Blast From the Past
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.99 You Save: $9.99 (67%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.78 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Blast From the Past
Movie Review: Entertaining, Witty and Extremely Likeable Comic Fantasy
Summary: 5 Stars
Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken) is a slightly mad genius living in Los Angeles at the height of the Cold War. Paranoid about the communist threat, he has made a vast and elaborate nuclear bunker under his house. And, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he takes the precaution of going into it with his pregnant wife Helen (Sissy Spacek). By bizarre coincidence, just as they get down underground, a military aircraft crashes on their house. Convinced this is the dreaded nuke, he locks in and they prepare to stay there for 35 years until the radiation reaches safe levels. Finally come the 1990s and son Adam (Brendan Fraser) is sent out to reconnoitre and get look for fresh supplies in what they are convinced is a nightmarish and disintegrated post-apocalyptic world. (The neighbour has gone badly downhill in a way that makes this a more than understandable mistake.) Out he goes armed only with an indefatigable innocence and decency, an unshakable conviction that Perry Como is at the cutting edge of popular music and what he does not yet realize is a huge fortune in vintage baseball cards. After a few hours he is seriously at sea and hopelessly lost. Then he meets Alicia Silverstone's wordly and cynical Eve...The central conceit of this film is the clash of what is basically a 1950s sensibility with the harsh and cynical realities of 1990s America. That way it strongly recalls `Pleasantville', made a year earlier. But this is a much better film. While `Pleasantville' rather condescended to the past, with its knowing modern kids teaching stuffy old 50s types how to be cool and have sex, this film is much more intelligently ambivalent about the blessings of modernity and has a very nice satirical edge. Not to mention much funnier. It is Eve who learns from Adam far more than the reverse. It's essentially an unusual romantic comedy with a bizarre fantasy premise. But it's an unusually sharp, witty and unintelligent romcom. A certain mismatch between British and American senses of humour may partly explain why I seldom laugh out loud at American movies. Several lines in this were notable exceptions. Its best moments recall, as very very few contemporary films manage to recall, the sharply observed intelligence of the great Hollywood romantic comedies of the 30s and 40s. Fresh, entertaining and extremely well-acted, it's well worth a look.
Movie Review: A heartwarming fish-out-of-water romance story.
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is a very great movie for the romance lover. It's also a great movie for the comedy lover. But most importantly, it's great for the drama lover. It's about a boy named Adam Webber born and raised in a bomb shelter, all proposed by his father, who locks him and his wife in a bomb shelter for 3 decades due to a nuclear war threat, but the whole time they're down there, nothing happens. But when the 3 decades pass and Adam becomes a grown man, and the shelter opens at last, Adam decides he wants to see the outside world, and his parents realize they can't coop him up any longer. And since they're low on supplies anyway, they send him up in hopes of buying supplies and bringing down a "healthy young woman", but with caution, because his father previously went up and was shocked beyond belief by the fact his surroundings are not what they used to be: Cheerful people replaced by stumbling drunks, bright blue skies replaced by gloomy ones, and beautiful buildings replaced by run-down shacks, and Adam's father hurries down to the shelter and tries to perish the thought of going up at all, but has a heart attack through the entire experience. So Adam goes up to do just that and to make his ailing father proud. But through the whole movie, a bizarre religious group thinks Adam and his family are the family of heaven, but later save the day near the end of the movie. He then finds the "perfect" young woman, Eve, your average 90's woman who frankly thinks Adam is a freak, but grows to like him and doesn't know it, but Adam is viewed differently by her gay roommate Troy. Through it all, Adam almost loses Eve repeatedly, and risks being locked up in the loony bin, but in the end he and Eve realize they love each other, then he, Eve, and Troy build his parents a new house with Adam's riches that he didn't even know he had, through his very old and very valuable baseball cards, stock certificates, and accessories, and live happily ever after.So if you like a wonderful combo of romance, comedy and drama, see Blast From The Past. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Movie Review: A Blast of Entertainment!
Summary: 5 Stars
Brendan Fraser and Alicia Silverstone are wonderful in the light hearted romantic comedy about a man named Adam Weber's (Fraser) first steps into society after being in a fallout shelter for his entire life.
Fraser's parents are played by the flawless Christopher Walken and the wonderful Sissy Spacek. Walken is a scientist who mistakes a plane crash in his backyard for a Cuban nuclear missile strike. He takes his family into a fallout shelter, that he has spent many months building to wait until the time is right to surface. Thirty-five years later, he emerges to find Joey Slotnick managing a rundown bar. Thinking that Walken is God, Slotnick becomes Archbishop Melker who tells his followers that he has seen God -- never mind that he is an alcoholic and a drug addict.
Walken suffers what seems like a heart attack, it is decided that Adam should be the one to go to the surface in search of supplies. Fraser surfaces and begins his quest for food and a woman. Along the way, he experiences the wonders of color television, sees a black postal worker who delivers one of the funniest lines in the movie.
He runs into Alicia Silverstone, when he tries to sell his baseball cards and is cheated by the proprietor. Eve (Silverstone) is angry that he is buying the cards for little or nothing, they are worth three times the amount that he gives Adam. She speaks up and Adam befriends her when he realizes he needs a someone to help him. He asks Eve to take him to a Hotel which she does and they he asks her to work for him. She agrees and takes him to her house and introduces him to her friend, Dave Foley, who turns in a wonderful performance.
Eve falls in love with Adam but is afraid that he is off his rocker. She turns him to the authorities and he escapes, she goes to his hotel room where her friend convinces him that he is on the level. She drives around looking for him and spots him and in the end goes to get his mother and father, builds a new home for them and lives happily ever after.
Movie Review: Cute Movie
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved this movie although I know its a bit too sweet and too cute at times. It's an excellent candidate for a "family movie" but actually its just a good, solid movie all around. Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek turn in delightful performances as Brendan Fraser's parents - wholesome and quirky. This movie does have its hints of the darker side of the middle class 60's type environment in which Adam (played by Brendan Fraser) was raised - such as Spacek's closet alcoholism as well as hints of the way our society has changed - from the so-called innocence of America during the Kennedy era with its Cold War paranoia to a modern-day America with its acceptance of a diversity of lifestyles that the 60's hadn't accepted just yet and also its societal problems that just didn't seem to be a part of the early 60's consciousness even though they existed then as now. Brendan Fraser turns in a wonderful performance, effectively portraying Adam's innocence and sense of wonder at everything he sees with humor and even pathos. Alicia Silverstone does a passable job although I felt the flaws in her character were not her fault so much as it was the fault of her character being underwritten and the director being confused as to what to do with her character. David Foley is wonderful as always. The movie is also peppered with wonderful character actors who actually make up some of the movie's funniest moments. Although the screenwriting is not as tight as it could be - especially with regard to the latter half of the movie when Fraser wanders around the modern world - Fraser carries the movie with ease and charm. This movie is well worth watching. Good movie if you're in the mood for something light, not too serious but not bubble gum either, funny, and with wonderful comedic acting by Walken, Spacek, and Fraser. The type of movie you can watch again and again and still enjoy because its just fun and cute and well done.Movie Review: Great, funny movie with a terrific cast
Summary: 5 Stars
"Blast from the Past" is one of my hands-down favorite movies. It's charming, cute, sweet, and genuinely funny. Brendan Frasier and Alicia Silverstone are (surprisingly enough) perfectly matched as Adam and Eve (the movie contains only one joke about their names).
Basically, Adam has spent his entire life in a very elaborate bomb shelter. His parents had just sealed themselves in their bomb shelter after a "news scare," and when a plane crashed on top of the shelter, they assumed that a nuclear war had finally been launched. The doors wouldn't unlock for 35 years (because that's when the radiation would be done - or at least that's what Christopher Walken said). Fast forward 35 years, the doors unlock, and Adam gets the chance to see the world outside. When he gets lost and can't find his way back to the bomb shelter, he fortunately stumbles across Eve, who helps him adjust to life in the 90s, as well as purchase supplies to take back to his parents.
The DVD release is pretty minimal, unfortunately. There is a movie trailer and a pretty lame game called the Love-Meter or something similar. Pretty skimpy, although the visuals are quite nice. It's a great movie, although if you are buying the DVD version, buy it for the movie and not for any extras, because there aren't any. It does contain both a widescreen and fullscreen version, however, and the disc is NOT two-sided.