The otherwise smart-sounding John Cusack variously calls this time-wasting time-travel comedy “very” and “kind of” “smart,” “dumb” and “postmodern.” High-school pal Steve Pink (who co-wrote “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “High Fidelity”) directs a screenplay by Josh Heald, Sean Anders and John Morris that’s self-conscious in kind of very little ways about Hollywood genre comedy. Cusack plays the smartest guy on a getaway with two pals and his nephew, who was conceived in 1986 at a ski lodge. That happens to be the precise destination of this outing by these two generations of infantile straight males with really big penis issues. They hop in a hot tub and turn up in 1986. The younger selves of the three older men appear only in a few mirror scenes; we see them as they are in the present. Everyone in 1986 sees them as they were then. How do they confirm when they are? Ask someone what color Michael Jackson is. “Black” is the answer that fits with Reagan on TV, legwarmers and cassette players. “I feel 19 again,” crows one. “I want to fuck something.” Space-time shit comes down to lines like: “Step on a bug and the internet is not invented” and “Are we going to make Hitler president?” “Hot Tub Time Machine” is not timeless humor at all. With Clark Duke, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, Sebastian Stan, Lyndsy Fonseca, Crispin Glover, Chevy Chase. 93m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Ten years is greater than the blink of an eye. Trying to fashion some sort of great overarching structure for an arbitrary patch of lifetime always leaves me like the kid at the end of “Kids,” who wakes from a ruckus to ask, “What just happened?”

How do you summarize a city’s decade of filmmaking and filmgoing that starts with John Cusack the quavering voice of a generation in “High Fidelity” but finds him as dad-bait in “2012″ in 2010, while once-perennial sidekick Jeremy Piven is an Emmy-winning star-and-a-half? There’s an epic tale right there.

Chicago could be the most cinematic of cities, if you look at Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” slavishly recreating Lincoln Avenue of the Dillinger era with some pricey set dressing, but hardly having to build a thing, or if you fly with “The Dark Knight” into the gleaming sky. There are  two movies that understand  the great city, burned to the ground, its skyline rising from ashes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Roland Emmerich hoping to suggest a Fritz Lang fueled on Ecstasy and poppers?  The Teutonic apocalypticist has topped his customary grandiloquence with bursts of grandeur in the 158-minute “2012,” a bravura, breathtaking, ridiculous, assured, intermittently political, berserk masterpiece about the end of the world. As a director-producer-SFX-house-owning Euro-auteur, he has no parallel. (Timur Bekmambetov needs to notch a few more conflagrations in his belt.) The economic critique leveled against form-follows-function disjuncture in movies like “Fight Club” could escalate to Titanic scale against this pinnacle of Emmerich’s appetite for destruction. As lit and framed by Dean Semler and designed by ranks and ranks of designers, Emmerich’s provocations aren’t meant to capture the hushed, stoppled intake of breath upon encountering a finely ruined world. There’s gallery-drowned influence that’s only grown with time. Some of his images hope to sleep cheek-by-jowl with work like Maurizio Catellan’s “La Nona Ora” (The Night Hour), in which a Pope has been slain by a small, perfectly aimed bit of meteorite. Amusingly, Emmerich has shown off the yields of his profits: he’s made his London home into a gallery of boldly political art, some commissioned. He wears the galleristic influence with confident glee. He adds more and more politicized sarcasm to the kind of enterprise that was considered programmatic, say, “Gone in Sixty Wonders of the World.” Emmerich is a mephitic prankster and the perfume comes from a perfect nose, a perfect nose for what he does. With John Cusack, God bless ‘im, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Patrick Bachau. 158m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“2012″ opens Friday.

There will likely be no gold-plated casket for John Hughes, no huge wake at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and no blowout eulogies or mournful dirges from Al Sharpton and Stevie Wonder.

There should. (Please hold the bad guitar solos from an opportunistic John Mayer, though.)

While I spent my childhood mesmerized by Michael Jackson, I spent my life in communion with John Hughes.

Jackson was a superhero, his Moonwalk a secret power. Though inspiring, he was as unrelatable as any man who calls a chimp named Bubbles his friend and embraces baby tigers while striking model poses in a Don Johnson leisure suit.

Sure, from his J.D. Salinger-like reclusiveness to that tortoise-shell-eyeglasses-adorned-hunky-brooding look in the press photo making the rounds last week, Hughes had his quirks.

But, yearbook photos circa 1988 will confirm many of us also had our own questionable pompadours, frizzy haircuts and Oliver People’s-plastic-glasses-frame phase.

And, while Jackson would dangle a baby, unveil the latest horrors of his alleged plastic surgeries, and celebrate the scorn and ire he raised with a concert, an album or a stroll through a public market in a SARS-virus-chic ensemble, Hughes embraced failure in a more human way.

No one knows for sure, but it seems cinematic failures like “Curly Sue,” “Dutch,” and “Beethoven” maybe did him in, turned him into a bit of a haunted Elvis-like figure roaming his North Shore mansion or his farm in Harvard, Illinois in search of what went wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunchbacks are born into a caste of lab assistants under mad scientists. All named Igor, their duties include throwing the switch to power-up their masters’ experiments, and to affect speech impediments borrowed from their counterparts in old movies. Smartly rendered with cynical detail that’s sure to elude kids—yeah, so what?—this PG animated tale depicts one Igor (voiced by John Cusack) who dares to dream of a caste upgrade. All he has to do is invent his own weapon of mass destruction to terrorize Earth, and win the Evil Science Fair just one week away. His sidekicks are a dim brain who mislabeled his jar “Brian” (Sean Hayes) and Scamper (Steve Buscemi), a woebegone wabbit with an existential death wish thwarted by Igor’s software that makes him immortal. Igor concocts a towering uber-warrior (Molly Shannon). But there’s a glitch in uploading her motivation as a mass killer. Instead, segments of James Lipton’s “Actors Studio” cable show turn her into an aspiring star of “Annie.” She blares the show tune “Tomorrow” like a death ray. Director Tony Leondis (“Lilo & Stitch 2″) and writer Chris McKenna populate their morose Kingdom of Malaria with characters named Dr. Schadenfreude. Tasty, nasty touches abound: Igor’s homeland funds itself by blackmailing the rest of the world with the annual winner of the Evil Science Fair. Kids can get that part. With voicing by John Cleese, Jennifer Coolidge, Arsenio Hall, Sean Hayes, Eddie Izzard, Jay Leno, Molly Shannon and Christian Slater. 86m. (Bill Stamets)

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Corporations don’t kill people. People who own and operate other people do the killing. When did a corporation ever get a break on screen, let alone save the day in the last reel? Not in “War, Inc.,” an acidic rip on outsourcing that overkills. Co-producer and co-writer John Cusack plays Hauser, an ex-CIA fixer in the employ of an ex-vice president (Dan Aykroyd). Under the cover of running a Brand USA trade show, Hauser is supposed to assassinate an inconvenient oil conglomerate CEO with the unlikely name of Omar Sharif (Lyubomir Neikov). Hauser is not himself these days. “I feel like a refugee from the ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’—some morally inverted, twisted character from a Céline novel,” he confides to his jet’s GuideStar (voiced by Montel Williams). Two women throw him off his game: lefty reporter Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei) and hottie pop star Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff). Cusack and co-writers Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser pack the script with a torrent of op-ed rants. Nearly every scene is an occasion for one political obscenity or another. There’s an Implanted Journalist Experience action ride simulating battle embeds. Popcorn comes with. Pointing to a chorus line of trans-femoral amputees kicking their prosthetic gams, Hauser hypes: “Just another breathtaking example of how American know-how can alleviate the suffering it creates.” Among the lower key touches: the logo for the fictional Tamerlane Industries shares the design (color, font, graphics) of the logo for the real BAE Systems, a global defense corporation based in England. The neo-imperial U.S. corporation in the film also shares the name of the fourteenth-century Tatar conqueror of Damascus, Delhi, Baghdad, Kabul and points in between. Uzbekistan now claims Tamerlane is its founding father. “War, Inc.” is set in fictional Turaqistan, occupied by Tamerlane Industries in the “first war ever to be a hundred percent outsourced to private enterprise.” Director Joshua Seftel breaks no ground in the genre of liberal satire, though. One off-the-shelf plot element is the uber bad guy (Ben Kingsley) spelling out all of his badness—unaware that his words are being transmitted live to the world, which will surely think less of him and do all the right things. “War, Inc.” may tap no new reserves of outrage against war profiteers and D.C. puppeteers, but it barks with rabid black humor. With Joan Cusack, Sergej Trifunovic and Ned Bellamy. 107m. (Bill Stamets)