Cedar Rapids

Review

The comedy Cedar Rapids centers on a cretinously ingenuous Midwest insurance agent, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms, of The Hangover), who is morally and sexually upended during a convention in the wild-and-crazy Iowa metropolis that gives the movie its title. Directed by Miguel Arteta from a script by Phil Johnston, the film is largely a series of juvenile jabs at midwestern piety, which is always a cover for corruption and sexual degeneracy, and it might have seemed fresh around 1978, when Animal House came out. To be as charmed as I was, you have to enjoy scenes like the one in which insurance agent John C. Reilly plops himself down at the hero’s table in the middle of the ostentatiously holy convention leader’s morning prayer and declares, �I am so hung-over� big-time beer shits� You got a pube on your cheek.� It helps that Reilly is the opposite of a slob-comic. With his hangdog melancholy, he makes even the nonstop cunnilingus allusions poignant�the product of emotional longing. (I hadn’t heard the phrase �Eating tuna from the bottom shelf��is that native to this movie?) Even better, Cedar Rapids features two boss femmes: expert straight-man Sigourney Weaver as Tim’s former seventh-grade teacher and now patient lover (he’s very clingy), and Anne Heche as the dizzy practical joker who makes nerdy guys sink to their knees and pray to be sexually harassed. — David Edelstein