Cedar Rapids movie review

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Cedar Rapids
(2011)
I got caught up reading one of those end-of-year retrospectives the other day, and I ran across a column about the ten movies you probably should have seen in 2011 but didn¶t. Cedar Rapids was one of them, and while I didn¶t know much about the film I had shied away from it largely because it looked like a typical fish-out-ofwater comedy, and I¶m leery of most comedy movies these days. But, obviously, I bit the bullet and took a chance. Cedar Rapids follows one Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), a stereotypical man-child so common in American comedies these days. Tim is of the kindly boy mold; he¶s in awe of superstar rep Roger (Thomas Lennon), and is suddenly picked to go to an insurance award convention upon Roger¶s untimely death. Tim has never left his tiny hometown, and to him even Cedar Rapids is ³the big city.´ As expected, Tim displays the usual naiveté once away from home, not recognizing a hooker who loiters around the hotel as a lady of the night and so on; you¶ve seen it before, small town = rube. Tim is thrown together in a room with two other insurance men, Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock), who, like Tim, is nerdy, but is far more successful at his job, and Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), who is basically everyone¶s drunken uncle, with his double entendres, smut talk, and wild behavior ill-suited to someone pushing fifty. Rounding out the little group is Joan (Ann Heche), who treats the yearly awards meeting as her version of Las Vegas, where whatever she does never leaves the city. All pretty much by the book for this sort of thing. However, the performances are all so well done that the movie manages to rise above its middling material and engage the viewer. While Helms¶ shtick as Lippe is nothing new, and no real stretch for him, the other three leads are all really sharp. Whitlock manages to make the slightly stuffy Wilkes incredibly likable, and Heche, while delivering pretty much the same performance as Vera Farmiga in Up in the Air, nonetheless is excellent as Joan, possibly the only character in the film who actually achieves three dimensions. Reilly is, naturally, spot-on; this kind of role is not a challenge for him, but he makes the character funnier as the movie progresses, turning in a strong performance (and getting the best line of the film and of the year, one that made me laugh so hard I had to stop the disc for several minutes to recover). Sigourney Weaver has a small role as Tim¶s girlfriend, but she¶s very sharp, just perfect. The movie gets better as it proceeds, as the leads are allowed more free reign to try and overcome the somewhat hackneyed set-up. Cedar Rapids succeeds despite its shortcomings, and ends much better than it begins, which is certainly better than the other way round. It¶s certainly worth a look for an evening¶s diversion. January 2, 2012

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