Hot Tub Time Machine

So often in life, you rarely know what you are getting. “Green Zone,” “Shutter Island” and “Bounty Hunter?” Too vague.

With a film like “Hot Tub Time Machine” you know exactly what you get. A warm — dare I say hot — tub of water and some sort of time travel, what else do you need to know?

John Cusack (“Pushing Tin”) Rob Corddry (“Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”) and Craig Robinson (“Pineapple Express”) play three friends who have lost touch with each other over the years, until they are reunited after Corddry suffers a Motley Crue-related accident.

They decide to relive their glory days at the Kodiak Valley ski resort, and they take along Clark Duke, who plays Cusack’s nephew. During their night of debauchery, wires get crossed, energy drinks get spilled and the foursome wakes up 26 years in the past.

Cusack, Corddry and Robinson all have their own memories from Winterfest ’86, and they are tempted to change things for the better. The trio appears to everyone else to be in their early twenties, and Robinson even has the Kid ‘n Play high-top fade.

Each character has his own subplot to carry them through the movie. Cusack is trying to avoid breaking up with his then-girlfriend, Corddry is trying to avoid a beatdown at the hands of the ski patrol and Robinson is trying to make sure his band’s debut show goes smoother than it originally did.

This leaves Duke to try and get the group back to the present. He occasionally fluctuates in and out of existence, so he has a personal stake in making sure the past follows the same path.

The movie combines the inherent cheesiness of the classic 80s movies (many of which Cusack starred in) with the comedy that comes along with meeting people from your past, or in Duke’s case, his mother, who is in the midst of her hard-partying youth.

The group tries almost everything you would try if you went back to the 80s, betting on games you know the outcome of, telling ex-girlfriends how they got fat and so on.

As the three older guys try to atone for their mistakes, the movie has plenty of comedy and even a few touching moments, courtesy of Cusack and a journalist played by Lizzy Caplan (“Cloverfield”).

Cusack is almost there for nostalgia, he doesn’t get too many punch lines, and is really a secondary part of the plot. You may empathize with him more than any of the other characters, but he doesn’t get many laughs.

Cusack might be the heavy hitter when it comes to names, but the movie is really Corddry’s to carry the comedic weight. From his obsession in discovering how the hotel bellhop loses his arm, to his relationship with a certain squirrel at the resort, he wins every scene he’s in.

If you’re serious about the consequences of time travel, this isn’t the movie for you, as you will no doubt find paradox after paradox after the movie winds to its conclusion. But if you went to the movie to see a movie that examines the serious consequences of messing with the space-time continuum, you clearly only read the last two words of the title.

It doesn’t require much brainpower, it doesn’t make you think hard after its over, but that’s sort of the point when you call a movie “Hot Tub Time Machine.” It brings the funny for 100 minutes, and it’s a very entertaining ride.

Rating - $9.50

Visioneers

Let's get one thing out of the way. I love Zach Galifinakis. And I'm not saying that like someone who has only seen him in The Hangover. I mean it like I've seen his stand-ups (hilarious) and looked through some old movie roles.

Which is what brought me to Visioneers. I saw it under his name on my Netflix, and saw it was available instantly, so one Sunday, I decided to see what it was about.

Wow. That's the first impression. It was categorized under "comedy" on Netflix, and boy is that far from the truth. Further research indicated that it was a "black comedy" which seems to lend more gravitas to the film than it deserves.

The film is a bleak look at a corporate world taken to the extreme. It's Big Brother-ish, but you're not quite sure how serious to take it until later in the film.

Galifinakis plays a mid-level administrator who presides over his cramped, yet spacious room in "Level 3" (of 5, we assume). One of his co-workers recently exploded, as are people all over the place.

Zach finds himself experiencing the symptom of people who have been exploding, namely, dreams.

He also tries to track down a co-worker who he has feelings for, despite having never seen her, and dealing with his wife, who watches boring daytime television all day.

In three paragraphs, I described the extent of almost 45 minutes worth of the movie. Forty-two minutes go by in the movie without a single thing happening, so it's almost a relief when it does.

It is a very visually striking film, everything seems to be placed in the frame to strike an effect, and most shots last long enough (and don't have enough going on) that you can take time to appreciate it.

But thematically, the movie is really weak. I think it tries to make an artistic statement about the banality of modern life, but I'm not sure, and I certainly didn't get it.

It takes the approach that "less is more" and leaves a lot of blank space, which I guess you're supposed to fill with your own awesome, ground-breaking thoughts about modern life, and then transfer them to the movie, therefore thinking that the movie is echoing your thoughts.

Well, my thought's were "When the hell does this movie end?" and I literally counted down almost everyone of the film's 91 minutes.

It is well shot enough to make you think you're watching something artistic and important, but you're just not.

Galifinakis is pretty good, he gets a few laughs, and he fills a whole lot of conversations (especially with women) with silence.

Quite frankly, it's a boring movie, and you keep waiting for something to happen, and though things eventually pick up (slightly) and things get a bit more sinister, the conclusion is extremely unsatisfying, but it fits perfectly with the style of the movie.

High-art people might say "Oh, but you missed the whole point! The movie was boring because it was a statement about how office and modern culture is turning our lives boring!"

Sure, I get that. I also know that "Office Space" said that same thing, only it was actually amusing.

Rating - $2.00

She's Out of My League

When Bo Derek introduced us to the concept of a “10” in 1979, it brought a ranking system into popular cultures in which people were given a number, one through 10, to describe their attractiveness. More than 30 years later, sets of “rules” have come from the scale, and one such “rule” is what “She’s Out of My League” is based on.

According to a character in the film, one cannot go more than two points above themselves in any relationship. Enter Kirk Kettner, a TSA screener at the Pittsburgh International Airport and a “six” at best.

Baruchel is the latest leading man from the Judd Apatow family tree, much like stars Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Jason Segal, Baruchel worked with Apatow in television, then worked as a supporting role in his films, before getting his own project.

He has that same sort of stumbling, awkward style of humor, but with his rail-skinny body and odd hairdos, he’s much more at the nerdy end of the spectrum.

While desperately trying to win back his ex-girlfriend after a two-year split, Kirk meets Molly, an event planner who is a “hard 10.” Molly misplaces her phone, Kirk finds it, and so begins a romance that threatens to turn the world upside down.

Kirk’s friend Stainer (played by T.J. Miller, best known as the cameraman in “Cloverfield”) tells him that the budding relationship is destined to fail, while Kirk’s other friends offer varying stages of bad advice and weak support.

The movie deals with Kirk’s struggle to accept the fact that this beautiful woman is interested in him, and his struggle to prevent the inevitable — her leaving him — from happening.

We get introduced to Molly’s lantern-jawed ex-boyfriend, a jet pilot, as well as Kirk’s family, each of whom serve no other purpose than to constantly remind him of the strangeness of the situation he’s in.

It’s the classic “fall for the nice guy” kind of movie, but it sort of works in this case. Molly is played by British actress Alice Eve, who is very attractive, but she’s also very down-to-earth, so it doesn’t seem like a terrible stretch.

While the story arc is the same as any romantic comedy, the story wins points because it puts the improv-style humor of Miller, Baruchel and others first. They all get time to say their piece, tell their stories at the bowling alley, the bar or wherever else the group finds themselves.

Nate Torrance, who plays Kirk’s portly, married friend Devon, is the gem of the film, he steals quite a few scenes, and in a movie rated “R” for language, his complete refusal to curse is both refreshing and off-putting in a funny way. This, combined with a few funny scenes with Kirk getting ready for his dates, fill out the movie where it could otherwise be filler. By the time the inevitable fight between Kirk and Molly comes and then the race-against-time reconciliation is happening, the movie is just wrapping up.

It makes the movie more of a comedy and less of a romance, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The only problem is that the comedy doesn’t always deliver. They rely on a lot of the same old awkward guy gags that were done much better in films like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

It’s entertaining for sure, but there are large gaps in the funny throughout the picture. Of course it tries to teach the whole “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” thing, but in the end, you walk out of the theater pretty sure that a skinny geek like Kirk couldn’t really get a hottie like Molly.

Rating - $7.50

Extract

Mike Judge has made a career of creating characters who are perfect caricatures of the people who populate everyday life. In “Office Space” he created a whole cast of them, people who were cartoonish enough to be funny, real enough to become pop-culture staples. If you hear someone end a sentence with “that’d be greeeeat” or slowly say “I’m a Michael Bolton fan” you have that instant flash of recognition.

After all, Judge’s strength has always been about highlighting the most annoyingly idiotic tendencies of us all, mostly to comic effect. So when the trailers for “Extract” started dropping, and the scene had shifted from a white-collar office to a blue-collar factory, it looked like Judge was primed to make another blip on the pop culture radar.

Jason Bateman plays the manager of a factory that manufactured flavor extracts. Stuck in a rut with his wife (Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig), Bateman has his eyes out for a woman who is interested in flavor additives.

Bateman plays the same character that was so well received on television’s “Arrested Development,” a normal character trapped in a world of people too dumb to be real.

His factory is populated with the type of secondary characters that usually make such an impact, but most of them aren’t on screen nearly enough to get big laughs, and the two women with the most lines are too annoying to laugh at.

Bateman finds solace at the local bar, where Ben Affleck serves his cocktails and a sympathetic ear for his problems. After a horse tranquilizer or two enters the mix one night, Bateman sets in motion a chain of events that leaves him fighting to save his marriage.

Like “Office Space,” this movie deals with a man whose dissatisfaction about where his life is going takes a strange turn after an altered state. But in “Extract,” the trouble in Bateman’s marriage takes him away from his place of business, and also shoves many of the goofy characters into the background.

It’s too bad. J.K. Simmons plays Bateman’s second-in-command, and he has far too little screen time. He calls the men at the factory “dinkus” and the women “what’s-her-face” but aside from that funny exchange in the beginning, Simmons isn’t featured nearly enough.
The two secondary plots dance in and out of the film, but they aren’t developed enough to be anymore than afterthoughts. Mila Kunis plays a beautiful con artist, but after a great first scene she only pops in on random occasions and is pretty much irrelevant.

It’s a hard movie to classify. It’s funny, but it’s not going to be quoted by generations of teenagers in the years to come.

Unfortunately, and despite the title, “Extract” seems to be a diluted version of what Judge has made his career doing. The characters are funny, but not that funny. The laughs are there, but they’re not the same quality of laugh.

You’ll probably laugh throughout most of the film’s 90 minutes, but afterwards you’ll be hard pressed to remember the funniest scene, or a specific joke that made you laugh.

Rating - $7.00

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this summer, you know about the G.I. Joe movie. Between the massive marketing campaign and the nostalgia held by anyone under the age of 40, it was bound to evoke reaction from people.

Given Hollywood’s spotty history with remakes, plus the noticeable changes to the franchise that are evident in the trailer, it’s easy to assume the worst.

As someone whose toybox was dominated by G.I. Joes (more than thirty of them by my count), I can identify with those who were upset to see the standard camouflage replaced with some sort of robotic suit that seems to put its wearers into the matrix, where the laws of physics don’t apply.

“G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is not an action movie, it is THE action movie. From “Star Wars” through “Spiderman,” the influence of every action movie that came before it is evident in every scene.

The dogfights may feature submarines instead of X-Wings, a robotic suit takes the place of a radioactive spider, but the action is very much the same.

The ensemble cast is made up of very talented actors from across the spectrum, from Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans to Dennis Quaid and Sienna Miller. While they are all talented actors, there are written with hardly more depth than their plastic counterparts.

Tatum is the gung-ho Soldier who is always ready for the next fight. Wayans is his wise-cracking partner with a heart of gold. Dennis Quaid is the grizzled yet vulnerable leader and Miller plays both the scorned lover and the villainess.

The movie piles action cliché on top of action cliché, but it does so in a way that seems more of a tribute than just lazy writing. There is every sort of conflict you can imagine. Childhood rivalries, old lovers’ quarrels and past family drama all come into play through a series of flashbacks.

It’s a very efficient way to inject drama into each battle, but it does so without letting plot get in the way of explosions.

The movie takes place in a world where the laws of physics don’t always apply, a karate fight could break out at any minute and every vehicle has at least a half-dozen missiles attached to it, just in case.

There are very few breaks in the action, another car chases, gun battle or highly choreographed fight is always right around the corner.

While all this is going on, enough plot points are planted for a long run for the franchise, the final scene indicates that a sequel is probably already in pre-production.

A particular highlight of the film is the battles between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. Snake Eyes never talks and Storm Shadow probably spends much of his paycheck on throwing stars.
Both martial artists (one always in black, one always in white), they have a personal history going back to their childhood. Their battles are the highlight of the film, even if you can see it coming from a mile away.

In fact, most of the plot can be plotted within the first ten minutes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The money that could have gone to an overcomplicated plot line instead went to some absolutely breathtaking scenes.

G.I. Joe purists who still remember getting their first Snake Eyes action figure might not be on board with the movie and its various liberties with the established characters, but if you’re looking to turn off your brain and watch explosions for two hours, there aren’t many movies better suited for that.

Rating - $8.00

Funny People

“Funny People” could easily describe the reason for Judd Apatow’s success over the last few years. It’s a simple, but effective formula. Put funny people on screen together, let them have conversations that range from the awkward to the obscene and don’t let the plot get in the way of the people.

In these days of the cookie-cutter romantic comedy or the interracial buddy comedy, it’s
refreshing to watch people that are just plain funny.

Adam Sandler, someone who has starred in many of those same clichés, now takes on a role that is basically a caricature of himself. He plays George Simmons, a once-groundbreaking stand-up comedian, who has earned his fortune by starring in terrible movies. Pay attention to the various movie posters in the background and you can see that Simmons has starred in movies that look so bad they could have been made.

He wakes up every day alone in his mansion, with only his staff to keep him company. But we aren’t meant to get to know the old George Simmons, because five minutes into the film, he learns that he has a rare disease that will more than likely kill him within months.

Living at the other end of the spectrum is Ira Wright, played by Seth Rogen. Rogen is crashing on a couch, working in a deli and trying to make it in the world of stand-up. He takes advantage of the chance to get laughs at Sandler’s expense, and gets a gig writing jokes for him.

Rogen also helps Sandler navigate his illness, encouraging him to tell his friends and family, including the woman that got away, played by Leslie Mann.

The film balances the fine line between comedy and drama, going back and forth between the two often within seconds of each other. There are times when people crying is the funniest part of the scene, and times when things get so real that all you want to hear is a dick joke.

The film comes in at a sturdy two hours, 26 minutes. A little long for anything but an epic, but when you’re first two directorial efforts gross almost $400 million, I guess you can have some leeway.

For a movie of its length, it moves very well. It doesn’t slow down very much, because you don’t know what’s coming next, you’re always on your toes.

The secondary cast is great, with Eric Bana, Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman providing a lot of humor at the expense of themselves and the main characters.

Almost every stand-up comedian worth his salt from the ‘90s has a cameo in the film, and while some are more memorable than others (Ray Romano), they add to the texture of the film.

Since Sandler and Apatow were roommates before striking out in different directions (one in front of the camera, one behind), this movie is sort of a "What If?" for them.

The only thing different is that both men are married with children, and one would like to hope both men have more satisfying lives than anyone in the film. I guess it goes to show the stabilizing influence of family.

And for a movie, a director, and actors that have roots in the simple act of telling jokes, that's pretty deep.

Rating - $9.50

Bruno

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. This is not a family film, nor anything close to it. Regardless of who you see it with, it will make you uncomfortable in several parts throughout the film.

That being said, “Bruno” offers laughs more consistently than actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s last work, “Borat.” The awkwardness is there. The bigotry is on full display. And Cohen, too much of him, is there.

Bruno is a flamboyant host of an Austrian fashion show who loses his credibility when his all-velcro suit leads to a fashion show disaster. Not knowing what to do with his life, Bruno sets his sights on America with an assistant, in order to become a celebrity.

If there’s one thing American can do, is make a celebrity out of people with no discernable talent. Cohen whittles it down to an almost step-by-step guide on how to become a celebrity. Reality shows, controversial statements, illicit video tapes, he tries them all.

Various celebrities make appearances, and it’s clear that most of them are unwitting accomplices to Cohen’s assault. 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul, singer Paula Abdul and actor Harrison
Ford are all caught on tape, and their reactions range from the confused to the profane.

Ironically, as much as the movie seems to mock celebrity, the real people that come off the worst.

The ignorance displayed by some church offcials, a mixed martial arts audience and a group of hunters, to name a few, is startling. Some of them could be forgiven, for they only crack in the face of Bruno’s onslaught, but others seem perfectly willing to make themselves look like fools with little provocation.

For example, a stage mother offers to get her baby’s weight down from 30 pounds to 20 pounds within a week to get a job. By being so off the wall himself, Cohen allows these people to open up and let out their own faults, and one wonders why on earth they would agree to sign releases to appear in the film.

“Borat” brought about a slew of lawsuits after it became a smash hit, most likely from people trying to cover themselves after the world saw what they had to say, and “Bruno” figures to have similar claims brought against it.

There’s a reason that Cohen isn’t known just as a simple gross-out comedian. Through his caricatures of stereotypes, he is able to unearth something that’s not funny at all: there are people even more ignorant than the characters he plays out there, and unlike Cohen, these people are 100 percent real.

Rating - $9.00