1. Did I enjoy the movie? YES
I have to love a movie where a man says to a group of people, gathered in the back of a bar to watch him preform fellatio on his best friend after losing a bet on a football game because the squirrell he had puked on earlier disrupted the timestream, "Where do you people come from?"
2. Would I watch it again? YES
It's been almost two weeks since I've seen the film and I'm still talking about. This is going to be a cult film and I will need to work on memorizing the lines. I do wonder who I will be bonding with over quips from this film?
If I had a time machine would I go back to that sad glad rightside down time of my life that was nineteen. Being thirty-five, the obvious answer is no. No thank you! I am old enough to realize my youthfull dream to marry Corrine from Sleater-kinney would still not happen. Even with my older mature knowledge. (Knowing how to program an Ipod really won't help much here) I am wise enough to be okay with that. Time does that. Heals all wounds as our forefathers used to say.
And maybe the men in this movie did the same. They did not actually travel through time. Maybe these three men did not travel through time back to when they were eighteen, but merely entered their memories of being eighteen and came to grips with what happenned. In the Tarot, the symbol of the cups represents emotion and the memory. Isn't a hot tub nothing but a giant cup. Introduce the power of will and intellect through the symbol of air: the lightning bolt on the Chernobyly, and BAM! Time-Travel! Back in the past, back inside their memories of the past, they find things are not as they remember. It's called maturation. It happens to everyone. Most memories when closely examined are not what we thought they were. The schoolyard seems smaller then you remember. You have kids and understand why your parents did what they did. This is the mechanism of memory at work. You travel back to a past point of time. You inhabit the person you were but can't help but think like the person you are. You realize the past wasn't everything you thought it was. You come to accept that what you considered failures might actually be successes. You return from your memories. You now see what you thought was the life you ended up with is actually the life you have built. Empowered you make new choices, hopefully better choices. Or at least, that's what I try to do. How about you?
When I saw the trailer for this film and the werewolf makeup on the poster, I was really excited to see this re-imagined classic horror tale. To be fair, the makeup and look of the picture is the best I have seen in a werewolf film. However, I was really let down by most everything else. Let's start with the acting. Anthony Hopkins is going through the motions in this movie. The other actors are okay, although I didn't sense a strong chemistry in the romance part of the story. The screenplay has some really laughable dialogue, with several of these howls (the wrong kind) being delivered by Hopkins himself. The pacing and the use of music and sound is also wrong. It begins way too fast, the werewolf attacks at super-powered speed and the sound and music tell us when to be scared rather than support the natural scares. The technology is also faulty, the obvious CGI werewolf running through the woods looks fake. I could go on, but you get the point. I'm sad that such excellent costumes, sets and makeup were placed in such a bad movie. An early candidate for my least favorite films of the year.
