Blast From The Past

Through the years, as Mountain Xpress teen reporters Amanda Levesque and Claire McLendon advance in age and wisdom, we notice that their film reviews advance in humor and discernment, as well. So, look out movie moguls, you’re not going to have Amanda and Claire eating out of your hands any more. A film has got to be pretty darned solid to win their praise, and it seems that Blast From the Past almost blew it by regressing into “a series of cliched pratfalls.” Wake up there, Hollywood! Here’s Levesque’s and McLendon’s take on Fraser and Silverstone in Blast From the Past:

OK, here’s the basic plot of Blast From the Past: A crazy inventor and his pregnant, wimpy wife bury themselves in their backyard bomb shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Hello … the ’60s … Cold War … that kind of thing). But as it turns out, the object they’d heard flying overhead wasn’t actually a missile — it was an airplane. Duh! But anyway, 35 years later, their son, Adam (Fraser), goes above ground to seek a wife and to replace the shelter’s rapidly waning supply of pipe tobacco. Much general chaos ensues, and eventually, Adam meets Eve (Silverstone) while trying to pawn a Yogi Berra baseball card for bus fare. Eve introduces Adam to the ways of the ’90s, and so on and so on, the story goes. Now, because this set-up does hold comedic potential, Blast From the Past could have been a good movie … but for the script. The actors were well-cast; the set design was fun; the directing, special effects and the cinematography were all good — but somewhere along the line, the plot got buried beneath a series of cliched pratfalls. Perhaps it didn’t occur to the producers that we didn’t need, yet another guy falling off a bus, another stereotypical homosexual character, and another set of wacky ’60s-era parents. However, stars Silverstone and Fraser almost make up for these shortcomings, aided by a killer soundtrack that we feel inspired to run out and buy (We will, really!). But sadly, with just a little fine-tuning of its screenplay, Blast From the Past could have been better. We’re not talking just better-better — we’re talking that it could have been a great movie. As it is, it’s a pretty entertaining film.