Fans turned out to see Hot Tub Time Machine and I registered surprise. As a DVD enthusiast (the movies are too expensive for my current price bracket), I'll give a shot to just about anything, even delving into The Crazies this month because Justified's Tim Olyphant was in it. But I had more of a "hunh?" reaction than a "yippee, gotta-see-it" sort of thing. Could they really not come up with a cooler title, or did they have to call it that to completely get across what their point was? I wasn't ready to race out and see it, but thanks to the folks at Fox, this one ended up available.

Always down for a laugh, I gave it a spin. I wouldn't say I'm terribly prudish but some of this was too over-the-top for me. Adam (John Cusack) and Nick (Craig Robinson) try to help their suicidal friend Lou (Rob Corddry) find himself by returning to the ski resort site of their teenage exploits, taking Adam's teenage nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) along for the ride. They end up sent back in time by a faulty titular device, unmaintained by a crazy repairman (Chevy Chase), and appearing as their teenage selves while maintaining their own memories as forty-somethings.

It's something akin to Back to the Future the R-rated Version which apparently appeals to a significant number of moviegoers and will probably result in HTTM turning into Cusack's next cult classic. Through a series of mistaken identities (think Michael J. Fox's guy waking up in his mom's bed), the quartet stumbles through the trio's past mistakes, debacles, fist fights, and first loves. Rather than finding a way to keep the future the same, the movie's "sweetness" comes when it changes the future as the men have the opportunity to make the right choice where they took the easy, selfish, and often self-damaging path before. Somehow, I THINK we're supposed to see them being responsible, but the human carnage (not in death, but in harmful decision-making) left behind hardly allowed me to find anything substantial to grab onto by the time it was done.

I've seen the "raunchy" hits lately: Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Hangover, She's Out Of My League. But watching Hot Tub Time Machine, I kept waiting for someone to break in, like a SNL commercial, and yell, "Just kidding!" Maybe I'm just getting too old for some of this, but it's hard to see the previous generation of comedy stars pulling off the bet-gone-wrong scene, or even subjecting themselves to that. Unfortunately, it seems like the gross-out, inflammatory stuff has to get more and more homophobic, sexually explicit, and in-your-face... literally. That hasn't had a profound impact on viewership, but it makes it harder to take the bad with the good on some of these.