To cheer up a friend, four guys (John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke) head to the ski resort that figured heavily in three of their wild youths. Disappointment over how the years have shabbily treated the town and ski lodge leads way to a night of heavy drinking in a hot tub. But as the title of the film attests to and the quartet quickly learn upon waking the next morning, it was no ordinary hot tub that they took their drunken dip in. They find themselves in 1986 and the three older friends realize that this may be a chance to change how their lives turned out.

If this sounds like a middle-aged version of Back To The Future, you’d be right. (One character even gets a story point directly lifted from the film, though here it pays off much differently for him than for Michael J. Fox.) The movie does sidestep the issue that these guys all kiss and two of them have sex with women roughly half their age. But then again, if this is a mid-life crisis fantasy, so it is probably to be expected.

Thankfully, the movie concentrates on finding laughs in its characters and situations, not in its setting. Things could very easily have degenerated in to a series of “Oh look, legwarmers! Weren’t they stupid!?” style of gags. Instead it finds its laughs in these three guys on the cusp of middle-age suddenly deciding whether or not to try and keep the one great girlfriend that got away, take a second stab at a music career or maybe avoid the fistfight that will shatter their inner confidence.

That’s not to say it doesn’t take advantage of the audience’s knowledge of `80s films. Skiing played a big part in Cusack’s Better Off Dead and in teen sex comedies like Hot Dog. A scene late in the film is staged just like a famous scene from one of John Hughes’s most famous films. There are certainly plenty of other references that speed by for those quick enough to catch them.

The movie assumes that the audience is familiar enough with the conventions of time travel stories (and some of them like the old Quantum Leap television series gets a knowing wink) and quickly dispenses with the obligatory scene in which one character warns the others about the dangers of changing the past.

At a crisp 90 minutes, Hot Tub Time Machine movies along at a good pace, though like its three middle-agers, it sags a bit around the middle when it tries to add a bit of pathos into the mix. Cusack, who star first rose in the latter half of the ‘80s, feels likes he’s playing a grown up version of Lloyd Dobler or Lane Meyer. Unfortunately, he is given the weakest material to work with out of the four leads and leaves me wondering if there wasn’t more of his performance left on the cutting room floor. Corddray’s normally broad comedic acting style is reined in somewhat, which helps bolster the moments when his character drops his boisterous attitude, exposing a more vulnerable side. It is a great turn which balances nicely with Craig Robinson’s more subtle and quiet, but no less funny, performance.

The history of rock and roll is littered with bands who briefly burned bright and fierce, momentarily capturing the public’s attention before flaming out equally as fast, and as quickly forgotten. Many of their stories chart similar courses, flavored by the various participants involved. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell if the tale of the Los Angeles group of rock and roll Lolitas, the Runaways, is interesting or not, because the new movie chronicling their meteoric rise and equally swift fall can’t seem to decide what story it wants to tell.

The Runaways is a rambling affair, never quite settling on what it wants to be the focus of its story. Is it interested in the story of band? Guitarist and co-founder Joan Jett? Lead singer Cherie Currie? Jett’s and Currie’s friendship? It tried to be a bit of each at various times, but the end result is definitely less than the sum of its parts. Presumably, the movie is supposed to be about Currie, as it is based on her memoir Neon Angel. Strictly speaking, Currie seems to get the most screen time and we see the effects of quick fame on her the most. But if this is to be the rock and roll cautionary tale it suggests it is at time, why do we only see the negative side of the girls’ hard partying and drug use impacting only Currie when we are shown Jett living it up just as hard?

The film’s title, however, would lead one to believe it is the story of the whole band which it definitely is not. As a document about the whole band, the movie fails dramatically. After their introduction, the other three girls in the group are quickly regulated into the background, nothing more than glorified extras. They only re-emerge for the few times when the script needs them to heighten the drama and tensions between everyone. Jett gets more screen time than a supporting character usually does, but the part doesn’t seem to be quite as strong a presence in the film to be a true co-lead. It feels as like the filmmakers wanted to tell Currie’s story, but pumped up the character of Jett just enough to help market the movie better.

Ultimately, it is the film’s lack of cohesion that makes it difficult to engage with anything happening on the screen.

Despite its haphazard organization, the film gives plenty of material for Dakota Fanning to draw from for her performance as Cherie. As Jett, Stewart manages to find a bit of life in an underdeveloped and underwritten character. (At least her time in the Twilight series has taught her something.) While we see much of Currie’s home life which drives her character, we barely get a glimpse of Jett’s background.

The most interesting character turns out to be the theatrical and quite possibly just a bit crazy record producer Kim Fowley, the Svengali behind the band’s success. The always dependable and versatile Michael Shannon plays him with gusto, but stops just short of making him cartoony. Unfortunately, the character is not on screen enough to save the film or make it worth recommending.

I was looking forward to seeing The Road.  I have not read the book by Cormac McCarthy, but then, I have never read The Wizard Of Oz, Gone With The Wind or Twilight and that has not stopped me from enjoying those films.

What really interested me in seeing The Road was the fact it was an “End Of The World” movie.  While that may not be a genre by itself, I have always loved movies that threaten, depict, portend, demonstrate or are either pre or post apocalyptic.  One of the most joyous experiences I ever had at the movies was at the end of Michael Tolkin’s 1991 film The Rapture when the biblical prophecies alluded to throughout the film actually came true in very imaginative ways to my great delight and this is praise coming from an atheist who finds the Bible patently ridiculous.

The Road started off well.  The film had an interesting if not very unique look and I certainly liked the bleak music score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, but it wasn’t long before The Road began to quickly go down hill.  The main reason for my disappointment was the fact the film never addresses what kind of disaster it was that destroyed the Earth. I understand why that information was not necessary in the book.  From what I gather, the book was less a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic world and more an allegory about humanity surviving, hopefully with its morals and ethics intact.  In many ways, the type of disaster that has befallen the Earth is unimportant, its just the “Maguffin”, the thing that gets the story moving and involves all the characters.

But film is a very literal medium and The Road would have benefited by having had someone think a little bit more about what kind of disaster it was that has befallen the Earth. I’ve been criticized for focusing on this one point and I am being told by people that the actual type of disaster doesn’t matter.  Doesn’t matter?  Perhaps that’s true for the book, but the entire look of the film from its physical staging, to the costumes, the make-up and production design all grow organically from whatever kind of disaster it was.  Believe me, the remnants of a nuclear holocaust would look very different from say, an environmental disaster or a disease epidemic.

Would it have been so difficult for the filmmakers to have selected one kind of disaster and then have focused their energies into making that reality consistent? What am I to think about the numerous conflicting visuals presented in The Road?  We see huge ships, their keels broken, laying on inland highways quite far from the ocean.  How did they get there?  Was their massive worldwide flooding?  There is no other visual evidence indicating massive flooding.

And yes, we do know what that kind of disaster looks like.  Check out photos of New Orleans post-Katrina or the coastal towns of Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004.  Talk about a worldwide disaster, the massive undersea quake on December 26, 2004 caused the entire Earth to wobble about 1” and shortened the length of the day by almost 3 micro-seconds.  Now that’s a worldwide event!

Much of The Road is spent wandering around in formerly tree rich areas (the film was partly shot in my home state of Pennsylvania, which believe me, North, South, East and West, we have lots of trees here), but the trees shown in this film are all dead, dried out, rotted and prone to collapse, leading to several tense scenes as Papa Viggo and Kiddie Kodi have to dodge falling timber. These massive piles of  kindling are also prone to bursting into flames, in fact, many times in the film we see the characters walking through what initially appears to be snow, but actually turns out to be falling ash from those burning trees.

And yet, there is an almost constant cover of dark grey clouds and copious rainfall everywhere they travel.  Huh?  How can the trees and the ground be so dry as to spontaneously combust, yet barely a day goes by without a drenching rainfall?  I accept the fact I may be the only person who cares about this inconsistency, but I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s noticed it.

It’s because I do love “End Of The World” movies that I don’t allow filmmakers to simply retreat into vague notions of unnamed calamity as catch-all explanation for their attempts at heightened drama and forced action.  This is a cop-out in the same way bad sci-fi films use the vagueness of “time travel” to cover over their creators lack of even trying to make their stories plausible. Come on filmmakers, you’re the ones spending millions of dollars here, you’re the ones asking me to spend two hours of my life here, it is your job to make the best film you can and if you slack off on the hard stuff, like making a film that makes sense, even within the limited frame of reference and reality you are creating, then I have every right to call you out on it.

I have had some friends of mine tell me that I should simply view The Road as a tense story of survival between a father and his young son.  This is the wrong way to approach me.  I am not a person who is automatically concerned simply because a character in jeopardy happens to be a child.  My general attitude is “F**K” the children.  Far from being the key to our future, I have seen too many contemporary adult lives ruined by kids.

Am I being unnecessarily hard on the filmmakers?  Perhaps, but filmmaking is a hard job and if you are not up to the task, well, they always have room on the night shift at McDonalds.

Although we first ran this review when Moon screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival, we’re reposting it for the beginning of its theatrical run.

Sam Bell is going a little bit stir crazy.

Coming up on the end of a three year stint stationed on the dark side of the moon, Sam (Sam Rockwell) has been the only human manning a station that monitors automatic mining vehicles that gather a mineral needed for energy production back on Earth. His only companionship is the station’s artificial intelligence Gerty (voiced by a monotoned Kevin Spacey). While heading out to one of the automated miners, Sam accidentally crashes his lunar buggy and blacks out. He awakens to find himself in the base sickbay, Gerty reassuring him that he is safe. However, Gerty very pointedly ignores any questions from Sam as to how he got back to the base from the crashed buggy. But solving that mystery only reveals a myriad more.

Moon‘s story itself is simple, and at several points it is easy to guess where the movie is heading towards next. But that’s OK, as Moon is more about acting than it is about plot. The central mystery of the film is not so much about why there are two Bells on the base as it is about revealing Bell as a character.

To fully discuss Rockwell’s performance would involve spoilers that the audience is probably better left discovering for themselves. The two Bells are very different characters, with both major and subtle mannerisms helping to make the distinction. Suffice it to say that Rockwell plays these two differing aspects of Bell in a way that gives us a deeper understanding of the character(s) as a whole than we might have gotten for a similar character stuck in a more conventional plot situation.

First time feature director Duncan Jones does an admirable job in creating the atmosphere for this character examination to play out. It is here that he betrays the obvious influence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Douglas Trumball’s Silent Running in creating the palpable sense of loneliness and monotony that someone in Bell’s position would feel. The 2001 allusions are further enhanced through the design of the robotic Gerty, whose video camera eye strongly recalls that film’s HAL 9000.

But into this sterile environment Jones has injected a rather unique structure for character examination. There are no big explosions, no huge action set pieces or laser gun fights. This is simply a speculation on man’s future relationship with technology and for that, Moon is probably the most literate and literary science-fiction film to come along in a long time.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to adapt a television show to the big screen. This summer’s movie season provides us with good examples of both. Last month’s Star Trek serves as an example of how the right creative decisions to make a very good film. Land Of The Lost shows us that the result of making virtually every wrong decision will result in a very bad movie.

Will Farrell stars as Rick Marshall, a maverick scientist whose theories about time travel and alternate dimensions as a a means of solving the energy crisis have turned him into a laughingstock of the scientific community. Instead of having two children who accidentally journey with him to a mysterious land overrun with dinosaurs and other strange beings, he is accompanied on his interdimensional trip by Holly, a research assistant who actually believes Marshall’s theories and Will, a redneck river guide.

While it is a general rule of thumb to review the movie that you saw rather than the one you wished you saw, it is hard not to think that this adaptation went in the wrong direction from the start. While the original 1970s Saturday morning television series is probably best remembered for its low-budget chintziness, it had some strong and interesting ideas that made up for its dearth of production value. But rather than capitalize on the wealth of material inheritant in the original’s premise and create a family-oriented adventure film, the producers of this new version have instead chosen to go a different route, turning it into a comedy.

Not that there is anything inheriantly wrong with doing a comedic take on any material, it is just that it in this case it is just an excuse to allow Will Farrell’s increasingly annoying man-child character to run amuck. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if it weren’t for the fact that every comedy piece falls flat. The occassional action set-pieces fall equally flat, often ending abruptly on a joke before jerkingly cutting to another scene.

It is a sad state of affairs when the only thing that you can recommend about a film is its production design. The world that Marshall and company find themselves in is a crazy-quilt land where an arid, sandy desert butts up against a steamy rainforest boardered by barren rocky mountains all within a short walk of each other. Crumbling temples house strange crystal pylons that are doorways to extra-dimensional spaces. Everything from abandoned motels to wrecked oceanliners to ice cream trucks, all tossed through holes in space and time, dot the landscape. It is a rich and imaginative world that offers a multitude of story possibilities. Unfortunately, none of those possibilities are explored and any chance of an entertaining movie becomes just some more cosmic flotsam trapped in the Land of the Lost.

Up, the newest animated film from Pixar, starts off by breaking your heart.

The movie opens on Carl, a young boy in the 1930s, captivated by newsreels of famous explorer Charles Muntz. While on the way home from the movie theater on afternoon, he meets Ellie, a young girl who also dreams of discovering lost worlds like Muntz. They immediately become friends. We are then treated to a montage of the couple’s life through the decades as friendship grows to love and marriage. Their decades together are bittersweet. They buy a dilapidated home which they lovingly restore to their dream house. Although they try to save for a trip to the jungles of Venezuela, to where Muntz disappeared years earlier, the expenses of real life intrude all too often. We learn that they can’t have children, but their relationship never wavers. Although they have a great life together, they never get around to having that great adventure they always dreamed of. And then finally, Ellie passes away, leaving Carl alone in a house full of memories and their one unfulfilled lifelong dream.

After spending an indeterminate amount of time rattling around his home with only his memories and regrest to keep him company, Carl finally decides to head out and have that great adventure he always longed for. A former balloon salesman at the local zoo, he fortunately has all the material on hand to secure thousands of helium balloons to his house to make the trip. Joining him on the journey to South America is Russell, an overeager Explorer Scout and inadvertant stowaway. A storm forces the house down in the jungle where the unlikely pair discover that explorer Muntz is alive and still in pursuit of a rare bird to prove to the world that his previous discovery was not a hoax.

With today’s satellite mapping and GPS technology, it is hard to do a realistic “Lost World” story. But Up seems to effortlessly strike the right tone from the beginning, invoking 1930s pulpish adventure in the opening, expository newsreel. There are chases through the jungle, the discovery of a rare and exotic animal, zeppelins and a (quite literally) aerial dogfight. The action is exciting and the comic moments are perfect punctuation.

But the story is much more than a fun and exciting adventure yarn. Karl had the lifelong dream of adventure, but never had a chance to live it. Muntz lived that dream, but his life was consumed by it. Long thought lost by the civilized world, he has been driven more than just a little mad and obsessive over his decades in the jungle. The final confrontation between the two becomes not so much about capturing or protecting a rare bird as it is about two old men trying to determine if their life was worthwhile and held any meaning. It is a subtext that Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull only wished to touch upon.

With each new Pixar film, we can see the studio build on the foundation of what it has done before. Technical achievements such as more detailed cloth texturing and the like aside, Up uses two storytelling devices previously seen in other Pixar films, but honed to a sharper edge here.

Like the opening of The Incredibles, Up‘s opening newsreel introduces us to Muntz and sets up his backstory. Additionally, it helps us understand the roots of Carl’s dream of mapping the unmapped areas of the world. It also sets the feel of the adventure to come. The montage of Carl and Ellie’s life together feels like an expansion of portions of last summer’s Wall-E where long sections of story played out wordlessly. Here, the defining moments of the couple’s life together, both joyous and heart-rending, play out wordlessly, decades of happiness and sadness distilled down to a few short minutes of screen time. It is craftsmanship like this that makes Pixar’s films, and Up in particular, true films for the whole family and not like many other animated films, just something Mom and Dad sit and wince their way through with the kids.

At first glance, it would be easy to draw parallels between director Jennifer Lynch’s film Surveillance and her father David Lynch’s magnum opus television series and film spinoff Twin Peaks. In both you have FBI agents, in this case Bill Pullman and Julia Ormand, arriving in a small town protected by quirky police officers to investigate the latest in a series of serial killings, a case which they may know more about than they initially let on. But as Lynch’s two agents interrogate the three survivors of the killer’s most recent attacks, it is slowly revealed that these are definitely not her father’s FBI agents.

Arriving at an unnamed, sleepy Santa Fe desert town’s police station, Agents Hallaway (Pullman) and Anderson (Ormand) almost immediately set the local constabulary, led by always reliable character actor Michael Ironside, on edge. They aren’t happy that their investigation is being taken over by outsiders, especially when one of their own happens to be one of the killers’ victims. Placed into three separate rooms, the three survivors of a roadside attack by the killers each give their version of what happened. But the various pieces of the puzzle they supply start to reveal a far more disturbing picture than first presumed.

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Sam Bell is going a little bit stir crazy.

Coming up on the end of a three year stint stationed on the dark side of the moon, Sam (Sam Rockwell) has been the only human manning a station that monitors automatic mining vehicles that gather a mineral needed for energy production back on Earth. His only companionship is the station’s artificial intelligence Gerty (voiced by a monotoned Kevin Spacey). While heading out to one of the automated miners, Sam accidentally crashes his lunar buggy and blacks out. He awakens to find himself in the base sickbay, Gerty reassuring him that he is safe. However, Gerty very pointedly ignores any questions from Sam as to how he got back to the base from the crashed buggy. But solving that mystery only reveals a myriad more.

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“This is a thoroughly delightful romantic comedy that is actually romantic and above all funny,” writes contributor Michael McGonigle about the film 500 Days Of Summer.

“Joseph Gordon Levitt is just getting better with each passing year. If this film does not mark some kind of breakout for him, than I don’t know what is wrong with people.

“Gordon-Levitt plays Thomas, a writer for a greeting card company based in LA. He has been a romantic since high school when he compulsively watched The Graduate and listened to British bands like The Smiths and Joy Division. A narrator informs us that Thomas believes in finding that one true love. His true love turns out to be Summer played by Zooey Deschanel. She comes to work at the greeting card company as an office assistant and they both fall into a somewhat passionate affair, at least from Thomas’s perspective. Summer however, is a bit more cautious.

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Often considered a difficult work to adapt due to its complicated themes and story structure as well as the expense required to recreate its alternate history world of the 1980s, director Zack Snyder’s film version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the groundbreaking graphic novel possible. The question that remains, however, is whether Watchmen is the best possible movie to be made from the material.

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