From the opening credits sequence, Love the Coopers feels like classic studio holiday schmaltz. Santa Clauses ride around town, dogs dressed in Hanukkah and Christmas garb embrace, and families take pictures for greeting cards. The Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal” scores the montage, completing an idyllic portrait of dull but harmless seasonal cheer.
It’s taken almost seven months, but one movie has finally emerged from the dreary pack as the worst of 2015. That film is ‘Vacation,’ and it’s absolutely dreadful.
The opening scene of Joe Carnahan’s latest shows a man getting jettisoned from the driver’s side window of his car in a crash, hitting the ground rolling and ending up sitting on the street with barely a scratch. That’s how this film begins, and it only gets zanier from there. The plot follows a down-on-his-luck limo driver, Stretch (Patrick Wilson), who finds out he has to pay $6,000 of gambling debts by midnight. Roger Karos (Chris Pine), a deranged billionaire, offers to cover his debt if he drives him around for the evening, an experience that gets more hellish with each passing minute.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home Written and directed by Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass USA, 2011 The Duplass brothers’ fourth feature length effort opens with its protagonist Jeff (Jason Segel), wielding a voice recorder, discussing how rewarding he finds M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. Heavily relating to that film’s themes of fate and purpose, Jeff also …