like the first one. I didn’t like the sequels. Keep that in mind when I tell you that I really did not like this latest in the gross-out, mean-spirited “Vacation” series, this time with the next generation going on another car trip to Wally World. You know how kids survive long car trips with earphones and DVD players? That’s what I wished I had to help me survive this movie. I even took extra time making my notes to have an excuse to look down at my notebook instead of looking at the screen. This is a movie that finds — or tries to find — humor in mistaking a sewage facility for a natural hot springs (with extended scenes of the cast spreading the “mud” all over themselves), sibling abuse, attempted suicide, a person and an animal in separate instances getting slammed by vehicles, excruciating humiliation, suspected pedophilia, and a misunderstanding of the term “rim job.”
Ed Helms plays Rusty Griswold. He bears no resemblance to the Anthony Michael Hall, who played him in the first film, or the young actors who played the character in the sequels. But Russ bears no resemblance to the character of the earlier movies, either. This Rusty is a genial bumbler who loves his family and works as a pilot for an airline. He and his wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) have two sons. The little one, Kevin (Steele Stebbins), bullies the big one (Skyler Gisondo as James) with constant insults, attacking his manhood, personality, and overall right to exist on the planet.
Russ decides that what the family needs is some bonding time, like on that car trip to the Walley World theme park he somehow remembers very fondly from his childhood. He rents a bright blue car called a Tartan Prancer, which he describes as “The Honda of Albania.” He has no idea what most of the buttons on the car do, but that means we all get to find out together.
The family swings by to visit Rusty’s sister Audrey (Leslie Mann), who is married to a guy who looks like a Norse god, because he is played by Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth. He is a TV weatherman named Stone and he is rancher who intimidates Rusty by being handsome, muscular, wealthy, and good at everything, including being a loving husband, if you don’t count his preventing his wife from having a job outside the home. Oh, and as we and Rusty and Debbie get to see in detail (graphic detail at the end of the movie), he is exceptionally generously endowed and feels very, very good about it. And this is — really — the highlight of the movie.
Hemsworth and Applegate both rise above the material, but the material is below sea level, so that is not saying much.
Parents should know that this movie includes very strong and crude language, very explicit sexual references and some situations, graphic nudity, disturbing scenes, comic mayhem involving people and animals, attempted suicide, apparent vehicular homicide (portrayed as funny), and a lot of bad behavior (portrayed as funny).
Family discussion: What was your family’s best road trip? What road trip would you like to take?
If you like this, try: the original “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and its sequels
The Hangover Part III
Posted on May 23, 2013 at 11:02 am
Let’s hope that this movie is the much-needed stake in the heart to the triligization of popular movies (okay, with an exception for Richard Linklater’s “Before” series and “Toy Story”). I began to think of the three films as a shell game, with the pea of novelty and humor under just one shell, and shrinking retrospectively as I was dragged through this far distant last in the series, so entirely disappointing that it diminishes any fond memories of the original.
And that is the key word. The first chapter was original. We got to enjoy the speculation and schadenfreude as we lived a night of mostly unintentional debauchery and mayhem backwards. Feral man-child Alan (Zach Galifianakis), cynical Phil (Bradley Cooper), and mild-mannered Stu (Ed Helms), a hapless trio, in Las Vegas for a bachelor party, wake up in the mother of all mornings after and spend most of the movie piecing together the events of the evening before. They have to discover how they ended up with a tiger, a baby, a missing tooth, and a hospital bracelet. And the prospective groom is missing.
In #2, there’s another wedding to make in time, and another morning after. Some people found the second one a garish and cynical retread. I thought it was pretty funny and even managed to find some meta-commentary in the way it rang changes on the first one. And I liked Paul Giamatti.
In #3, director Todd Phillips and Craig Mazin (the execrable “Identity Thief”) take over script duties from the original’s writers, who were off plagiarizing themselves with a college-age version of the very same movie. This one jettisons the backwards-style structure, which is fine, but it plays as though they pulled it out of a slush pile and did a global search and replace to insert the first movie’s characters, who, in one of many increasingly less funny repetitions of almost-jokes we’ve increasingly tired of, are referred to by one character as The Wolf Pack.
Once again, they are separated from Doug (Justin Bartha), who is held hostage by a thug (John Goodman) while they are sent to track down their old frenemy, Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong). We also meet up with the first episode’s characters drug dealer Black Doug and former stripper Jade (the criminally misused Mike Epps and Heather Graham). And here is what we learn:
1. These are really unpleasant people. They are selfish, childish, and uninteresting.
2. A little of Leslie Chow is better than a lot.
3. It is impossible to make the same joke funny three times in a row. The second time may provide a pleasant sensation of remembered humor. The third time is just irritating.
4. It is possible to criminally underuse even John Goodman, completely wasted here.
5. Melissa McCarthy, on the other hand, while also underused, manages to make her five minutes the highlight of the film.
6. It is possible to miss Mike Tyson.
This movie is the bad hangover from the now-tarnished original.
Parents should know that this film includes comic and more serious violence including murder, guns, chases, characters and animals in peril, injured, and killed, extensive drug content, constant very strong language, sexual references (some crude) and situations (male and female nudity), pervasive very bad behavior
Family discussion: Which of the friends makes the best choices? Do you think that the different structure of the story-telling works as well as the original?
If you like this, try: the first “Hangover” movie and “Cedar Rapids”
Jeff, Who Lives At Home
Posted on March 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for language including some sexual references and some drug use |
| Profanity: | Constant very strong, explicit, and crude language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, drunk driving, and drug use |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Some peril and violence, no one badly hurt |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | March 16, 2012 |
Of course Jeff (Jason Segal) lives at home. Just about everyone lives at home; that’s what “home” means. The thing about 30-year-old Jeff, though, is that he still lives at the home he never-quite grew up in. He lives in the basement of his mother’s home, and while he tells her he is busy when she calls from the office, he really does not do much but smoke pot and watch movies, certainly nothing by way of education or employment. We first see him dictating his thoughts on yet another re-watching of M. Knight Shyamalan’s deterministic alien invasion movie, Signs. In tight close-up, there is almost a rapturous expression on his face as he recounts the way that seemingly random events and choices turn out to be essential. That enlightened insight about interconnectedness seems to have no relationship to Jeff’s being on the toilet as he discusses it.
Jeff’s mother asks him to go to the store and get some wood glue so that he can repair a broken slat in the shutters. And it is her birthday. So like heros in epics from the earliest days of storytelling, Jeff undertakes a journey and a quest. He makes a rare excursion away from home.
Jeff may be going out for wood glue, but in his heart the quest is for meaning and connection. The wrong number asking for “Kevin” he received that morning could be a sign of some kind. And so, when Jeff sees a guy on the bus with “Kevin” on the back of his basketball shirt (Evan Ross, son of Diana Ross), he follows him off the bus instead of staying on to get to Home Depot for the glue. After some misadventure — and a pick-up game — he runs into his older brother, Pat (Ed Helms of “The Office” and “The Hangover”), who has been drowning his troubles at a Hooters after surprising his wife, Linda (Judy Greer of “The Descendents”) with a Porsche they cannot afford. Pat and Jeff get into the Porsche so they can buy the wood glue but once again a number of detours lead them astray, after they see Linda out with a man they don’t recognize. Meanwhile, their mother (an enchanting Susan Sarandon) is receiving flirtatious overtures from an anonymous admirer somewhere in her office’s nest of cubicles and finding herself flattered and intrigued and nervous.
Writer/director brother team Jay and Mark Duplass (“The Puffy Chair”) are often credited or criticized for creating the genre of “mumblecore,” a category of 21st century independent characterized by inarticulate and often aimless characters ineffectually grappling with the transition to adulthood. But it is a mistake to underestimate the strong structural foundation that underlies this film. Both Jeff and Pat are immature and inclined to numb their feelings (with pot or a Porsche). But the essential debate they (sometimes inarticulately) have about meaning and connection is nicely echoed in the seeming coincidences and randomness of their journey and the way they rediscover their own connection.
Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, sexual references including adultery, drinking and drug use, and some peril and scuffles.
Family discussion: Whose life changes the most by the end of the movie? Why did Pat and Jeff respond so differently to the loss of their father?
If you like this, try: “Daytrippers” and “The Puffy Chair”