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Love the Coopers

As studios amp up to release their big holiday products, like sequels to The Hunger Games and Star Wars, along with surefire Oscar contenders like Spotlight and The Revenant, there will be a week or two when cinemas try to squeak by with meager offerings. Love the Coopers is one of those meager offerings. I’ll say this for the movie: Its cast is jam-packed with talent. Diane Keaton, Marisa Tomei, John Goodman, Anthony Mackie, Alan Arkin, Amanda Seyfried, Ed Helms and even the voice of Steve Martin all show up in this supposed holiday film. If you are looking for a Christmas movie to add a little joy to your holiday season, this movie will not do the trick. If you are looking for something totally weird, dark and unfunny while being sort of stupid and wasteful overall, this one might please you. Love the Coopers obviously has a lot of characters played by those performers I listed above, and a lot of plot lines to go with them. It gets a bit tiresome trying to follow all that’s going on, and I’m not going to recount everything for you. I would need this entire publication’s space to do that effectively. Well, I say effectively, but it would probably be a horribly boring description so saying I would do the whole description thing effectively is actually total bullshit. Charlotte (Keaton) and Sam (Goodman) have been married for over 40 years. Their marriage has hit the skids and Christmas looks like it could totally suck, not a good thing for a Christmas movie. Charlotte has been refusing to travel to Africa with Sam for many years, and that’s the final straw. As the family

gathers for Christmas Eve, Sam is planning to leave his wife shortly thereafter, and all cups of eggnog will be tainted with that sour taste of despair. One of the more prominent of the many, many subplots involves Charlotte’s sister Emma (Tomei) being arrested for shoplifting and getting a stoic police officer (Mackie) by Bob Grimm for an escort to the police station. Of course, Emily manages to successfully decipher all of bgrimm@ the officer’s life issues from the back seat of newsreview.com the car and, you know, maybe she just learns a little about herself, too. 1 Another storyline has Charlotte’s wayward daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) meeting some Army dude (Jake Lacy) at an airport on her way home and inviting him to be her boyfriend for the weekend to trick Mom, even thought they can’t stand each other. It’s the sort of thing that only happens in stupid movies like this. Wilde and Lacy are cute enough to make their screen time almost tolerable even if it’s mostly banal. Will they eventually make out? I think so! Dumbest of the subplots is Charlotte’s dad, Bucky (Alan Arkin), having an odd relationship with a diner waitress (Seyfried). They aren’t screwing or anything like that, but he does lend her movies, and she serves him coffee with sad, forlorn eyes. Developments later in the film suggest Seyfried’s character could wind up with Bucky’s son (Helms). It’s all just a little creepy and uncomfortable. Throw in a crazy aunt who doesn’t remember anything (June Squibb) and farts a lot, and a gangly teenaged boy learning to kiss his girlfriend under the mistletoe, and you have just the right ingredients to make you throw up profusely. Director Jessie Nelson, whose last directorial effort was the assault on humanity that was I Am Sam, sabotages her own movie with crazy left turns and wild moments. It’s actually a shock that Seyfried and Arkin don’t make out, because that sort of weirdness would be right at home in this flick. Nelson determines to make this an anti-holiday holiday movie. I can respect the effort to be different, but she messes it up in a big way. The final twist involving the origin of Martin’s narrator voice is probably the best thing in Love the Coopers. Since the final twist is also sort of lame, that’s not saying much for the movie. Ω

The eggnog will be tainted with that sour taste of despair.

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2Bridge of Spies Steven Spielberg continues a mini slump with his second good-looking yet terminally boring historical drama in a row after Lincoln. This is Spielberg’s fourth collaboration with Tom Hanks, and their first since 2004’s terrible The Terminal. It doesn’t represent a return to Catch Me if You Can and Saving Private Ryan glory. This film certainly had a lot going f or it. Not only is it Spielberg’s take on spying during the 1960s Cold War, which sounds like it should be exciting, but it’s also a collaboration with the Coen Brothers. Joel and Ethan chipped in on the screenplay, which usually means good things are afoot. I wish Joel and Ethan had directed it, too. Hanks plays James B. Donovan, a U.S. tax attorney who lands the unenviable task of representing recently captured alleged Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). While Donovan’s law firm and the courts see the whole thing as an open-and-shut case, Donovan makes it known that his intentions are to represent Abel to the full extent of the law. In a parallel story, some pilots join the CIA in a new spying program with U-2 planes. One of those planes getting shot out of the sky at 70,000 feet gives the Russians their own spy prisoner in Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell). With the construction of the Berlin Wall, yet another “spy” is captured when Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American student who picked a crappy time to study in West Berlin, is apprehended by the East Germans. It all adds up to a rather boring time at the movies despite a typically strong Hanks performance.

3The Hallow Adam (Joseph Mawle) moves his family to a house in the Irish countryside. He has a nice wife (Bojana Novakovic), a beautiful child, and a bunch of demonic creatures living in the backyard that want to kidnap the kid. The creatures are a variety of tortured souls, some of them people who were kidnapped and transformed into slimy monsters. In short, they are really gross and scary, and Adam picked the wrong place to live. Writer-director Corin Hardy does good things with a small budget. When the monsters finally attack, Hardy gives the film a true sense of dread, with Adam’s plight becoming the stuff of nightmares. It’ll make you think twice before purchasing a remote home in the wilderness, and will inspire you to purchase a cannon and 57 guns if you should opt for such a home. The second half of the film is full of dread as Adam’s duties as a father and protector are put to the test. He discovers that some of the folklore and stories his neighbors warned him about are true. Hardy’s film owes a lot to The Descent, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Shining, and it continues a good year for horror in 2015. (Available for rent during a limited theatrical release on On Demand, iTunes and Amazon.com.)

4The Martian Ridley Scott’s latest is a fun and funny movie that represents lighter fare for the often dark director. Yes, it’s about some poor sap getting stranded on Mars but, no, aliens don’t burst from his belly after breakfast. Matt Damon spends a lot of time onscreen by himself as Mark Watney, a botanist on a mission to Mars who becomes the unfortunate recipient of a satellite dish to the gut during a storm, a violent squall that mandates the evacuation of his crew. After an attempt by his commander (Jessica Chastain) to retrieve him, the crew bugs out thinking Watney has bought the farm. (Yep … that’s a botanist pun I just dropped right there.) Watney awakens to find himself alone on the red planet with a piece of metal stuck in his gut. After another Ridley Scott directed self-surgery scene—reminiscent of that yucky self-surgery scene in Scott’s Prometheus—Watney commences survival mode. The film has fun with science facts involving things like the creation of fertilizer, the surprising need and effectiveness for duct tape and tarps on Mars, and trying to make fire out of mostly fire-retardant materials. Scott and his writers present these overtly nerdy aspects of the movie with great humor and the right amount of intelligence without making things too complicated. 3 The Peanuts Movie The spirit of Charles M. Schulz is ever present in this sweet, fun update of the popular comic strip that birthed some pretty cool TV specials when I was a pup. The look of the film, especially in its 3-D format, reminds me of the View-Master toy I had when I was a kid. The plot is a simple one, with Charlie Brown trying to get the attention of the Little Red-Haired Girl while his dog Snoopy fantasizes about battling his enemy, the Red Baron. Director Steve Martino captures the adorable essence of Peanuts, remaining faithful to its origins and ignoring temptations to modernize it. He’s also done a nice job of assembling the voice cast, with all of the characters sounding much like they did decades ago. (One exception: Peppermint Patty sounds way different.) The soundtrack often pays tribute to the iconic piano sounds of Vince Guaraldi, and they even get the classic Peanuts dance moves down. I watched this with a sea of kids, and they ate it up, so I imagine more will be on the way. Good to see Chuck and Snoopy getting the big screen adaptation worthy of them.

2Spectre The Daniel Craig-led James Bond movies have been a little brainier than past efforts. They’ve also been the best of the Bond films. With Craig, the franchise has dared to let genuine emotions into the mix. The series peaked with 2012’s Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes and featuring Javier Bardem as a classic Bond villain. For the latest installment, Mendes returns, and this time out the action gets amped up. This film has some terrific set pieces, including a dizzying helicopter sequence to open things up and a nasty fight on a train. That’s what’s good about the movie. What’s bad? Actually, a good chunk of it is bad. After the full experience that was Skyfall, this one feels incomplete and shallow. During a layover in Italy—this one hops around a confusing amount—Bond finds out a few hard truths about his origins, and discovers that much of the pain he’s gone through in his last few chapters is attributable to one man. Christoph Waltz shows up (barely) as Oberhauser, a past acquaintance of Bond now leading a dark society called Spectre, responsible for terrorist attacks worldwide. Of course, Bond will get a girl along the way. This time out it’s Madeleine Swann, played by Lea Seydoux of Blue is the Warmest Color. Not only does she fall for Bond, she falls for Bond in a way that kind of makes her look like an idiot. The film underuses Waltz, and Craig gives off an impression that he might be getting tired of the gig.

5Steve Jobs This innovative biopic, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by the ever-reliable Danny Boyle (127 Hours, Sunshine), plays out in three parts. Apart from a few flashbacks, we see Steve Jobs (an amazing Michael Fassbender) backstage at three product launches during his career. The film is expertly staged, playing out like the most entertaining and brutal Shakespearean drama. As Jobs ties his bowtie and prepares to launch the Macintosh in 1984, his personal life is messing with his mojo. We see Jobs at his very worst, a man so obsessed with the new gadgets his companies come up with that he wouldn’t face the reality of his fatherly duties. Lisa, portrayed at different ages by Moss (6), Ripley Sobo (9) and a show-stopping Perla Haney-Jardine (19) is a girl any dad would be proud of, but Jobs can’t really be bothered. He has a couple of goofy-looking computers to sell. Fassbender delivers a performance for the ages as the man who gave us that phone thing you are so damned in love with. Boyle makes another great movie to add to his pile, a film that somehow makes hanging out backstage with Steve Jobs exhilarating. Undoubtedly one of the year’s best films, and Fassbender is most certainly an Oscar contender.

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