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Love the Coopers: Mini-review

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Ed Helms

Ed Helms adds to his string of mediocre comedies

CChristmas movies are like Christmas fruitcakes; most of them are stuffed with overly sweet contents that really have no business being in the same film or dessert. Love the Coopers is a prime example. Its dysfunctional family members seem drawn from about a dozen different sitcoms, many of them bad, but the audience knows right away that the Christmas spirit will eventually solve all their problems.

For starters, Charlotte (Diane Keaton) and Sam (John Goodman) Cooper, who are hosting their annual Christmas Eve dinner, plan to tell their family they are divorcing after forty years of marriage. Son Hank (Ed Helms) can’t tell his family he’s out of work, and daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) is so desperate to avoid confronting her folks that she asks a soldier (Jake Lacy) she meets at the airport to pose as her boyfriend. At least, they’re at the dinner; Charlotte’s sister Emma (Marisa Tomei) has been arrested for shoplifting and might spend the night in the slammer.

As in most films with multiple storylines, some of the subplots in Love the Coopers are better than others. Olivia Wilde does an excellent job in limited screen time of creating a believable, albeit confused, character, and the dialogue in her scenes with Jake Lacy sparkles. I could have easily watched an entire movie about the two of them. In addition, Charlotte’s father Bucky (Alan Arkin) has an unusual, hard-to-pin-down friendship with a much younger waitress (Amanda Seyfried) at the diner the retired teacher frequents. The relationship intriguingly wavers between physical longing and a substitute father/daughter bond. Their scenes provide what little real drama Love the Coopers has. Unfortunately, the film devotes the largest amount of screen time to the completely unbelievable friction between Charlotte and Sam. Their pending breakup results from the type of argument that exists only in movies as a plot device to enable a happy reconciliation. That’s not the only manufactured conflict in Coopers; by 2015, parents unwilling to admit they’re out of work is an equally tiresome device. Add to that bouts of PG-13 profanity and inappropriate flatulence from children and old people, and the enjoyable parts of Love the Coopers become hard to find. Fortunately, this movie has opened in early November, so it’s unlikely to be in theaters at a time when it can spoil a real family’s Christmas. at the movies 
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Vacation: Mini-review

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Ed Helms

Fortunately, Ed Helms is not on vacation here

CAlbert Einstein supposedly defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” By that token, John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein are certifiably insane, because they tell the same tasteless, unfunny jokes in Vacation, which they wrote and directed, over and over, sometimes in the very next line of dialogue, and somehow think these jokes will eventually become funny. 

Vacation is a sequel or reboot of sorts of 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, the saga of Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) and his family, on a vacation from Hell. It’s now the present day, and Clark’s son Rusty (Ed Helms), who has fond memories of the original trip, wants to take his own family on a similar bonding trip. As in the original, Rusty, wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) head to fabled amusement park Walley World in Los Angeles, but this time around, instead of Cousin Eddie, they encounter toxic waste dumps, drunken sorority sisters, motels that not even roaches would inhabit, a demented white water rafting guide (Charlie Day), a possibly demented trucker, interrupted sexual encounters, and a ridiculously well-endowed brother-in-law (Chris Hemsworth).

National Lampoon’s Vacation  was written by John Hughes and directed by Harold Ramis. In their place, we get the guys who wrote Horrible Bosses. The new movie has its fair share of exceedingly crude but often funny jokes, but it has just as many that simply fall flat. To make matters worse, Daley and Goldstein don’t seem to know when enough is enough, repeating those same bad jokes over and over. A prime example occurs about ten minutes into the movie (in the scene shown below), when Rusty’s younger son Kevin (Steele Stebbins) refers to his older brother James (Skyler Gisondo) as a “vagina.” By the time the scene is over, every member of the family has “accidentally” called James the same thing about a dozen times. And, as that scene indicates, the movie is more mean-spirited than the original as well, with Ed Helms’s cluelessness considerably less endearing than Chevy Chase’s was. Travel misadventures and dysfunctional families will always be good for laughs, as Vacation demonstrates on several occasions, but they’re much funnier when someone when related by someone who knows how, and how often, to tell a joke.
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