CEDAR RAPIDS: A BIG BAD WORLD AND A GOOD MOVIE

Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is a little fish in a little pond. He is an insurance salesman in a small town which he will probably never leave. Finally, he gets his big break and is asked to leave on a very important company trip to an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Once there, he rapidly finds new friends: John C. Reilly, as the bad influence and party boy, Anne Heche as the seductive,live for the moment and let your hair down kind of woman and straitlaced, rule following, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. The four of them bond quickly and form a believable alliance. Helms is naïve and wide-eyed and totally believable in a part that could've been played over the top. In fact, the cast struck a comfortable tone that complemented one another. Of course with such bad influences, Lippe gets himself in to trouble and then out of trouble again with the help of these friends.  This was a sweet film with many entertaining and funny moments. My favorite, is when Whitlock launches into his favorite character from Oz the HBO television series about prison life. A very sweet movie.

SNOW ANGELS

SNOW ANGELS... LITERALLY

Don't we all think of laying down in the snow, flailing our arms and legs as if to take flight and the carefully standing up to look back and see a beautiful angel, white and fluffy? This movie is not about those kind of snow angels. It is bleak and sad, taking place in a small town where everybody knows everybody. Slowly as the story unfolds, we are introduced to our "major players". Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is a waitress with her friend Barb (kudos for Amy Sedaris in a dramatic role) at the local diner. Her husband, Glen (Sam Rockwell), has sworn himself off the booze and with help from Jesus Father God, he promises his redemption and tries to insert himself back into Annie's and his daughter's lives. Little by little, his true colors show and through a series of drastic events, and eventually bring the plot to crescendo. Beckinsale and Rockwell are amazing in their roles. However, it's Rockwell who rocks this picture. He could have made his character too much to believe true. He stopped just short of that invisible line. Why he didn't get nominated for something is news to me. This film is breathtakingly sad and during the bleakness of the winter, plain depressing. There are no happy endings; but at least they are done right.

BIG bite: Intense movie, well acted and painful to watch, but in a good way.

OUR VERY OWN

OUR VERY OWN HOMEGROWN AND WELL DONE

In the 70's, a small-town group of friends anxiously await the return of Sondra Locke to her hometown, Shelbyville, Tennessee. They hang out together, drive to Nashville together, in fact, they seem to do everything together, except for Clancy Whitfield (an enduring Jason Ritter). He keeps secrets from his friends; well, as best he can. When his dad (Keith Carradine) is the town drunk people talk and everyone listens. His mother Joan (Allison Janney) does her best to keep a "happy face" and enable (a word not used so freely then) her husband while fighting off the re-possessors, banks, and other creditors. This isn't an action film; no explosions, no murders or escapes. This is a people film where the moves are made on the inside. Wonderfully enough, acting like Ritter and Janney let us in on those subtle differences. Janney owns every scene and Ritter isn't far behind. Clancy's friends are a bit stereotypical, but there's reason for that; stereotypes aren't imagined, they are based on something, but it doesn't detract from the movie in any way. This was a sweet movie, full of nostalgia and small town dreams.

Rating: Worth watching on a quiet night at home.