Film 'Cedar Rapids' Highlights Ed Helms & John C. Reilly in Comedy About the Insurance Game

Twenty-five seconds into the new movie "Cedar Rapids," the skyline of Philadelphia is shown, substituting for the real Cedar Rapids, Iowa skyline. As one reader of the blog www.philly.com said, "In what universe would a shot of Philadelphia be a good substitute for Cedar Rapids, Iowa?" Most filming, however, took place in Michigan, no doubt because of Michigan's favorable film incentives (Clint Eastwood shot "Gran Torino" there), a lot of it around Ann Arbor.

For someone who grew up 30 miles from Cedar Rapids, a few establishing shots of Quaker Oats (a local Cedar Rapids industry), etc., are tossed in occasionally, and a fictitious motel called The Royal Cedar is used to represent the motel where insurance salesman Tim Lippe (Ed Helms of "The Office") will be arriving to represent his small insurance firm from Brown Valley, Wisconsin, as the firm attempts to win the coveted 2-Star Award from the ASMI insurance network, headed by corrupt President Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith, who played Reginald "Red" Foreman, the father on "That '70s Show" on television).

Tim Lippe is the proverbial Babe in the Woods. He's the kind of small-town straight arrow that people felt this way about: "I'm thinking that somehow you're gonna' go and then somehow you just didn't." That line is delivered by Sigourney Weaver, who plays Tim's former 7^th grade teacher, Macy Vanderhei, with whom Tim has begun a sexual relationship. Macy is recently divorced and looking for nothing more than the occasional "friend with benefits" but Tim is such a straight shooter that that sort of behavior is foreign to him...until he hits the Big City of Cedar Rapids (IA) for the annual meeting of the insurance agencies in the group.

Tim wouldn't be there at all, save for the untimely death of star salesman Roger Lemke, who is found naked, with a belt around his neck, no doubt a victim of auto-erotic asphyxiation. (So much for the Christian part of the ASMI code).

Tim ends up roommates with Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) and Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who played State Senator R. Clayton "Clay" Davis on "The Wire"). He has romantic run-ins with a local prostitute, Bree, played by Alia Shawkat, and with fellow insurance agent from Omaha, Nebrasks, Joan Ostrowski-Fox, played by Anne Heche.

All of Tim's deeply-held beliefs will be tested and all of his illusions will be destroyed before this film, written by Phil Johnston and directed by Miguel Arteta comes to a close, with Tim, like a little bird leaving the nest, finally realizing that he is going to have to spread his own wings and fly to achieve his potential.

It's a film script that circulated in Hollywood longer than almost any other unproduced script until Executive Producer Ed Helms, who also stars, took the reins and made it happen through Ad Hominem Enterprises. If you have longed for a scene of John C. Reilly (who steals every scene he is in) lighting one of his own farts, this movie is for you.