Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

There’s a scene in the middle of the indie comedy “Cedar Rapids” that I think captures exactly what this film does so well.   Ed Helms is a naive, straight-arrow insurance salesman from a small-town in Iowa, and he is attending his first big insurance conference in Cedar Rapids.  He nervously befriends John C. Reilly and Anne Heche, who can’t help but take advantage of his naivete and innocence, though mostly in a good-natured way.  It’s Talent Show night at the insurance convention, and Heche signs Helms up to sing a song, unbeknownst to him, until suddenly the spotlight is on him and everyone’s chanting his name.  There’s no getting out of it, so he makes his way forward to the shabby motel stage.

Now, just about every comedy coming out these days would play this scene the same way:  Helms would try to sing something (probably something awful and from the ’80s) and would be completely terrible, but Helms would think he was doing awesome, and ramp it up more nad more, and it would go on and on, and get worse and worse.  Everybody would cringe, and we would laugh at how awkward an d embarassing the whole thing is.  I feel like I’ve seen this scene, or some variation on it, played out a hundred times the last few years.

But wait – that’s now how “Cedar Rapids” plays it.  Sure, Ed Helms sings a terrible and funny song– it’s a version of “O Holy Night” but with insurance-themed lyrics.  But he sings it heart and soul, and well, he pretty much nails it.  The audience explodes with applause, charmed and surprised.   And we, the “real” audience feel the same way.  The scene is funny, for sure, but it’s not lazy, and the laughs feel earned, and the characters likable, and everything has a warm glow about it.  And that’s a good thing, verging on great.

There’s so much about “Cedar Rapids” that feels like a pleasant surprise. Helms essentially plays the same character as in the “Hangover” movies; a straightlaced guy who inexplicably finds himself in wacky, bizarre, and increasingly raunchy situations.  But in “Cedar Rapids,” he really plays it, as opposed to just occupying the physical space as he does in “The Hangover.”   He’s especially good in the first act, before things get all crazy, consistently underplaying scenes where his character takes his first plane ride, befriends a hooker, and suspects the motel clerk of trying to steal his credit card information.  The fact that he resembles a real person makes the scenes funnier, certainly less quotable and possibly less memorable.

And then he meets John C. Reilly, a foul-mouthed blowhard with a secret heart of gold. It’s hard to say he underplays any of his scenes, as everything out of his mouth is foul and he spends a good portion of the movie with a garbage can lid on his head.  But somehow, Reilly makes his character seem somewhat real, instead of the cartoon character he easily could’ve been.  Watching “Cedar Rapids,” I was reminded of how much I liked Reilly before he met Will Ferrell.   If you’ve never seen him in movies like “Hard Eight” and “Criminal,”  you really ought to.   He hasn’t always played obnoxious man-children, and he really is a pretty good actor.

The performances in “Cedar Rapids” are great, and the movie has something to say (rather politely)about hypocrisy and the appearance of evil. Helms really is as straight as they come, and gives a great little speech about the heroism of insurance agents in times of disaster.  But he discovers at the conference that his heroes — church-going family men, all of them– are engaged in low-level corruption and general dishonesty, not to mention discreet philandering and sleeping with prostitutes.  They aren’t the men he thought them to be, and it’s a shattering realization.  Meanwhile Reilly, who, in his own words, “talks too much, drinks too much, weighs to much, and pisses off everyone around him” turns out to be a reliable friend who keeps his secrets and rescues him from one dangerous situation after another.

I enjoyed “Cedar Rapids,” and this comes a week after watching “The Hangover Part II” made me wonder if movie comedies just weren’t my bag. This film reminds me that this is the kind of comedy I like — one that earns its laughs by investing in its characters.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Much like its predecessor, “Hangover Part II” is a thoughtful reflection on the duality of human nature, and the darkness that lies within the best of people, and the prettiest of places.  On location in a beautiful paradise and just hours before a joyful event celebrating love, honor, respect and commitment between two people, three friends wake up to find themselves in a virtual hell, with no memory of the string of events that led them there.  What’s surprising is just how close they live to the edge of the precipice between paradise and hades; in the presence of a certain mix of narcotics and alcohol, these men discover their inner Mr. Hydes and…

Wait.  WTF?  No it isn’t.  ”The Hangover, Part II” isn’t about duality and demons; it’s about monkey masturbation and she-males. It’s about facial tattoos and fart jokes.  But I’m tired of complaining that dumb comedies are dumb.  Nobody making the Hangover movies is trying to be smart.  Nobody watching them wants to them to be.  Trying to “think” about these movies – which is usually the prelude to writing about them” is like trying to drink ice cream.   So here’s what I can say; if you saw the first film and laughed, you’ll probably laugh at the second film, but not as much.

A few “thoughts” about “Hangover, Part II” :

• Ok, first off, why the pretentious title with the roman numerals and all?  Why not just “Hangover 2″?  Are we trying to be “The Godfather” here?
• More Zach Galafianakas does not equal funnier Zach Galafianakas.  His comedy is a balancing act; it’s about seeming mostly normal, and then saying something that makes you wonder if he’s really just totally bonkers.  He played this pretty well in the first movie; he came off as a really unbalanced guy who mostly knew how to keep his mouth shut so the people around him wouldn’t know just how unhinged from reality he really was.   Not the case in “Hangover 2;”  from the beginning, he’s front and center, and crazy as hell.  Not as funny.
• I think I’ve finally figured out why these movies leave me feeling so unsatisfied (and it’s not the penis jokes.)  It’s because I watch too many movies.  The format of the Hangover films is a pretty classic setup:  hero wakes up not knowing where he is or how he got there, has a few items around him that serve as clues, and must follow the clues to get his life back.  Really, it’s the same setup as the Bourne movies, and “Source Code,” and “Unknown,” many other action thrillers.  But in all those movies, there’s always an action payoff; the hero stops being a normal guy and becomes a hero, discovering an inner strength (and usually martial arts skills) to protect the ones they love, defeat the bad guy, and get their life back.  But the Hangover movies refuse to play it that way; our heroes completely refuse to do anything heroic, and there’s no action sequence, and no payoff.  It could play as action-comedy, but it’s just comedy instead.  I could say there’s something noble and true in that, but mostly it feels disappointing.  And I refuse to say there’s anything noble and true in a movie about monkey masturbation.
• So what I said at the beginning of the review was mostly BS…but not completely.  Kudos to the writers for making an attempt to deal with the extreme unlikelihood of this kind of crazy situation happening twice.  Stu actually decides it’s something in him that causes this to happen, and uses that knowledge to stand up to his unkind father-in-law.  Not sure the way he does that makes any sense at all, but hey, at least it’s a try.

When I was in high school, we had to take standardized writing tests.   (It’s hard to standardize writing, but standardized tests are what school’s about, right?)  There were lots of categories – persuasive, biographical, etc.  If you were lucky, you got “imaginative.”   And you were given a setup – an unopened letter, a 30 year journey, a dying word – and asked to write the story that explains it.    I totally failed this test.

Credit the writers of “The Hangover” — Jon Lucas & Scott Moore – with creating the granddaddy of all setups.   Four guys travel to Vegas for a bachelor party.   Three of them wake up the next morning.  There’s a tiger in the bathroom, a chicken under the piano, and a baby in the closet.   One of the guys is missing a tooth.  None of them can remember a thing.  Furthermore, a few things are missing: a mattress, and the guy who was sleeping on it.  The groom.

Oh, the stories that could unfold from such a setup.  I guarantee you could give it to a hundred different writers, and get vastly, wildly different stories back from them.  About half of those stories would be really good, and a handful might be brilliant.   Sadly, the story Lucas & Moore wrote isn’t brilliant.  It’s pretty good, but still, a bit disappointing.

The three guys are Bradley Cooper, the slick, self-centered ladies’ man, Stu, the uptight and henpecked dentist (his girlfriend is so awful you know within five minutes of meeting her that he’s destined to leave her before the film is over) and Zach Galifianakis, the bride’s brother, who is… an enigma.   A child molester?   A few bricks short of a load?   Asperger’s syndrome?    Maybe.    Oh, and there’s also a groom, but he’s hardly in the movie, so it’s okay that he doesn’t have much personality to speak of.

“The Hangover” spends a little time letting us get to know these guys, and then The Night happens.   And the next day is spent trying to figure out what happened, and where the groom is.   One of the fun things about “The Hangover” is that the weirdness keeps coming – after you think you’ve seen it all, the valet brings back a cop car.   And Mike Tyson shows up at the hotel.   And there’s a naked guy in the trunk.   This is good stuff.

But what’s disappointing about it all is that everything gets explained, and nothing amounts to anything.    Basically, they got drunk and did some random, stupid stuff.  Everything remains disconnected.   The tiger has nothing to do with the baby, which as nothing to do with the mattress on the roof.   (The chicken never is explained, but really, do chickens have to be explained?)   “The Hangover” has a chance to be a great one-thing-led-to-another-and-it-all-made-sense-at-the-time flick – a film like Scorsese’s immortal “After Hours” — but completely strikes out on that count.    Yeah, some funny stuff happens, and some stuff that’s supposed to be funny (the tazer scene, for instance) happens, but none of it goes anywhere, or amounts to anything.    The thing about a great setup: it needs an even better payoff.  And “The Hangover” can’t deliver.

It’s easy to get caught up on what “The Hangover” could have been and miss what it actually is.   Really, this is a pretty funny movie.  It’s at least above average.   Galifianakis, in particular, has incredible timing and a great delivery.   Half the time he just seems to be riffing on whatever’s around him, dropping non sequiturs deadpan.   Mike Tyson dancing to Phil Collins is brilliant, and Ken Jeong has an awful lot of fun as a diminutive Asian gangster.    It’s fast-paced, quite often smart and sharp, more than occasionally hilarious.   As the old folks used to say, a good time will be had by all.

It just won’t be one you’ll particularly want to see again.  That’s all.

Recommended

• if you’re looking for summer comedy at the theaters.   It’s better than anything else out there right now.
• if you loved (and watched repeatedly) “Old School” and “Road Trip.”
• if you really don’t mind forgetting a movie as soon as you’ve watched it.

Not Recommended

• if you’re a frustrated comic or screenwriter.   You’ll spend the whole movie thinking of ways you could’ve written it better.