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Four buddies, Adam (John Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson), Lou (Rob Cordry), and Adam's nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), go on a vacation together to relax and get away from their depressing situations at home. The four of them reconnect when Lou is found passed out from car-exhaust poisoning and taken to the hospital. They decide to go their old party place up at a mountain resort in Kodiak Valley. The group finds that the mountain resort isn't like it used to be and now is pretty beat up and old. After a long night of drinking, the four of them take a hot tub which turns into a time portal and sends them back to 1986 to a memorable night each of the three best friends had at K-Valley. The four realize they must relive the past the same in order for young Jacob to come into existence. Hilarity ensues. The situation they are involved in as well as what each of the characters had to say had me laughing almost the whole movie. Yes, the movie is kinda ridiculous but what were you to expect with a film title Hot Tub Time Machine. I would give this movie 4 out of 5 stars, funny, clever, and the cast was well put together. Overall, I would recommend this movie to anyone that enjoys a light, humorous film who is not to concerned with plot continuity and likes to laugh out loud. 
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In Solitary Man, Michael Douglas plays Ben Kalmen, a (former) car salesman in NYC with a heart condition who is divorced from his wife and sleeping with many young women (he's nearing 60), and his family doesn't approve. He used to have multiple dealerships on the east coast, but lost them all through bad business tactics. He's working on opening one via his current girlfriend's father's connections. He blows his opportunity to get in on the new car dealership, which was the only thing he had going in his favor. Without that he has no job, no income, no wife, and no life. Ben slowly ruins every kind of relationship in his life, personal and professional. He's an aging man living with the consequences of his actions and choices that have isolated him and dissolved his once successful business, a marriage, and most recent relationship. He has nothing left to lose. His only friend left is Danny Devito's character, who gives him a job at his diner to help him through the hard time. Being an aging man with a bad heart whose life is in tatters, Ben struggles to accept that he is a shadow of his former self, and he tries to feel young again by having relations with lots of girls much younger than him and half-heartedly working on his business by scamming his girlfriend. As it would be for anyone, it's hard for him to accept that he is responsible for the current state of his life and his mistakes spell the end for him. The problem with this movie is that you don't feel sorry for Michael Douglas' character. The film lacks emotion and depth, and while it's watchable, slow but not boring, it didn't leave me with much. Its not a very memorable or special film, but worth watching on a slow night with not much else to do.  I did not have high hopes for this film. Mostow directed Terminator 3, and for that I can never really forgive him. Bruce Willis is a great actor- The Fifth Element! Die Hard! Sixth Sense! Look Who's Talking! - but he occasionally does some pretty dumb stuff (Cop Out? Ugh...) and this looked like it might've been for him what Battlefield Earth was for John Travolta. Thankfully, everyone involved (except Travolta in Battlefield Earth) did a good job. Surrogates is centered around Tom Greer, who lives his life as a police detective and unhappily married man largely through the eyes of his robot self. Nearly the entire world is sitting in a “stim chair” all day while their “surrogates” live their lives, making the crime and infectious disease rates plummet. The real people are basically experiencing everything their robot personae do, except they can disconnect any time. Then somehow, a group of anti-surrogate renegades get their hands on a device that kill both the robot and the user at home. Well, poop. Willis and Radha Mitchell have great chemistry as the long-married couple who can barely look at each other after the death of their young son in a car accident before surrogates were as widely used. There's a great back story on how surrogates became what they are, and a lot of politics got 98% of the population using them- just like what I guess would happen if we had them. The action is pretty standard, but the dramatic parts and character development are what really kept me watching. This movie is good sci fi. All in all, I'd put this at a solid 7 out of 10- not the greatest movie of all time, but thoroughly entertaining fare with a few good warning points about staring at the computer playing WoW all day.   |
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January 2015
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