We’re Anticipating… Cedar Rapids
By
December 23, 2010
“There’s palm trees, and the whole thing smells like chlorine! It’s like I’m in Barbados or somewhere,” Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) exclaims in the trailer for Cedar Rapids, the new film by Miguel Arteta (Youth in Revolt, The Good Girl). Tim apparently doesn’t get out much: he’s not in the Caribbean; he’s at a hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for an insurance convention. But despite the seemingly austere occasion, it appears Cedar Rapids is destined to play host to a fairly crazy couple of days: rock-climbing foibles! R2D2 jokes! Hanging out in tighty-whities with his wild new pal Dean Ziegler! (Ziegler is played by John C. Reilly, but we keep thinking of him as Zach Galifianakis—how much do you want to bet he was approached first for the role?)
The cast is rounded out by some comedians we love—Mike Birbiglia, Rob Corddry—and some excellent ladies, including Anne Heche, Alia Shawkat, and, according to IMDb, Sigourney Weaver, though we don’t see her in the trailer. The movie loses a couple of points for Tim’s morning-after declaration that Shawkat, who plays a prostitute, is “not that pretty,” but makes up for it with deft deployment of an inside joke: Isiah Whitlock, Jr. appears in the trailer just long enough to make you wonder where you recognize him from, then knocks it out of the park with a reference to “the HBO program The Wire.” (He played Clay Davis.) And Heche is looking better than ever!
