Love the Coopers

For F*** Magazine

LOVE THE COOPERS

Director : Jessie Nelson
Cast : Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Ed Helms, Anthony Mackie, June Squibb, Marisa Tomei, Olivia Wilde, Jake Lacy, Steve Martin
Genre : Comedy
Run Time : 107 mins
Opens : 10 December 2015
Rating : PG13 (Some Sexual References)

Family reunions are often where grinning and bearing it is the order of the day. This Christmas comedy-drama follows four generations of the Cooper clan as they reunite to celebrate Christmas as one big, not-so-happy family. Sam (Goodman) and Charlotte (Keaton) have been married for 40 years but on the brink of calling it quits, both reluctantly agreeing to put on a brave front for everyone coming over. Their son Hank (Helms) is recently divorced from Angie (Borstein) and is looking for a job, having to provide for his kids Charlie (Timothée Chalamet), Madison (Blake Baumgartner) and Bo (Maxwell Simkins). Hank’s sister Eleanor (Wilde), a struggling playwright, meets military man Joe (Lacy) at an airport bar and they kind of hit it off. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s sister Emma (Tomei) gets arrested for shoplifting by Officer Percy Williams (Mackie). Grandpa Bucky (Arkin) befriends diner waitress Ruby (Seyfried). Christmas dinner doesn’t go according to plan as a series of events unfolds, events that could drive the family further apart or bring them together in the spirit of the holiday.

            Every Chinese New Year, we get star-studded comedies like All’s Well that Ends Well, with posters that have Andy Lau, Chow Yun Fatt, Cecilia Cheung or Carina Lau grinning and holding their chopsticks up in the air. Well, Hollywood has movies like Love the Coopers. This is the kind of film which one can bring grandpa and grandma to during the holidays and it’s meant to please everyone, naturally pleasing nobody in the process. The goings-on are at once mundane and over the top, with the Coopers depicted as dysfunctional in a relatively pedestrian manner. Before everyone gets together a little after the halfway mark, the film flits from character to character, stringing the vignettes together. Every line of screenwriter Steven Rogers’ dialogue sounds like stock romantic comedy-drama drivel and it’s altogether very cloying and syrupy. There are attempts to temper this with some cynicism, but it seems like Rogers and director Jessie Nelson are constantly asking themselves “we can be a little bitter here without alienating all the grandparents, right?”

            We’re going to dust off that old chestnut one hears whenever there’s a movie that entirely wastes the collective talents of its cast: “imagine what Robert Altman could do with these actors.” Indeed, the collective wattage of the star power could eclipse even the Star of Bethlehem itself. Love the Coopers manages to be tolerable in the slightest because many of the actors are innately watchable, Goodman in particular. While he and Keaton are believable as a squabbling elderly married couple, the material is still very rote. At one point, Sam even asks Charlotte “what happened to us?” Excuse us if we can’t gather up the sympathy. There are flashbacks to every single character when they were kids and it feels more like a cheap heartstring pull than a worthwhile storytelling device.

Wilde and Lacy have decent chemistry and there is a degree of development to their relationship, even though it is heavy on the “oh, he’s a Republican and she’s a Democrat!” jokes. Tomei is shrill and casting the usually-engaging Mackie as a stoic police officer and the token black guy is a crying shame. Arkin mopes about and looks sad a bunch with Seyfried playing opposite him as the diner waitress anyone would have a crush on. There are hints of romance in their interaction, which given the 52 year age difference, is creepy in spite of both actors’ best efforts. Helms is pretty much a non-entity and Squibb is the doddering senile aunt whose dementia is played for laughs. While nobody is sleepwalking through the movie per se, it’s obvious that Love the Coopers demands precious little from its cast, literally half of whom have won or been nominated for Oscars.

While Love the Coopers isn’t an insufferable gag-heavy Christmas comedy in the Deck the Halls mould, it still provides plenty of cringe-worthy moments. All of this is tied together by painfully on-the-nose narration by Steve Martin, with an end reveal as to the mystery narrator’s true identity that is worthy of an almighty eye-roll. This isn’t one of those films that’s joy and cheer from start to finish and it does take stabs at drama, albeit very ham-fisted ones. Make no mistake, with the fluffy St. Bernard and the adorable moppet granddaughter, this is still engineered for maximum “aww” factor and that’s going to make a significant portion of the audience throw up in their mouths a little. It’s not even cheesy and corny in an endearing, old-fashioned manner. Love the Coopers oozes insincerity and sitting through it ends up being quite like being forced to spend the holidays with relatives you’re not entirely fond of.

Summary: A monumentally talented cast by any standards is entirely squandered in this schmaltzy holiday flick which repeatedly attempts to trick us into thinking it’s making wise observations about family.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

The Hangover Part III

Written for F*** Magazine, Singapore

THE HANGOVER PART III

Director: Todd Phillips
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Justin Bartha, John Goodman
Genre: Comedy
Run Time: 100 mins
Opens: 30 May 2013
Rating: M18 (Coarse Language and Some Nudity)

Remember when The Hangover wasn’t a thing? When it was just a sleeper hit that came out of almost nowhere and reinvigorated the R-rated comedy genre? Then remember when the second film squandered almost all the goodwill the first had earned? Now, the Wolf Pack has re-awoken with the hope that it’s third time lucky in this self-proclaimed “epic conclusion to the Hangover trilogy”.

The first two films started with preparations for a wedding, so perhaps it’s apt that this time around, it’s a funeral that kicks things off. Man-child Alan (Galifianakis) is off his medication and making life as difficult for those around him as ever, an incident involving a giraffe and his father’s (Jeffrey Tambor) heart attack afterwards being the final straws. His friends Doug (Bartha), Stu (Helms) and Phil (Cooper) decide to stage an intervention, taking Alan to a treatment facility in Arizona where he can get better. However, the plan gets derailed: drug lord Marshall (Goodman) confronts the Wolf Pack and holds Doug hostage. “International criminal” Leslie Chow (Jeong) is to blame, having made away with Marshall’s gold bars, and the guys are sent in pursuit of Chow, leading them back to where it all began: Las Vegas.



It’s been noted that the Hangover movies should’ve stopped at just one, and perhaps that’s true: that first movie did, after all, have something of a lightning-in-a-bottle quality to it. Alas, the franchise potential was just too enticing, particularly after The Hangover became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy at the time. It did seem rather hubristic that the second film traced over the first one so blatantly, just setting in Thailand. Come now, a sequel that’s a retread of the original with a change in locale is something one would expect from a direct-to-DVD follow-up.



It’s with mixed results then that the formula has been ditched, in favour of a different formula: that of the caper/chase movie. An actual hangover doesn’t kickstart the events in The Hangover Part III, rendering it an artifact title. This one ventures into more dramatic territory and there seem to be actual stakes and important plot events instead of travelling from one crude sight gag to the next. Is it completely devoid of laughs? No, but audiences going into this expecting a third serving of wanton ribaldry will be at least a little disappointed. Leave the Vegas heisting to Danny Ocean and his 11+, guys.



There are some pretty fun set pieces: the mean streak running through Part II is evident with the ill-fated giraffe, Mr. Chow gets to do a spot of BASE jumping, the Wolf Pack has to break into a manor in Mexico and there’s even bedsheet abseiling. The thing is, director Todd Phillips and company are not always able to keep their footing in their attempt to change things up yet not stray too far from the selling points of the series.



Something that afflicted The Hangover Part II and that gets a reprise here is what we call “breakout character-itis”. A character in a minor role – Ken Jeong’s Mr. Chow, in this case – is well-received by audiences and becomes popular, so the producers ramp up his screen time and give him more wacky antics, not knowing that the character worked best in small doses. Jeong’s shrill, obnoxious shtick does very nearly wear out its welcome on several occasions. He’s also been oddly upgraded from incompetent goofball to something of a criminal mastermind.



Nothing much has changed with the Wolf Pack themselves. Galifianakis does get a nice assortment of forehead-slapping silliness, Helms is a serviceable lily-livered straight man, Brad-make that Academy Award-nominated Bradley Cooper doesn’t really look like he wants to be there, and Justin Bartha sits out the bulk of it just as he did before. John Goodman is a welcome addition but alas, just like Paul Giamatti in Part II, his talents are wasted in a small role.



The Hangover Part III is an improvement over its immediate predecessor, and isn’t so much bad as it is very middle of the road. It doesn’t blindly try to shock at every turn and there is more of a plot, but it’s hard to say if this was a step in the right direction. What is nice is that there are continuity nods aplenty and an effort is made to link this film back to the previous two. For example, Heather Graham returns for a cameo and baby Tyler/Carlos from the first movie shows up as a five year-old, played by Grant Holmquist – who, along with his twin sister Avery, played the baby in the first film. He even gets a sweet/awkward moment with Alan, who fondly recalls the adventures the Wolf Pack shared with this “wolf cub”.



As a conclusion to the series however, The Hangover Part III doesn’t seem to wrap things up, and a mid-credits stinger rather blatantly leaves the door wide open for a potential Part IV. There’s no finality to this one really, and there’s the hard-to-shake feeling that studio executives want to cling on to the Hangover brand and continue to wring whatever’s left out of it. Still, this is a fairly entertaining diversion and definitely better than Part II. We do wish they visited Amsterdam for this one though.

SUMMARY: A middling effort that has several entertaining moments, but doesn’t quite pass muster as a triumphant send-off for the Wolf Pack.

RATING: 3 out of 5 STARS

Jedd Jong