Krissys Books: Movie Night: Love the Coopers

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Movie Night: Love the Coopers

Review:

For their annual Christmas Eve celebration, Sam Cooper (John Goodman) and his wife Charlotte (Diane Keaton) welcome four generations of extended family, including son Hank (Ed Helms), daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) and Charlotte's father, Bucky (Alan Arkin). Sam and Charlotte are separating after 40 years of marriage, while Hank is in the middle of a divorce. As the guests reveal their respective problems, they also rediscover the importance of kinship and the spirit of the holiday.

I'm not sure if I just didn't catch on at the beginning but I really had no idea that through the entire movies narration that most of it is being told from the dog's perspective.

Sort of.

I liked the movie for the fact that it wasn't one of those everything is perfect everyone has the perfect family nothing is wrong type of films.

Pretty much every person in the movie is flawed in some way, broken in some way or struggling with some issue in some way. I liked that kind of realism. I didn't like that it was depicted as a slap stick comedy because its not. It has a few ha - ha moments but its not overly laughable at all.

I did like the individual emotional scenes in the movie but in the end that's what it felt like. Individual scenes.

It was too choppy, there wasn't much coherent flow to blend it all together, and the story jumped around so much that you lost focus on the moments that were meant to make you laugh or sympathize because you're still questioning what the point of the previous scene was.

Viewers if they stick with the film long enough get to the end of the movie earn a brief life lesson to close it all up and make it all better but by then caring was a tad beyond me at that point.

I felt the movie could have had a lot of potential but the way it was filmed didn't allow it to achieve what it really could have been despite the fantastic cast who tried very hard to carry their scenes and give them meaning.