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Tag: Cooper Hoffman

  • Reviews For The Easily Distracted: The Long Walk

    Title: The Long Walk

    Describe This Movie In One Gong Show Creator Quote:

    CHUCK BARRIS: The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed.

    Brief Plot Synopsis: It’s a walk. And it’s long.

    Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2.5 Scarfaces out of 5.

    click to enlarge

    Tagline: “How far could you go?”

    Better Tagline: “This new Klondike Bar campaign sucks.”

    Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Every year, a young man from each of the 50 states embarks on the Long Walk. The boys assembled this year include Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), Pete DeVries (David Jonsson), and Art Baker (Tut Nyuot), who form a friendship of sorts, which complicates the fact that there’s only one winner. Any Walker who drops below three miles an hour gets three warnings before their “ticket” is punched. The winner is basically granted a wish, and Garraty has plans for his.
    “Critical” Analysis: Does dystopian fiction still work if we’re already living in a dystopia?

    The alternative timeline The Long Walk is set in is no picnic. Perceived enemies of the state are taken from their homes and given a choice: service in the “Squads” or a bullet to the head. The postwar economy is in shambles, and the resident dictator (The Major, played un-memorably by Mark Hamill) promises to make the country number one again.

    I trust none of this is disturbingly familiar.

    Stephen King’s original novella was itself a barely veiled metaphor for Vietnam, written in reaction to the televised draft lottery, but the movie — while evidently set in the mirror universe1970s — reflects current events in other ways. Well-meaning people might say, “Society would never tolerate an event like this where young people are needlessly gunned down.” Some of those same people would still vote against regulating firearms even after kids were shot in a school or church.

    Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, several of the Hunger Games…es) and screenwriter JT Mollner had to make some choices in adapting Stephen King’s story. They’ve truncated the number of kids from 100 to 50, for one, and removed many of the (meager) references to the wider world (shout out to Orange Julius).

    As with most of King’s work, a fair bit gets lost in the translation from page to screen. Much of the novella takes place in Garraty’s head; thoughts of his girlfriend and mom, and loss, and patterns of life and death. It’s not very easy to shoehorn into a movie (or a miniseries, if the latest calamitous attempt to adapt The Stand is any indication).

    And in going with fewer Walkers, certain characters are excluded, others merged (“lean Buddha” Stebbins gets Scramm’s pneumonia, for example). What hasn’t changed is DeVries’ role as Garraty’s garrulous companion, though Lawrence clearly didn’t have time for the character’s amateur theology). Jonsson is the high point here, as DeVries modulates the often hysterical Garraty and is given the most compelling backstory.

    Hoffman, so disarming in Licorice Pizza, is fine here. But he isn’t a great fit for Garraty, even with the additional motivation Lawrence and Mollner give the character. However, they do delve into what we’ve probably all considered (at least I know I have): being the subjects of our own story. Bad things — tickets getting punched, etc. — happen to other people. The idea of being the principal protagonist has gotten more traction in the age of FPS games and online anonymity, but The Long Walk attempts to bring that unreality a little more immediacy.

    The conundrum of how to consistently adapt Stephen King for the screen continues. Lawrence and company have condensed a meditation on mortality and the hopelessness of adolescence into a quest for vengeance.

    The Long Walk is in theaters today.

    Pete Vonder Haar

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  • You Can’t Look Away From Cooper Hoffman

    In Poetic License, Hoffman is like a Gen-Z Vince Vaughn, bullshitting sophistication at a mile a minute, but also too sensitive for this world.
    Photo: Toronto International Film Festival

    There’s an early scene in Poetic License, Maude Apatow’s directorial debut, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival over the weekend, in which an idiosyncratic college senior with family money, played by Cooper Hoffman, floats the idea of creating a LinkedIn account. His best friend, a comparatively buttoned-up economics student named Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman), asks Hoffman’s Ari what he would write on it. Ari chews on the question for a beat, a quizzical expression on his face as it morphs subtly from curiosity to bafflement to worry to contentment. Finally, he retracts his flight of fancy: “Never mind.” There aren’t many actors doing intense character work between the setup and punch line of a joke. In Poetic License, Hoffman establishes himself as one of them.

    Poetic License is a movie about transition. By coincidence or otherwise, it comes from the Apatow school of zooming in on characters at major turning points in their lives (Apatow’s father, Judd, is a producer, and her mother, Leslie Mann, co-stars in the movie). Ari is aimless and has made the executive decision to wean himself off his antidepressants; Sam is tortured by the prospect of going straight from college into a boring and unfulfilling career at Morgan Stanley. Everyone around them is in transition, too. The boys become enamored with Liz (Mann) in a poetry class at their college, which she’s auditing to cope with the fact that her daughter, Dora (Nico Parker), is about to move away after high school. Their professor, Greta (Martha Kelly), is going through a messy divorce. They all turn in stellar work — particularly Mann, who finally gets the role befitting her talents that Judd has been trying to write for years. All of which makes Hoffman’s standout performance all the more impressive.

    Some of this is owing to the script, courtesy of first-time screenwriter Raffi Donatich. The dialogue crackles with witty, fast-paced rapport, and Hoffman gets many of the best individual lines. At one point, upon seeing Liz pull out of the school’s parking lot, he turns to Sam and remarks, “I love a woman who can drive.” When Sam points out that that isn’t an identifiable archetype, he hits back, “It is if you’re from New York.” But Hoffman also imbues the character with an innocent, slippery charisma. He’s Gen-Z Vince Vaughn, bullshitting sophistication at a mile a minute, but also too sensitive for this world. In an early conversation with Liz, she remarks that Sam and Ari have a special connection, and he says with precocious gratitude, “You’re so perceptive of what we have.” He punctuates line deliveries by flashing his eyes and curling his face into endearing half-smiles, which grow more manic as the movie progresses and his medication wears off.

    About halfway through the film, Ari and Liz talk about his decision to stop taking his antidepressants. Liz asks him why he thinks it’s safe to do, and Ari replies that he’s unconcerned because the medications are diminishing his “sparkle.” It’s supposed to be a ludicrous argument: How could anything diminish this guy’s sparkle? a viewer might think. It’s a credit to Hoffman that that comes across.

    Hershal Pandya

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  • ‘Poetic License’ Review: Maude Apatow’s Directorial Debut Is a Bighearted but Frustratingly Aimless Campus Comedy

    Maude Apatow’s directorial debut Poetic License is an intergenerational coming-of-age film about an aimless middle-aged wife and mother who comes into the lives of two college students with problems of their own. When her husband (Method Man) accepts a position as an economics professor at a prestigious university, Liz (Leslie Mann) decides to audit a poetry class to fill her time while their daughter Dora (Nico Parker) starts her last year of high school. In a new town full of people she doesn’t know, Liz is floundering while both her husband and daughter quickly adjust and make new friends. When Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman) and Ari (Cooper Hoffman) meet her in poetry class, Liz becomes a romantic fixation for both of them. But Liz is oblivious to their feelings and the growing rivalry between the two for her attention and affection — she’s too busy obsessing over Dora and the looming realization that her daughter doesn’t need her as much anymore. 

    As a former couples therapist, Liz immediately clocks the codependent relationship between Ari and Sam, spending time with them mainly because she’s intrigued by their dynamic. Ari is a rich kid who lives alone in a lavish apartment with no ambition beyond getting Sam to move in with him. But Sam would rather live in the dorms and be an RA, while working on his degree in economics. Sam also has a girlfriend (Maisy Stella) whose presence is a constant source of annoyance for Ari.

    Poetic License

    The Bottom Line

    Warm and well-acted but disappointingly generic.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
    Cast: Leslie Mann, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Nico Parker, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Martha Kelly, Maisy Stella, Will Price
    Director: Maude Apatow
    Writer: Raffi Donatich

    1 hour 57 minutes

    But both boys agree on Liz, asking for her advice and approval at every turn. She gives her time to them freely, simultaneously revisiting her youth while also acting as a parental figure. And despite her lack of confidence, Liz gives Sam and Ari some solid advice throughout their time together.

    Mann, Hoffman and Feldman are clearly having a good time, and their comedic chemistry carries the film. But for the most part, Poetic License feels just as aimless as Liz, wandering from scene to scene without much of a vision. Each scene seems to end too quickly, not giving the characters and their dialogue enough space to breathe. Even in the emotional moments, the audience is never given time to sit with the meaning behind what’s being said. The scenes in the poetry class feel perfunctory, suggesting no real interest in writing, form or meter. The professor (Martha Kelly) never actually teaches her students anything, instead rambling about her ongoing divorce and conflicts with her soon to be ex-wife. Kelly is funny in the role, but she never feels like a poetry professor and there’s a sense that if the film had centered on just a regular creative writing class everything would have played out in the exact same way.

    Nothing feels specific about Poetic License and all the details seem randomly chosen. “Poetry” and “economics” are portrayed like topics drawn out of a hat, with no real reasoning behind their inclusion in the narrative. We don’t know why Sam or Liz’s husband are into economics in the first place or what it means for both these characters to share an area of study. We also don’t know why Ari is taking the poetry class at all, or even what his major is.

    The film’s script, written by Raffi Donatich, works best as an exploration of the troubled bonds between Ari, Sam, Liz and Dora. But everything around them comes off as superficial, with interchangeable details that only serve to set the scene. This gives the movie a generic quality, most obvious in the scenes involving Liz’s husband. Method Man seems lost in Poetic License, woefully miscast as a no-nonsense academic with no real personality to speak of. His role in Liz’s life functions as a built-in barrier to ensure that the film’s love triangle has no real romantic stakes. Parker fares a bit better as Liz’s level-headed daughter, even though her personality is just as ill-defined as her father’s. 

    As a first-time director, Apatow shows some promise, especially in the tender scenes between Mann and Parker. Apatow shoots Mann with the eye of an adoring daughter, in awe of her mother’s seemingly effortless humor and warmth. The camera also loves Hoffman, who quietly steals the movie whenever he’s onscreen, giving dimension to a character who could so easily come off obnoxious.

    Despite its shortcomings, Poetic License is a film with a big heart populated by talented actors genuinely having fun with their characters. It’s a shame, then, that the story begins to fade from memory as soon as the credits roll.

    Jon Frosch

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