Maggie Cooper (Nia Vardalos) thinks she’s a hip mom. She wears pink and blue streaks in her hair, talks casually about weed, and is way more excited for her son Lloyd’s (Jason Dolley) 17th birthday than he is. Yet she’s also less than cool, as indicated by the title of the movie in which she appears,Helicopter Mom. It opens as Maggie and Lloyd are making their way around Venice Beach. We see what she sees, slim surfers and skaters with their boards, tourists with their maps and cameras, a pack of bikers in black leather, their faces menacing. Now we know: Maggie isn’t the only stereotype in Helicopter Mom.
Salome Breziner’s comedy follows the well-intentioned but overbearing Maggie, doing her best to look after Lloyd and also, maybe, to let him go. A sensitive writer of poetry, Lloyd is as different as possible from her and also his mostly absent, ex-hippie dad Max (Mark Boone Junior). He doesn’t feel as though he fits in at high school, where the crowds of Venice Beach surfers and tourists are replaced by cheerleaders and band geeks. Maggie thinks she knows why.
Read the rest of Judy Hur's review here.
June 26, 2015