A disturbing trend in cinema is the inability of some filmmakers to distinguish the difference between pathetic and kind. Really, they’re not the same thing at all, but over the past few years there have been scores of wide-releases with protagonists who aren’t nice guys so much as weak and naïve, not truly friendly because to be that one must have an awareness of what it means to be unfriendly.

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Miguel Arteta’s “Cedar Rapids” might be the most egregious offender I can fathom, surpassing the similarly awful protagonists in “Dinner for Schmucks.” To call Ed Helms’ insurance salesman Tim Lippe milquetoast would be an insult to those who are merely weaklings. Tim’s a small town Wisconsin insurance man who apparently has never left his burg, nor does he seem to have ever watched television, read a magazine, or even spoken to anyone about what the world’s about.

Were this guy real, he’d be instantly unlikeable, a grinning idiot that has gone to great troubles to minimize his exposure to the slightest element of reality. Helms, of “The Office” and “The Daily Show” fame, proves unable to handle his nitwit character in a way that engenders empathy, but he does seem to be winking at the audience, a fatal mistake. Pathetic characters are best played without a sense of irony, and when John C. Reilly shows up, all I could think of was how better suited that great actor would be for the lead role, though even a fine performance could only do so much with this repulsive material.

The film’s contempt for Tim creates an awkward tension with the moments where we’re expected to laud his progress in the titular Iowa city, victories which include but are not limited to:

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Some actors get famous for playing one unique type of character – Sylvester Stallone will always be   the monosyllabic tough guy, while Hugh Grant is the highly sensitive yet adorable British twit. And Michael Cera has made a name for himself as the ultimate high school nerd, awkwardly mumbling his way through one teen movie after another. 

If there was ever a need for a young actor to reinvent his image, it’s Cera – for the persona he’s been stuck in is so passive his characters barely seem to exist. He takes a big, bold and highly entertaining step in that direction with the new comedy “Youth in Revolt,” based on a novel by a writer named C.D. Payne that’s become a cult sensation since its publication in 1993 and has confounded filmmakers ever since.  

The reason why the novel has been so hard to adapt is two-fold: the book is a gigantic, 500-page tome written in the form of a journal composed by a fictional high-school student named Nick Twisp, and it’s packed with his randy sexual fantasies and frustrations. But screenwriter Gustin Nash and director Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl”) have solved the problem in astute fashion: cutting down the frequency of the sexual material resulting in a 90-minute confection that’s still risque enough to be rated-R without being overly offensive. “Youth in Revolt” stands up well against the classic canon of the late great John Hughes’ ’80s teen films.  (more…)