Cooper Raiff has a serious problem with titles. The intimidatingly talented multi-hyphenate made his first film at the age of 22, a warm and revelatory college-set comedy that was unfortunately called Shithouse, a title so head-scratchingly awful that it was renamed Freshman Year for its UK release. But as bad as that might have been, and it didn’t stop the film from winning a major award at SXSW and garnering a string of deservedly enthused reviews, he’s somehow managed to outdo himself with his follow-up, the excruciatingly named Cha Cha Real Smooth, a title so skin-crawlingly heinous, it appears that perhaps he’s simply trolling us. It’s also, sadly, a much weaker film, a sickly-sweet disappointment from someone whose first feature suggested that he might be the new Richard Linklater but it turns out that instead, he might just be the new Zach Braff …
What’s most frustrating about the slide from Shithouse to here is that what had previously felt genuine and raw now feels rather false and self-conscious. With a bigger budget and bigger names, Raiff has created something that feels too primed to please and too eager to be loved, a calculated Sundance movie made for a Sundance crowd, far from a disaster but even farther from the highs of his debut.
