Word: tubbed
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...with a nerdish hero, as Dragon followed She's Out of My League (which finished sixth this weekend, with a total gross of $25.6 million), and Diary of a Wimpy Kid (in fifth place, with $35.8 million). Indeed, several of the guys in the other new wide release, Hot Tub Time Machine, fit the underachieving mold. The lurid, inspired title aside, fans of late-night soft-core woo-pitching will be disappointed to learn that the four people in the hot tub at the beginning of the film are all guys, three of them middle-aged. The movie has plenty...
...That would be the dignified approach, but it would not represent the full truth of my Hot Tub Time Machine experience. Vomit, poop, etc. aside, the movie made me laugh as much as anything since The Hangover or the love scenes in Avatar. (Further disclosure: The two women seated to my left hardly laughed at all, and as the lights were coming up, one said to the other, loudly and pointedly, "I think it's more of a guy's movie." I tugged on my skirt hem and tried not to feel judged.) (See the 100 best movies...
...Tub stars John Cusack, who, despite a natural tendency toward the dour, was one of the most delightful things to come out of the '80s. With the exception of 2000's High Fidelity, Cusack spent the aughts in a serious rut (Serendipity, Martian Child), so it's good to see him come back, even in something this ludicrous. He plays Adam, the semistraight man of the enterprise: reasonably successful in business but disastrous in love (his girlfriend just moved out) and in friendship, having long ago ceased calling his old pals Nick (The Office's very funny Craig Robinson...
...Some gags do fall flat. Chevy Chase is wasted as what Jacob dubs the "mystical time-traveling guy" who arrives to fix the hot tub; everything he says is mumbled nonsense and the only laugh lies in him being '80s icon Chevy Chase. But a gory running joke involving another prominent face from that decade - Back to the Future's Crispin Glover, playing a one-armed bellhop in the present and an intact but accident-prone bellhop in the past - might be the single funniest thing in the movie...
...Tub Time Machine works because it doesn't just take delight in lampooning the deserving '80s, it reminds us that our iPhone-carrying, Red Bull-swilling, video game-playing culture will soon enough make a fine target as well. The times are always changing. Walking into their ski lodge circa 1986 - just as the guys are beginning to realize that they have time-traveled, clued in by indoor cigarette smoking, a "Where's the Beef" T-shirt and Ronald Reagan live on TV - Nick grabs a woman and demands, "What color is Michael Jackson?" Her well, duh response - "Black!" - sends...