In Which Intercourse In A Whirlpool Is A Disturbing Prospect At Best

Rise of the Meta-LOL

by LAUREN BANS

Hot Tub Time Machine

dir. Steve Pink

108 minutes

Hot tubs were at risk of going the way of waterbeds (that is: kaput) and Hot Tub Time Machine is the best save the vessel campaign I’ve seen this century. That isn’t saying much, but if you’re a Jew like me who likes to play word association games on Friday nights, when someone says “Hot Tub!” you say, “Folliculitus!” When your friend groans and intones again “HOT TUB”, you say, “DO NOT HAVE SEX IN ONE.”

Seriously, why do goys want to have sex in hot tubs? I cannot think of a less fun way to get scabby AIDS.  But at least now hot tubs can claim to be something other than a regretfully-baked bacterial clafoutis. That was the point of this opener, I think.

I mean this next sentence as the ultimate compliment: Hot Tub Time Machine is the greatest execution of an idea that came to someone who was high on the marijuana drugs. Usually baked ideas suffer from the fact that absurdity is the only selling point, but HTTM managed to construct an honestly funny movie around the initial concept.

John Cusack plays an older, but still emotionally stunted version of Lloyd Dobbler like he always does. He’s just lost yet another girlfriend and has a sadsack life. Rob Cordry is his eternally-drunk asshole of a friend.

Craig Robinson, the highlight of the movie, plays Nick - an emasculated shell of a man who took his philandering wife’s last name, a signifier in this Apatarded world that he is a big ole pussy. It’s okay to suspend disbelief that these people would be best friends because we’ve already conceded to the plot device of hot tub-cum-time machine, so.

The entire CGI budget of this film was spent on perfecting really forceful projectile vomiting. But those are the worst jokes in the movie, and they’re not even so bad. There are also a lot of black cock jokes, though I’d like to believe that while audiences might have David Duke humor centers, they have Bennetton hearts.

Also, on a more general note: me and Don DeLillo are super happy with all the meta-LOLs in movies these days! John Cusack writing Say Anything-esque break-up poetry when he’s back in the 80’s? Excellent. I would have appreciated if he would have used the time travel opportunity to neg out of 2012 and Must Love Dogs but maybe there wasn’t enough turnaround time.

Of course because this was a film, there needed to be heart or whatever. Lizzie Caplan provides that as John Cusack’s love interest. She is apparently the only decently cool female to exist in the ‘80s.  

In female-oriented rom coms you’ll get a choice a few decent men because women love buffets, but in male coms WITH ADDED ROMANCE, of all the Earth’s females there’s only one who has, like, ever read a book or made a fart joke, and the choice might as well be handed down on a stone tablet from God. I’m sorry, but that scenario is so teasingly unfair. If that were true, I would have like 8 million boyfriends.  But IRL Molly Lambert and Julie Klausner exist. FUCK.

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can read more of her work here and here and here. She twitters here.

"Four Score and Seven" - Titus Andronicus (mp3)

"A More Perfect Union" - Titus Andronicus (mp3)

"A Pot In Which To Piss" - Titus Andronicus (mp3)

In Which We Teach James Cameron A Thing Or Two

The Unsubtle

by LAUREN BANS

Avatar

dir. James Cameron

161 minutes

There are still things Hollywood has yet to learn in this brave new age of cinema. Maybe most importantly —  no matter how good the CGI or whatever brand new visual technology they’re flashing before our eyeholes may be, nothing trumps a believable story and good acting. 2012 may have realistically wreaked destruction upon the Christ the Redeemer statue, but the fact remains someone cast Lloyd Dobler as the one American who can outdrive the crumbling earth in a limo. Oops.

James Cameron’s Avatar is saddled with this same problem. The 3D experience is incredible. It’s stunningly immersive and immaculately executed. The camerawork is exciting without any overly graphic scenes (a surprise stabbing in 3D could really spur a heart attack).

It’s like spending 3 hours in a Lisa Frank folder on acid. You might as well invest in 3D Lasik now — it will only save you money in the long run. The visual revolution is here. The only thing that could possibly be more entertaining than watching Avatar in 3D would be some sort of Avatar 4D screening, wherein James Cameron stands behind your seat yelling, “Watching you watch my movie is like watching two monkeys fuck a football.”

As an allegory, Avatar is a hit-you-over-the-head cautionary against American imperialism set on a moon called Pandora. There live a hot blue-bodied humanoid species, the Na’vi, and they inhabit a tree parked right over the mineral we grabby earthlings came for. It’s called UNOBTAINIUM. (Close runner up in the unsubtle naming pool: Nevergonnagetitium.)

For all you worrywarts out there, rest assured, despite all current signs to the contrary, America is still the number #1 world power in James Cameron’s future. The foreigners on base in Pandora can easily be divided into the good science-y Americans who just want to better understand the Na’vi people and the bad overly-militaristic ones who see the Na’vi as savages in the way of a precious resource.

Jake Sully, a paraplegic jarhead straddles the line between these two extremes, and he’s sent into the forest as a “dreamwalker”—a human embodying a genetically-forged, controllable Na’vi avatar. Jake lies in a pod, a scientist presses a red button, and poof he’s in the forest running around with a ten-inch electric blue cock.

Of course, when Jake’s journey begins his only goal is to spy on the Na’vi people. But as he learns more about them and is trained in the Na’vi way, he grows to like the Na’vi and see them as the benevolent, advanced society that they are. This of course is made easy because Cameron endows the blue people with English-speaking abilities, hot bodies, classically beautiful features, and the exact same family structure and benevolent rule as the greats of Western civ. It’s just so natural to love ‘em. They’re not ugly and they’re totally like us!

There are important lessons to be learned from these easily swallowed anthropomorphic creatures. For one, the Na’vi are super attuned to their environment. In fact, they can just plug their ponytails into trees and horse-like creatures and immediately become in synch with their surroundings.  Which is a good lesson for us—we Americans SHOULD be more plugged into the world, more in tune with our delicate ecosystem or whatever. When I got home from the theater I plugged my ponytail into my iPod receptor and immediately had the greatest synchgasm of my life.

But the more blatant lesson of Avatar is not that American imperialism is bad, but that in fact it’s necessary. Sure there are some bad Americans—the ones with tanks ready to mercilessly kill the Na’vi population, but Jake is set up as the real embodiment of the American spirit. He learns Na’vi fighting tactics better than the Na’vi themselves, he takes the King’s daughter for his own, he becomes the only Na’vi warrior in centuries to tame this wild dragon bird thing. Even in someone else’s society the American is the chosen one. He’s going to come in, lead your army, fuck your princesses, and just generally save the day for you. Got it? This is how we do it.

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs here. She twitters here. She last wrote in these pages on our robotic future.

"Dandelion" - Charlotte Gainsbourg (mp3)

"Greenwich Mean Time" - Charlotte Gainsbourg (mp3)

"Trick Pony" - Charlotte Gainsbourg (mp3)

"Time of the Assassins" - Charlotte Gainsbourg (mp3)

In Which We Await The Imminent Robot Takeover

The Deserted Robotic Future

by LAUREN BANS

There are really only two reasons to watch Cherry 2000.

1.) You’re an insomniac whose penchant for Battlestar takes you to the SciFi channel at 3am, or

2.) You have this theory that you tend to divulge whilst intoxicated on dates about how exactly the inevitable robot takeover is going to happen, and Cherry 2000 happens to be a 1987 Melanie Griffith film about futuristic sex robots.

You watch it all Tylenol PMed up on late night cable or you Netflix it with the intention to learn.

(The theory goes something like this: In five to ten years the first specially designed sex robots will be ready for the market, but too expensive, they’ll first appear in brothels. Theeeeen the crazy people who salivate over stab sex fantasies will start being extra violent to robot prostitutes because they’re just robots, you know, and some people will even tout this development as good — like in the same way people thought that child molesters could safely and discreetly exercise their craving for 9 year olds on Second Life and avoid To Catch A Predator camera time.

But eventually all this violence towards sex robots will start to make us feel bad. No one likes to see any sort of being-ish thing victimized, and we’ll begin to lobby for sex robot rights. And the sexbots will win more and more rights and gain greater and greater access to resources, because it seems like the humane thing to do, but then one day they’ll plug themselves into the power grid and OMGOMGOMG...EVENT HORIZON...I can barely see it, it’s so hard to describe, but stock up on Diet Mountain Dew and regional topography maps and prayer books and please, someone hold my hand as we run. (Nitasha?) Also see: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.)

Beyond the evolution of sexbots, Cherry 2000 is about the impotency of the middle income male yuppie, a man who has no power at his job but makes decent money, who vaguely looks like a pervy version of Seth Meyers as if Seth Meyers wasn’t pervy-faced already, and whose greatest comfort is coming home to a hot yes woman who cooks his favorite dinner and spouts pre-programmed compliments about his dick. I feel like maybe it’s a portrait of an I-banker.

The first scene of the movie is man-bot frottage on the kitchen floor. Suds from the overflowing dishwasher pour down on the two. The sexbot’s breasts look incredibly supple. Then the suds short-circuit Cherry’s wiring causing sparks to fly everywhere, and right away you realize that you’re not actually dealing with a normalish well dressed office drone, but a guy who is willing to stick his cock in an electric box. There is just so much room for character development.

Sam’s friends try to take him to a bar to meet human ladies, but, like, blood-based pussy is just so frakking difficult. One lady calls him an asshole for a minor faux pas. All the women kind of look tired and saggy, and there are CONTRACTS REQUIRED FOR CASUAL SEX (actually, is this maybe a good idea?) He decides he won’t give up the dream of getting a new Cherry, but his favored model is only stored in a dangerous robot graveyard somewhere near what used to be Las Vegas, because in the movies the future always is a desert. SRSLY, THINK ABOUT IT. And he needs to hire Melanie Griffith, a brassy tough-as-nails tracker with a phone sex voice, to help him. Lover-like bickering, shooting of bad guys, and sexually tense montages to Moog-y music ensue. Between Griffith's breasts and a recording of Cherry's coos, Sam has a constant face erection.

I would divulge more of the plot, but it seems a little silly since you already know what happens. Sam chooses to love the human woman, of course, because this is a film made by 1980s humans. Though his sudden decision, coming moments before the film's end, doesn't mean so much — it happens after he's already taken his new Cherry model and flown off in a plane that can only seat two, leaving Griffith to essentially die by the guns of the bad guys.

A few minutes after takeoff he looks back down at the pathetic figure of Griffith hiding behind a barrel, and with a pained look, he decides to land and switch out the robot for the real girl. AIEEEEEEEEEE! What's maybe even scarier than my vision of the imminent robot takeover, is that in the future a real grrl's standards are so low she'll smooch a guy who five minutes ago left her for dead.

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She blogs here. She is a writer living in New York City. She last wrote in these pages about Green Day's Dookie.

"Da Game Been Good to Me" — UGK (mp3)

"Hard As Hell" — UGK ft. Akon (mp3)

"Steal Your Mind" — UGK ft. Too Short & Snoop Dogg (mp3)