John Cusack, who will soon be joining us here at Boing Boing as a guestblogger, has a new movie out tomorrow, Friday March 26: Hot Tub Time Machine.
Ebert likes it, and that's about all I need to know. Those of you, both men and women, who are old enough to have enjoyed "electroclash" back when it was called "new wave" and came out on vinyl will likely find much to enjoy. It's sort Hangover meets H.G. Wells meets 80s nostalgia, meets a dude in a bear suit and sex jokes.
Cusack, as Ebert writes in his review, pretty much rules in everything—even goofy escapist fare such as this. As the Village Voice headline aptly explains, "The Delorean's a jacuzzi and the 80s are back." Snip from a Chicago Sun-Times interview:
Q. With a name like "Hot Tub Time Machine," you have a lot to live up to.
Cusack: I sort of thought it was the other way around. If you have a title like "Hot Tub Time Machine," that's a stupid title. Maybe people are going to think the people who made it have lost their mind completely. When they go in and see it, they're going to be so pleasantly surprised … [Laughs] It's pretty hard for people to say "Hot Tub Time Machine" does not live up to the artistic expectations we had.Q: Why did you decide to produce this movie?
Cusack: Grace [Loh, his production partner] and I thought this would be … very smart, post-modern and very dumb. Post-modern in the way that you have a movie within a movie. You have actors who were in these '80s movies going back to movies that, it's almost like Crispin [Glover] and I and Chevy [Chase] kind of being trapped into a version of film youth. We thought that mixture could be a pretty fun ride for a comedy if you get it right.
Boing Boing readers and internet continuity extremists will note that the comedy contains a few elements of historical fudging with regard to when the internet and email were invented, and by whom. And that is why FSM invented comment threads, my children.
