Here’s the trailer from from DOCTOR WHO: The Hungry Earth, which will have it’s U.S. premiere this Saturday on BBC America.
“It’s 2020, and the most ambitious drilling project in history has reached deeper beneath the Earth’s crust than man has ever gone before — but now the ground itself is fighting back.
The Doctor, Amy, and Rory arrive in a tiny mining village and find themselves plunged into a battle against a deadly danger from a bygone age.”
Directed by Ashley Way
Written by Chris Chibnall
Guest Stars: Arthur Darvill (Rory),
Meera Syal, Neve McIntosh, Robert Pugh, Samuel Davies
Airs this Saturaday at 9PM ET/PT
According to The Hollywood Reporter
Ivan Reitman’s (GHOSTBUSTERS) Montecito Picture Company and Paramount have picked up a a science fiction adventure-comedy script called FIELD TRIP from Jordan Cahan (MY BEST FRIEND’S GIRL).
While few details are available, it appears the film concerns a time-traveling trip by a high scool teacher and his students.
Paramount and Walden Media (CHRONICLES OF NARNIA) will apparently co-finance the picture. Note: Art our conception, not from film.
This is one trip down memory lane that few viewers wanted to take, and it is easy to see why: HOT TUB TIME MACHINE is an unwieldy welding-together of sentimental soul-searching and gross out humor. The audience interested in the pathos will be repulsed by the crude comedy, and the audience waiting to laugh at the crude comedy will be bored by the pathos.
The story plays as if someone pitched the film as an “R-rated spin on BACK TO THE FUTURE.” Two middle-aged men take a suicidal friend to a ski resort to cheer him up; along with a younger nephew, the end up transported back to the 1980s by the titular “Hot Tub Time Machine” (which is an actual line in the film, and actually gets a chuckle, thanks to the deliberately hokey delivery by Craig Robinson). Their disruptive presence in the past threatens the future existence of the nephew, who was apparently conceived on this eventful weekend. The question becomes how to get back to the future before some inadvertent action unleashes the “butterfly effect” with catastrophic consequences (like “Hitler becoming president,” as one characters suggests, ignoring the fact that, even twenty-five years in the past, Hitler is already dead).
Unfortunately, the script is marred by inconsistencies that render the storyline pointless. A mysterious repairman (Chevy Chase) shows up to fix the broken hot tub time machine and informs the the three middle-aged men that, in order to keep the timeline unruptured, they must relive the exact events of the long-ago weekend they spent at the resort, then return to the future within twenty-four hours. This leads to one of the script’s amusing touches: many of the events that need to be relived are extremely painful, and the characters are understandably reluctant to experience them a second time.
Around the time you are starting to wonder why anyone would wax nostalgic for a place filled with such miserable memories, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE makes a big mistake: having milked the concept for a few gags, the script allows everyone drifts off and do whatever they want, future consequences be damned. In effect, the story’s “time lock” is unlocked, but the script blunders on regardless. With the central plot device essentially ignored, there is no longer any engine driving the narrative, and the story disintegrates into a muddled mess of uninvolving episodes. When the film itself cannot even decide on its own rules, we have little reason to care about whether the characters stay in the past or return to the future.
This is not quite enough to ruin the film’s best running joke, but it does hurt: Giving HOT TUB TIME MACHINE’s best performance, Crispin Glover (the father from BACK TO THE FUTURE) plays a bellhop with an understandable chip on his shoulder: the poor fellow has only one arm – at least in present day; in the past, he is perfectly normal (well, as normal as Crispin Glover can be). Knowing that the bellhop is bound to lose the arm, the audience squirms at each potential catastrophe (among other things, the character creates ice sculptures with a chainsaw that he hurls up into the air). Even better, the script forces viewers into the uncomfortable position of not only anticipating – but welcoming – the eventual dismemberment, because we don’t want some change in the past to result in something like “Hitler becoming president” (as one character suggests, overlooking the fact that Hitler is already dead, even in the past). The problem is, once the four leads have abandoned trying to recreate their own miserable past lives, it makes no sense that the bellhop should be forced to suffer his misfortune – and yet the film keeps urging us to anticipate the gorey event (which, when it comes, is done in a MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL style that doesn’t jibe with the film’s overall tone).* Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Rob Corddry, and John Cusack contemplate the Hot Tub Time Machine.
There are a handful good laughs in between the blow-job jokes, as when one character, angry and drunk and eager to use his knowledge of the future to lash out at the characters in the past, warns that John Lennon will be shot – then realizes that this has already happened. John Cusack has a few nice moments that make you almost understand why he would be in such a stinker. Chevy Chase is at least tolerably amusing (which is saying something, these days). And as big a mess as the film is, its strange combination of elements is just weird enough to be interesting – not good, but interesting. In the end, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE tries to preach a message about friendship and the value of sticking together throughout the years. It may even have been intended with heart-felt sincerity, but you can’t help noticing that, the real reason the story turn out well, is that one character cheats, using his future knowledge to make a fortune. Friendship may be esteemed, but money makes the world go ’round. HOT TUB TIME MACHINE (2010). Directed by Steve Pink. Written by Josh Heald and Sean Anders & John Morris. Cast: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Crispin Glover, Lyndsy Fonseca, Chevy Chase, Lizzy Caplan. FOOTNOTE
And if you stop and think about it, there is no reason the fateful accident had to happen on this particular weekend. The bellhop could have lost his arm anytime during the ensuing decades, but the writers seem to have never considered this.
USA Today has posted an interview with the stars of the sci-fi comedy HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. While mostly a portrait of how John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson riff off one another in a good-natured way, there is the occasional snippet of discussion about, you know, the actual movie they are promoting:
Luckily, Cusack — who also produced Hot Tub —has a sense of humor about himself. The film’s mockery of the 1980s is partly a mockery of him, since he helped define the era for teenagers with his earliest films, including Sixteen Candles, The Sure Thing, Better off Dead, One Crazy Summer and Say Anything. “I thought that would be one of the things that is fun about it,” he says. “It’s a mix of snarky, and post-modern, and really, really dumb comedy. Profoundly stupid.”
[…]
You’re either in or out with the title,” Cusack says. “I thought it would be the greatest, recreational water-based time-travel movie in history.”
“Better than Sauna Wormhole?” Corddry asks, making one up off the top of his head.
“Better than Whirlpool Wayback?” Robinson adds.
“There are other time-travel movies,” Cusack says. “None of them are as good — or as water-based.”
An article in the Congleton Guardian offers a preview of what to expect from the new DR. WHO. Actor Matt Smith, who recently replaced the departing David Tennant as the long-lived Time Lord, says his episodes will feature “madness, tenderness and recklessness with adventure and risk.”
The 26th-year-old Smith is the youngest actor yet cast as the Doctor, who periodically “regenerates” into a new appearance (which helps smooth over the recasting that has kept the show going for decades).
The biggest surprise in the article comes from head writer Steven Moffat, who suggests the possibility of a romance between the Doctor and new companion Amy Pond (Karen Gillan). This strikes a somewhat sour note. DR. WHO began as a children’s show, and even after it attracted a wider, older audience, it kept to the tradition of an intellectual, advanced alien unencumbered by traditional human emotions. After a long hiatus, the recent revival of the series, starting in 2004 with Christopher Eccleston, poked fun at this tradition but kept it basically intact (company Rose Tyler’s friends and family kept assuming the Doctor was her new boyfriend, despite emphatic denials).
So, wil the new DR. WHO overthrow that tradition? Says Moffat:
“You take two attractive people and they will probably be a bit romantic about each other.”It is a complex story between Amy and the doctor, it is not simple. It is not a story you have ever seen between the companion and the Doctor before.”
Well, if that’s the direction they go, I hope they can make it work. The one previous move in this direction, with Paul McGann delivering a kiss to his leading lady in the disappointing 1996 American tele-film, was an awkward sop thrown in, no doubt, to appease the Fox television network. It does not bode well.
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer releases this R-rated comedy about four bored guys who return to their happy-go-lucky earlier years with the help of the titiular time machine. Considering the cheezy title and low-ball premise, it is a bit surprising to see John Cusack in the lead. Equally surprising, the film was directed by Steve Pink, who co-wrote two fine films Cusak, GROSSE POINTE BLANK and HIGH FIDELITY. Josh Heald and Sean Anders & John Morris wrote the script. Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Crispin Glover, and Chevy Chase round out the cast.
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THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE is a wildly romantic love story that can easily be seen as an exercise in the old surrealist concept of L’ Amour Fou, the kind of mad love that defies all the conventions of society. In this film, it is made even more surrealistic by the additional twist of two lovers having to overcome the barrier of a shifting space-time continuum. THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE is also a book (by first time author Audrey Niffenegger), that follows a pattern set by two previous romantic novels, where the lovers are separated by a breech in time, Robert Nathan’s PORTRAIT OF JENNIE and Richard Matheson’s BID TIME RETURN. Like those stories, scriptwriter Bruce Joel Rubin provides a short and sweet explanation for why Eric Bana as Henry has the ability to time travel (a genetic anomaly), with the caveat that his journeys are totally uncontrollable. He never knows when or where he may suddenly vanish into the past or the future. By strictly logical standards some viewers may find this a grievous fault, but that is actually the whole point of the story. L’ Amour Fou is totally irrational, (as is traveling through time) and neither can ever be explained logically. However, they are still fascinating concepts to contemplate, which is what gives the picture its surrealistic tinge and such an emotional charge.
Bruce Joel Rubin who won an Academy Award for writing Ghost was totally captivated by the book’s vision and the breadth of its imagination when he first read it. “I thought the story was profoundly told and I wanted to help translate it to the screen,” explains Rubin, “so I pursued this project with a vengeance. The book is very complex and it was especially challenging to juggle all the different timeframes. I decided the love story would dictate the flow of the movie. Scene by scene, the romance had its own journey through time, but as long as that journey made emotional sense, it never betrayed me.”
Since the emotional romantic journey is what is at the heart of the movie, it is crucial that the two leading actors have a very special on-screen chemistry. The kind displayed by Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten in Portrait of Jennie and by Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time. Here, the combination of Eric Bana as Henry and Rachel McAdams as Claire proves equally as fortuitous, since both actors seem as if they were truly made for each other. Their earnest performances also will help more skeptical viewers accept the fantastic nature of the story much more readily.
Director Robert Schwentke’s approach to the picture was to also focus on the love story, and treat the fantasy elements in a casual, matter of fact manner. He even claims the movie ”is not really a science fiction film. It is an emotional journey about two people in a relationship, and the time travel is the catalyst for things that both strengthen and test their bond. You could argue that time travel is the thing that brought them together, but it ultimately causes all sorts of conflicts. So I saw it as an opportunity to make a great love story, but at the same time we were able to weave some undercurrents into the fabric of that relationship. That feels more truthful to me, especially in a story that starts out with two people who are given the incredible gift of finding the person with whom they belong. It’s important that at some point they earn it.”
Schwentke realizing the important role editing would play in the picture, hired veteran film editor Thom Noble, whose first film as editor was Francois Truffuat’s Fahrenheit 451. Schwentke explains, “The movie is intentionally fragmented at the beginning, mirroring the state of Henry’s life. Then, after he finds Clare their relationship becomes Henry’s anchor. Things are more settled, which we tried to echo cinematically. In a way, the rhythms of their life dictated the rhythms of our film. Those shifts should be subtle, but hopefully they have a cumulative effect.”
Schwentke also provides us with some beautifully staged sequence shots, particularly a long steadicam panning shot of Henry and Clare’s dream house, brought with Henry’s huge winnings in a lottery after he finds out the winning numbers. The shot goes in and out of rooms and windows showing us events from their life together that provides a refreshing change from a more traditional montage that might normally be used to show the passing of time.
It’s also quite a change to see a handsome leading actor like Eric Bana in a full-fledged romantic role, instead of the mostly male dominated action thrillers he has become more widely known for. Oddly enough, it’s the same kind of rare choice Brad Pitt made when he appeared in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Cate Blanchett. Ironically, Pitt and his then wife, Jennifer Aniston, first acquired the rights to The Time Traveler’s Wife back in 2003, and at one point in time, they probably wanted to play the leading roles themselves. Their loss proves to be Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana’s gain, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them together again in the future, perhaps becoming an on screen couple in the romantic tradition of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.
Only time will tell.
You can see additional pictures from The Time Traveler’s Wife at my Facebook page HERE. THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE (New Line Cinema). Directed by Robert Schwentke. Screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin, based on the novel by Audrey Niffenegger. Produced by Nick Wechsler and Dede Gardner. Cinematography by Florian Ballhaus. Production designer: Jon Hutman. Film editor: Thom Noble. Costume designer: Julie Weiss. Music by Mychael Danna.
CAST: Rachel McAdams (Clare); Eric Bana (Henry); Arliss Howard (Richard DeTamble); Ron Livingston (Gomez); Stephen Tobolowsky (Dr. Kendrick).
Adaptedfrom Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel of 2003, Robert Schwentke’s THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, asks us to suspend our disbelief, and if we are to enjoy this film at all, that is exactly what we must do. Starring Eric Bana as the agonised-looking Henry, and Rachel McAdams as Clare, THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE demands that we ask no questions, for if we stop for even a brief moment to ponder, we will realise what utter nonsense it is. The Time Traveler’s Wife begins just moments before the death of Henry’s mother in an auto accident. Henry who is sitting in the back seat, suddenly disappears; he turns up naked at the roadside, where an older Henry has come back in time to tell him not to worry. Right away it is established that Henry can choose where and when he will ‘travel’ to. Why, then, the rest of the film tries to convince us that he has no control over it, is beyond me and I was instantly annoyed that I was being played for a fool.
We never see Henry fighting dinosaurs, or having dinner with Henry the Eighth; instead he keeps going to the same meadow to visit his wife when she was a child. Remember now, this man is naked when he ‘travels’, and on their first meeting his wife is a six year old girl. I found this a little uncomfortable. This six-year old Clare is instantly infatuated with Henry and knows that he is the man of her dreams, and one day when she grows up, he will be hers. It’s a little disturbing, to see this grown man constantly visiting this little girl.
There are obvious benefits to Henry’s ‘condition’, such as being able to escape the law, and the knowledge of this week’s lottery numbers; in some ways, this isn’t a curse at all. For Clare and Henry, however, constantly being separated when they least expect it, it does become a problem. The ‘travelling’ intensifies when Clare keeps miscarrying because her unborn baby ‘travels’ from the womb. Henry, trying to find a solution to this problem, has a vasectomy, but a younger, pre-vasectomy Henry, soon put a spanner in the works!
There are mildly amusing moments; there are touching moments, but most of all this film left me irritated. I know that most time travel films have holes in the plot that leave you sitting and trying to figure out ‘How does that work then?’ and ‘Could that be possible?’ – but some time travel films (for intance, the Back to the Future series) are so ingenious and well orchestrated that you can’t help loving them. In comparison The Time Traveler’s Wife is clumsy and dull; it is clear from the get go that it is total gibberish.
Bana had a permanent look of discomfort on his face, which was not particularly appealing, and neither of the two leads ‘played a blinder’. Their daughter Alba at different ages was played by Tatum and Hailey McCann, who looked so ghoulish they would not have been out of place in The Shining! Ron Livingston played the best part as Clare and Henry’s friend Gomez; he brought a little energy to an otherwise flat and unexciting film. The Time Traveler’s Wife is an average film, with average acting, and a feeble story. It is an easy way to pass the time, but will certainly not leave a lasting impression.
Eric Bana as the Time Traveler
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE (2009). Directed by Robert Schwentke. Screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin. Cast: Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams, Ron Livingston.
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The big-budget feature film version of LAND OF THE LOST turns out to be an amiable summer popcorn movie, enlivened with eye-popping production design, impressive make-up and special effects, enthusiastic performances, and a handful of good jokes. Unfortunately, the best moments are all on view in the various trailers and film clips available on the Internet, which makes the experience of watching the complete film somewhat disappointing. It’s not bad, but for a film that seems to have been constructed simply to string together a series of laugh-out-loud comedy set-pieces, the results are oddly muted, mostly mild chuckles dispersed at discrete intervals. Without a strong story to engage the audience, LAND OF THE LOST winds up feeling disjointed and episodic, but at least it is so eager to please that you wind up wanting to like it perhaps a bit more than you actually do.
The basic premise is ripe for classic comedy: Will Ferrell plays a discredited scientist who builds a machine that warps him into another dimension where past, present, and future co-exist, and faced with numerous dangers, he inevitably makes the wrong decision about everything. Chief among those dangers is Grumpy the Tyrannasaurus Rex with a brain the size of a walnut (but wait till you get a look at the size of walnuts in the Land of the Lost!j).
As long as LAND OF THE LOST sticks to Grumpy, Chaka the ape man, and so forth, it is reasonably amusing. It starts to go astray when a new plot element is introduced: it’s not enough that our characters want to get home; they have to save the universe from an evil villain. Ho-hum, where have we heard that before?
Occasionally, director Brad Silberling seems uncertain of what tone to strike. Although LAND OF THE LOST is marketed as a family film, there are a few slightly crude jokes (like having Chaka cop of feel of the leading lady’s breasts). And as if to convince us that this is not just a silly comedy, Silberling gratuitously tosses the severed arm of an ice cream vendor who pops into the Land of the Lost just long enough to be devoured by dinosaurs. If the intent was to convince us that the film’s jeopardy is realy, it fails, coming across like a bad joke.
Ferrell is funny as the pathetic paleontologist. Also good is Danny McBride as someone accidentally roped into the time travel adventure, who offers his ordinary guy reactions to the scientist’s blase acceptance of wild and amazing sights around them. Anna Friel is mostly given the straight woman role (she is even reduced to damsel in distress at the end), while the guys get to do all the funny stuff. Leonard Nimoy provides the voice for one briefly seen Sleestak character.
Judging by the footage seen in trailers and clips that does not show up in the actual film, LAND OF THE LOST was shot with a free-wheeling, improvisatory style. No doubt, much of this footage will show up as deleted scenes on the DVD. Too bad with all that extra footage, the editor couldn’t come up with 100 great minutes for the theatrical version. UPDATE: I just wanted to add that any film that not only contains the line “Matt Lauer can suck it” – but also makes Matt Lauer himself say it on screen – deserves at least some small measure of appreciation. Grumpy the T-Rex reaches for some snack food. LAND OF THE LOST (2009). Directed by Brad Silberling. Screenplay by Chris Henchy & Dennis McNicholas, based on the Land of the Losttelevision series by Sid & Marty Krofft. Producers: Jimmy Miller, Sid & Marty Krofft. Executive Producers: Julie Wixson-Darmody, Daniel Lupi, Adam McKay, Brad Silberling. Cast: Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Anna Friel, Jorma Taccone.
[serialposts]
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE is a wildly romantic love story that can easily be seen as an exercise in the old surrealist concept of L’ Amour Fou, the kind of mad love that defies all the conventions of society. In this film, it is made even more surrealistic by the additional twist of two lovers having to overcome the barrier of a shifting space-time continuum. THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE is also a book (by first time author Audrey Niffenegger), that follows a pattern set by two previous romantic novels, where the lovers are separated by a breech in time, Robert Nathan’s PORTRAIT OF JENNIE and Richard Matheson’s BID TIME RETURN. Like those stories, scriptwriter Bruce Joel Rubin provides a short and sweet explanation for why Eric Bana as Henry has the ability to time travel (a genetic anomaly), with the caveat that his journeys are totally uncontrollable. He never knows when or where he may suddenly vanish into the past or the future. By strictly logical standards some viewers may find this a grievous fault, but that is actually the whole point of the story. L’ Amour Fou is totally irrational, (as is traveling through time) and neither can ever be explained logically. However, they are still fascinating concepts to contemplate, which is what gives the picture its surrealistic tinge and such an emotional charge.
