A 'Hot Tub' Worth Dipping In

by Brett Parker

What happens when you cross The Hangover with Back to the Future? You get Hot Tub Time Machine, a comedy armed with what has to be one of the funniest titles in cinematic history. It rings with a goofball's invite to ultra-silly kitsch. All you can really hope for in such a venture is for the film itself to live up to the playful jolliness of the title. It does, and it even makes sincere efforts to surpass it.

The comedy follows a group of four friends who are all facing serious boughts of inadequacy in their lives. Adam (John Cusack) has just suffered a toxic break-up with his girlfriend and is in a miserable rut. His nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke), lives in his Uncle's basement and wastes his days on the internet. Nick (Craig Robinson) is stuck in a dead-end dog grooming job and suffers a demanding wife who may be cheating on him. Lou (Rob Corddry) is a reckless boozer with nothing of substance in his adult life. One night, he has a drunken mishap with his car in his home garage that looks very much like a suicidal act. Lou swears it was a drunken mistake, but the other three still have their concerns and try to devise a way to cheer him up. Their plan is to spend the weekend at a ski resort they used to populate in their youth. The foursome pack up and head to the resort, only to discover that it has been seriously run down over the years to become one of the most loathsome ski resorts in existence.

Despite their shabby surroundings, the four decide to make the best of their trip and they booze it up in their hotel suite's hot tub. After a night of binging heavily in the tub waters, the guys awaken to discover that the hot tub has magically transported them back to the 1980s. The ski resort is overrun with leg warmers, jerry curls, and giant cell phones! It turns out the gang has magically inhabited their younger selves during the last trip they took to that lodge in their youth (Jacob wasn't even born yet, but he is still present in this blast from the past). While stuck in the past, the gang contemplates whether its better to follow the same path their lives have taken or use their knowledge of the future to make things better for themselves. Hijinks ensue, time gets altered, and a mysterious Repair Man (Chevy Chase) tries to help them to get home.

It is said that John Cusack received a phone call to help contribute to a comedy script from MGM. Once he heard the title, he laughed out loud and agreed to help out on the condition that Steve Pink (his collaborator on Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity) got to join him. MGM made the right move, for we can sense how Pink's direction and Cusack's co-producing and script contributions helped save this comic romp from being callow trash. Like their earlier works, Pink and Cusack bring a feeling of middle-aged angst, romantic sweetness, and strong masculine insight to the material. You can certainly see the ways in which this deranged sitcom strides towards grown-up material. It's an on-screen struggle between screwball and maturity, a battle that screwball wins!

The comedy starts off a bit slow; the jokes and expositions are a bit weak, yet things get more colorful (literally) once the foursome finds their way to the 80s. It's in this pastel-colored decade where the film finds its comic momentum and takes off running. Whats most impressive, and surprising, is the various and thoughtful ways the main dudes discuss matters of the Space-Time Continuum. Most comedies revolved around time leaps usually take their sci-fi concepts for granted. Here we see hilariously active discussions about time travel: should the guys relive their past the exact same way? Should they alter the course of their futures? Should they invent stuff before its meant to be invented? Its refreshing to see time travelers asking the very same questions we would ask in such a situation.

The film actually produces ingenious gags to play off of the logic of the plot's timeline. There's an inspired bit involving a bellhop (Crispin Glover) who is fated to suffer a severed arm sometime in the 80s. Another hilarious scene shows Lou betting on a Super Bowl using his foresight of the future (this scene produces a surprise cameo from a deliciously 80s movie star, who shows up with one of the most beautiful women in showbiz on his arm). A funky fun sequence shows Nick stealing from the Black Eyed Peas to dazzle during a musical set at a nightclub. And I really enjoyed the film's over-the-top play on Back to the Future's slightly-superficial yet undeniably-satisfying ending.

Hot Tub Time Machine is a mixture between the current cinematic trend of bromance movies and the 80s trend of men finding their true selves in a cynical and confusing time. The highly likeable cast hurtle through the gags with a heroic sincerity and conviction while the filmmakers treat us to more brain cells than we'd expect. It may be a slight enterprise, but it's a wildly fun comic ride that successfully makes you laugh harder at the film than you did at the title.

'Men' to Avoid

by Brett Parker

In the midst of American health care reform comes Repo Men, a harrowing sci-fi fable that suggests horrid and disturbing ways insurance companies can dominate and tamper with our medical care in the future. The good news is that technology will be so advanced that any body organ can be artificially replicated to replace a faltering one. The bad news is that these organs are so astronomically expensive that the insurance company holds the right to gut you and repossess their property if you fall behind on payments. It's a wickedly clever premise for a sci-fi parable, one that's a bloody nightmare to behold. The great failure of this film is that it spends way too much time depicting the bloody aspects of the story instead of contemplating the nightmarish angles.

The film opens by introducing us to the inner-workings of The Union, the elaborate health care company that provides replacement organs for American citizens of the future. Need a new heart, kidney, or liver to stay alive? The Union can provide a technologically advanced replacement in no time. The only problem is that a typical organ is usually in the minimum pricing range of six figures. The Union assures its customers that efficient payment plans can be set up to suit any citizen's financial situation, but its an unspoken fact that most customers can't keep up with such gargantuan monthly installments. If a customer falls about three months behind payments, The Union dispatches their highly-trained repo men to reclaim their hardware. These agents track down their quarry, render them unconscious with a stun gun, and slice open their skin to reclaim The Union's blood-soaked property. They more or less leave their former customers to die. It's a gruesome business, but one that appears to be booming.

The film centers on a repo man named Remy (Jude Law) who is mainly considered the top man on the job. He comes from a military background that helps give him the poise, discipline, and detachment to be so good at his assignments (“A job's a job,” he keeps reminding himself). Joining him on his jobs is his lifelong friend and partner in repossession, Jake (Forrest Whitaker), a tough cannon who loves his job just a little too much. Remy's job has become something of a strict routine until the fateful day when he has an accident with a defibrillator on the job. The accident causes him to have his heart replaced by The Union while he's unconscious, bounding Remy to the company's overwhelming payment system.

This changing of hearts literally causes Remy to have a change of heart and he finds he no longer has the stomach to carry out his repo jobs. This leaves him without work and without a way to pay for his expensive new heart. Pretty soon, it becomes painfully clear that Remy is going to be tracked down by his very own comrades and have his heart ripped out. He realizes he must go on the run in order to stay alive. He tries to hide out and figure out ways to defeat the very repo technology he used to live by, all with the help of a street woman named Beth (Alice Braga). Remy must also prepare for his eventual confrontation with his tough-as-nails best friend.

In the back of my mind, I found Repo Men somewhat similar to Minority Report, Steven Spielberg's wonderful sci-fi thriller about predicting murders before they happen. That film also depicted an advanced futuristic technology that betrays its key player, forcing him to try and defeat his own system. While Minority Report touched on anxieties over post-9/11 security, Repo Men stirs up nightmares over current health care issues. Minority Report is a shining example of all the qualities Repo Men appears to lack: command in tune, fluidity, strongly-realized themes, masterful action sequences, alluring suspense, thoughtful meditations. Minority Report was a tight masterwork that weaved all its ideas and themes together in a focused flow. Repo Men appears to wander shapelessly between its excessive action scenes and casual ideas.

The best thing the film has going for it is the performances. While this cast easily could've been made up of B-Movie pop faces, we're actually given seasoned pros who've treated us to powerhouse drama in the past. Jude Law is an actor who can weave effortlessly between charm and anguish and its these qualities that sell us on Remy. He also makes for a durable action figure. I loved the scene where he takes on a office full of airport security guards without getting a scratch on him. Forest Whitaker brings his unsettling tics and eccentric bravado to Jake and brings him more depth than we'd expect from such a character. These are two actors who can never be accused of sleepwalking through roles. Also adding devilish fun to the cast is Liev Schreiber as Frank, the apparent head of The Union. He's a wily and quick-witted pencil pusher who would easily dismiss his shady dealings as “business-as-usual.” He humorously doesn't take the film's plot as a matter of life or death, but plays it more as if it were simply an annoying nuisance to a businessman.

If a character is about to die in a movie and is shot dead with a gun, that's effective violence. If a character is about to die and he gets his head cut off with a chainsaw when a gun could've accomplished the same point, that's gratuitous violence. Repo Men is one of the most gratuitously violent movies I've seen in a long time. Of course the repossession scenes necessarily calls for blood and body parts; fight scenes later in the film consist of stabbings, decapitations, slit throats, and blood splattering for no apparent reason other than fodder for action junkies. It's obvious that director Miguel Sapochnik wants to borrow The Matrix's ideal for fusing big ideas with big action, but the action here is so bloody excessive that it looks creepily out of place with the rest of the film. Perhaps Sapochnik is trying to demonstrate a demented karma by showing how Repo Men who live by the sword must also die excessively by it, but the action scenes are too overwrought to focus on such an idea. There's a scene towards the end where Remy uses two knives and a hacksaw to slice and dice security guards and repo men blocking his path in a hallway. This scene is so excessively gory and over-stylized that it becomes hopelessly distracting. A warning to the faint-of-heart: if you get queasy over blood, guts, and human dissections, stay far, far, away from this movie!

Repo Men is a cautionary tale laced with big ideas and a compelling enough premise, but it all doesn't hold together in the end. There are likeable stand-alone moments (I love how Remy infiltrates his old job once he's a wanted man...and the way Frank, Jake, and even Remy laugh about it) but too many aspects of this movie don't deliver. The production design by David Sandefur (Journey to the Center of the Earth) feels half-hearted and doesn't deliver a futuristic landscape that holds up when compared to the great ones we've seen in the past. The soundtrack songs are meant to evoke a disjointed irony but are too distracting and doesn't serve the material in an effective way. Plus the film forces a ludicrous twist ending on us that comes straight out of left field and doesn't fit at all. I appreciate how this film makes us contemplate the horrors our society could face if health care reform were to never intervene, its just too bad that it doesn't appear in an entertaining enough package.

BY THE WAY: The film is based on a novel by Eric Garcia called The Repossession Mambo, a title that is literally referenced in this movie. It's a wonderful title and it sounds way better than Repo Men. Besides, it would've avoided confusion with Alex Cox's 1984 cult classic, Repo Man.

Familiar Yet Wacky 'Cop' Business

by Brett Parker

Kevin Smith is a filmmaker known for directing dialogue that not only delivers raunchiness and vulgarity in a delightful symphony, but reveals staggering insights into pop culture. The characters in Smith’s world heavily discuss comic books, constantly reference movies, and even know all the words to Run DMC songs. Sometimes they take on the bizarre, self-reflexive feat of criticizing the very cinematic situation they find themselves inhabiting. His characters spend so much time dissecting clichés in entertainment that his films often manage to become devoid of them in the process.

When Kevin Smith revealed that his latest project, Cop Out, was to be a throwback to the buddy cop comedies prominent in the 80s, I half-expected a thoughtful spoof that put the tired conventions of the genre through the ringer. How entertaining it would be to see buddy cops discussing buddy cop clichés as they were enacting them! To lace all that with Smith’s trademark wit and color would truly be a delight. But unfortunately, Smith has long-strayed from his raw indie wagon and has settled into a comfort zone of creating formulaic Hollywood comedies devoid of his sharpest instincts. Cop Out is, disappointingly, no exception. Smith doesn’t really bring creative insights to the material but essentially tries to recreate a typical cop flick from the 80s, although one that’s not nearly as good as its predecessors. But Smith is no sleepwalking zombie, however, and this sitcom isn’t without some juice. Smith’s greatest strength here is that he knows just how to unleash Tracy Morgan’s side-splitting zaniness on the big screen, producing consistent laughs throughout.

You’ve heard the scenario a million times: one’s a straight-arrow cop who plays by the book and has a no-nonsense approach to his job. The other is a wise-cracking loose cannon with a knack for creating effortless mayhem anywhere he goes. Together, this duo teams up for a fragile partnership that produces high tension and big laughs. Things heat up with their alliance, however: people get shot, cars crash, things get blown up, the Captain wants their suspension with their badges on his desk, etc. The only way the duo can redeem themselves is if they work out their differences and take down an elaborate criminal ring all by themselves. In the end, guns get fired, the bad guys get taken down, and the bond between the unlikely partners grows much deeper.

It’s an all-too familiar plot that Cop Out cheerfully revels in. We have Bruce Willis as Monroe, the straight-arrow tough cop, and Tracy Morgan as Hodges, the comic relief cop. They’re partners who’ve been serving the NYPD for nine years, as Monroe smacks around the bad guys while Hodges showers them with jokes. We follow Monroe as he hopes to sell a valuable baseball card to help pay for his daughter’s lavish wedding. As he goes to a collectibles shop to cash in the card, two robbers knock over the joint, subdue Monroe, and escape with the card. The long-time partners must now set out to recover the stolen card by any means necessary. This sets off a chain of events in which the duo gets caught up in an elaborate crime plot that involves a Latin crime lord (Guillermo Diaz) and a kidnapped Mexican mistress (Ana de la Reguera). From there, action explodes, laughter ensues…you know the drill!

Kevin Smith has undergone a curious transition in his career. He used to create gritty indie comedies that were treasured for their defiance from typical conventions. Now he seems to be celebrating the clichés and churning them out enthusiastically. You can see how recent films like Jersey Girl and Zack and Miri Make A Porno bear some of his signature trademarks, but they seem to be lacking the freshness of his smirking edge. His recent works seem more adherent to genre formulas then to his own flights of anarchic fancy. Cop Out suffers from the same problem; Smith doesn’t really put his own distinctive stamp on the material. This is his first film with a script not written at all by him (the screenplay was concocted by the TV writing duo of Mark Cullen & Rob Cullen), so the film lacks his naughty sparkle and colorful inspiration. There’s no clever hook or variation to the premise, the whole idea is to bring deranged wackiness to a familiar plotline. Still, this one feels inferior to its earlier influences.

Part of the problem is that Smith has no idea how to stage an action scene properly. Both the camera and the editing are way too jumpy and frantic, never allowing the viewer to get a full grasp of the character’s movement in relation to their space. The action scenes are so clumsy and weightless, they evaporate rapidly from the mind. It’s almost as if Smith knows he can’t do action properly so he hurries past it in hopes that no one will notice. Smith has often been accused (sometimes unjustly) of having a poor sense of camera framing. Never before has that been stronger felt than with his shaky work here.

If there’s one thing Smith knows how to do wonderfully, it’s let the camera settle on scenes of wacky and hilarious dialogue. It’s scenes like this that give Cop Out its strength. Occasionally we come across routine scenes that are played for extensive silliness and it generates enough laughs and smiles to keep us delighted. There’s a frantically cockeyed opening sequence in which Hodges violently interrogates a witness while hurling countless movie quotes at him with great intensity (“NOBODY PUTS BABY IN THE CORNER!”). Both Monroe and Hodges present an inspired telephone gag meant to insult their rival detectives on the force (played by Kevin Pollack and Adam Brody). And there’s a great bit where Hodges imagines his wife (Rashida Jones) cheating on him, inspiring what sounds like a very funny Cary Grant impression.

Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan seem like the unlikeliest of duos, and indeed they don’t have the easiest chemistry, but they do generate a fascinating interest and it keeps the movie alive. Willis can play a role like Monroe in his sleep, and he appears to be humorously half-asleep this time out. This is essentially Morgan’s movie to steal, and he does so with great comic insanity. Morgan is one of the funniest comedians working in showbiz today. Read any random interview with the 30 Rock star and you’re guaranteed at least five laughs. He conveys the image of a sugar-high adolescent enjoying a goofball spree in the adult world. His outsized silliness is just what this script needs to shake things up. Watching the straight-edged Willis bounce off of the stark raving lunacy of Morgan is a well of twisted amusement, and it all but saves this flick.

Cop Out is commercial pop with occasional delights that hold up if you care to remember it. You’re not as contemptuous of its familiarity as you’d expect to be. The film has a lot of nice little touches. Sean William Scott has a funny walk-on as a stoner thief and I absolutely loved the throwback score from genre veteran Harold Faltermeyer (Beverly Hills Cop, Tango & Cash). His nostalgic 80s sounds are worth the price of admission alone. So if you want an exceptional buddy cop flick, check out 48 Hours, Rush Hour, and Starsky & Hutch. If you want to see Kevin Smith at his most biting and intelligent, check out Chasing Amy. Now if you have two hours to kill and want to have a laughing fit at the hands of that loveable maniac Tracy Morgan, Cop Out just might be for you.