Caddyshack

A week over-viewing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein for an upcoming Lambcast on the movie has left me contemplating how movies—which do not change without some "Director's Cut" interference—can change over time. Because the viewer changes. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein holds up pretty well (pretty well...) from the time I saw it as a 9 year old to my current dotage. Some do not.

Case in point: Caddyshack, which, I once thought was hilarious, but now...seems rather puerile. Oh, it has moments of entertainment in spots, but a lot of the time slices, and sometimes just whiffs. It's a bogey rather than a birdie and it is certainly not the hole-in-one I remember.

So, yeah, kvetch all you like about it, but it's going out on the traditional "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Caddyshack (Harold Ramis, 1980) One has few regrets in life, hopefully. As one gets older, experience colors perception, and suddenly movies like The Rules of the Game speak to you in new ways, and movies like Caddyshack...well, I've been spending a remorseful few minutes thinking of all the people I'd recommended this movie, too.

Not that Caddyshack is horrible, mind you. But it hasn't aged well since my college days.* Fond memories of Harold Ramis' "Animal House for Juvenile Adults" is full of references and gags that seem geezer-ish. But there are some things that hold up. It's Chevy Chase's funniest performance in the movies (I believe that is the very definition of "Damning with Faint Praise"), and one of Bill Murray's wildest--you get the impression that they were winging it, Chase improvising the physical with Murray skewering the dialog. It showed Rodney Dangerfield to be a weirdly endearing clumsy performer for the movies, and it's Ted Knight at his foolish best.

Two bits still work--the "Baby Ruth" gag, and the little mini-epic contained in it of the minister's perfect game in the rain. But, don't be surprised if the one thing you take away from it is John Dykstra's roly-poly gopher puppet.

* It reminds of the recent reactions to the release of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." series on DVD, where the adults who watched it as kids ask facetiously why it was re-filmed using a "crap filter," that made all the sets look like cheesy back-lots, the performances hammy, and the thrills, not so much. Memories are yet green. The reality is oft-times compost.

Hot Tub Time Machine

Written at the time of the film's release. Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day....

"What...Again?!"

These things go in cycles, but every so often someone has to do the "If I Knew Then What I Know Now..." movie. Let's tick off a few, shall we? Big, Freaky Friday, Vice Versa, Like Father Like Son, Peggy Sue Got Married, 18 Again! (with Charlie Schlatter), 17 Again (with Zac Efron), they (and I'm sure I've left one or a dozen out) tell the story of a bitter adult who yearns to go back to the time when they were happy...before all "THAT" happened, and they learn...what, that life wasn't as good as they thought, or they'd probably do the same thing all over again...whatever, their eyes are opened to some basic truths about themselves or their times and that "there's no time like the present." It's the future, get used to it.

After so many variations (or are they parallel universes) on the theme, we should be used to it by now. Sadly, Hot Tub Time Machine is a roll-back to those films without significantly supplanting that feeling of Déjà vu while seeing it. It actually feels like a been there/done that version of Back to the Future (very much so*) in the process, with only an an upsurge in smut to recommend it. Even the era the quartet goes to (Reagan's 80's) is a recall of the period where these "do-over" films occurred with alarming frequency...again and again.

The basic plot is: after their friend Lou (Rob Corddry) attempts suicide, buddies Adam (John Cusack), a recently dumped insurance salesman, and Nick Webber-Agnew (Craig Robinson) decide to take their friend (as well as Adam's nephew, played by Clark Duke) on a sentimental journey for the weekend to their favorite party location—Kodiak Valley Ski Resort, which has fallen on hard times.

At least the room still has a hot-tub. But a drunken slob-party knocks vodka and an illegal Russian energy drink, Chernoblé, into the hot tub's controls sending the four back to 1986 and that one eventful week-end they'd celebrated before. After that, everything went down-hill for them, so it's conveeeeenient that the HTTM takes them to that one point in time. From then on, it's Big Hair, poofy parkas and leg-warmers, some minor time-goofs, and 80's references around every corner.

Corddry's character comes out strongest,** an anarchic spirit dispirited, a man so debauched that anything and everything can and should be tried if only to feel something, anything from the torpor he suffers from. For him, life is a gateway drug. He learns the valuable lesson: events in time are not fixed, they can be changed. He discovers this, first, to his pain, and then, to his delight, and its his very go-for-broke spirit that "makes things happen," to everybody's advantage. And for a movie guided by John Cusack and directed by Steve Pink (who co-produced the superior Grosse Pointe Blank starring Cusack), the movie adheres to a fairly conservative conclusion, where the entrepreneurial spirit (and a bit of insider-trading prescience) can conquer your inner slacker. W. would be proud.

I wonder if that's what they intended.

From a technical stand-point, the movie's sort of a mess. Oh, it keeps its concurrent time-lines properly creased, but it has the look and feel of an 80's B-movie, not unlike Better Off Dead (also starring Cusack), which felt like it was hurried through (despite a good first half) and then it became a matter of knuckling down and finishing the thing within time and budget...but not inspiration. It has the feel of a low-end TV-movie that could never be shown on TV due to its raunchiness.

It's okay to waste a couple hours on, but, really, don't you have better things to do with YOUR time? You just might want to experiment with your own hot tub to get those hours back.

* Okay, instead of a Delorean Time Machine, this one is another 80's icon, a hot tub. The boys—it is SUCH a boy's movie—must recreate the disastrous weekend they'd experienced: Cusack's character suffers a nasty break-up, while being stabbed with a fork, Cusack's nephew keeps zapping away—rather than fading—if his conception doesn't happen, Richardson's character introduces a song that hasn't happened yet—"but you'll love it" he says—Corddry's character must suffer the same fight-humiliation he originally did, and uses his knowledge of the future to alter events. Crispin Glover's in both films, and Chevy Chase's character could be Doc Bown in disguise. Sure, it could be an "homage," but it plays like a set-piece by set-piece remake—and that was done in Back to the Future, Part II. In fact, the more I think about it, Zemeckis and Gale have a potentially lucrative law-suit brewing. But then it's released through United Artists, so maybe "lucrative" doesn't apply).

** Who comes off the worst is Chevy Chase in an ill-conceived half-idea of an Alternate Reality Hot Tub Maintenance Man. Maybe they thought Chase would add something to the proceedings with some choice ad-libs, but if he did, the part was a real dud to begin with. I kept hoping that he'd be revealed to be Clark Griswold thrown out of the time-space continuum by a Christmas lighting disaster.