HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

Apologies to all, and beggars can’t be choosers, but Will’s pot rules. On a bench by the park I overdo it, some rustling behind makes me nervous but it’s just a squirrel. Will’s ex likes the little guys. We speculate that a parking spot too good to be empty must be haunted—but it’s Park Slope, someone will take it anyway. Like Rajiv, Will doesn’t care for previews—too much of a good thing. Okay, but when an ad for the Phish concert comes on I see my buddy Smith playing back-up for the band, and for a moment the screen’s constituent opacity wavers, turns porous, it helps that we’re in the second row, the place is packed. People are always so fucking psyched at these weekend shows, and I’m fucking psyched, Will says it’s like a hot tub in this theater which is the one that you may have been in that leaks in the rain. It does stink.

It’s these wish-fulfillers that sell tickets. This one’s male mid-life, and how great are hot tubs? Some people have ‘em in their real own houses! “Fuck wives! Fuck kids!” say the buddies, on a ski weekend meant to placate the old friend (Corddry) they’ve ignored to the point of his attempted suicide. Hey, that’s what it takes to get people out. It’s a comedy. One of the great drinking montages, and how great is booze? They get so wrecked they travel through time, and the first thing they do, aged 18 again, is ski down a mountain in a hymn to pure bodily joy.

The 80s—how great is cocaine? Cusack: “We had Reagan and AIDS.” The fashions not as they were but in dreamlike pastiche. The textual web grows dense: they avoid the butterfly effect, which is an Ashton Kutcher reference, who is the husband of a famous cougar who is an 80s star, and now these already-beleaguered middle-aged men have the cougar effect to worry about. A running castration gag involves the cutting off of an “arm.” You couldn’t get a girl to come for the life of you, back then, and you once lay in the snow with someone intriguing and briefly, weirdly interested in you. So why go back to the future? Wife and kid, dummy. “You may find yourself/living in a beautiful house…”

When a squirrel figures in the plot, Will and I trade looks. The bad guys take our heroes for communists. Might our own fears, the film asks, one day seem so overblown? A white guy almost blows a black guy. The movie’s lament: you can’t fuck your friends. The one you betrayed. It’s a comedy. The ancient form in which you go to a place so dark tragedy won’t touch it, and then in the last ten minutes tack on a wedding or, as here, a found fortune, and wrap it up by demolishing the fourth wall. Reader, are you still here?