Writer/director Alan Hruska doesn’t hold back on melodrama with Reunion, the story of a group of Yale alumni and members of a secret undergrad society of would-be world-changers who get back together on the tenth anniversary of a friend’s passing to bare their souls and air their grievances in the shiny conference room of NYC lawyer Jake (Brett Cullen). Overflowing with self-serious Big Ideas, Hruska’s ensemble film tackles, via its characters’ confessions and bickering, issues of love, faith, happiness, success, aspirations, self-worth, and the feasibility of change, a Big Chill-ish enterprise whose serious intentions aren’t enough to compensate for the two-dimensionality of its stock archetypes, nor for the fact that their discussions about these topics – all of which are laced with regret, jealousy and longing – generally amount to a lot of hot air. Hruska intends for his material to be insightful but undercuts his grave tone with hoary, histrionic situations and revelations at far too many turns, the only respite from the proceedings’ distinct Psychology 101 feel coming via corniness such as an angry confrontation that devolves into a food fight.

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Will Elder has died at the age of 87, after a battle with Parkinson's. A commercial artist and cartoonist, he spent much of his life all but joined at the hip to the great Harvey Kurtzman, who created Mad for EC Comics in 1952. Elder, who had been a classmate and collaborator of Kurtzman's from years before, became the defining artistic voice of Mad in its comic book period; he and Kurtzman had similar senses of humor, and when Elder illustrated Kurtzman's scripts eviscerating such cultural touchstones as Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, and Archie and Jughead. After Kurtzman left Mad in 1957, Elder followed him loyally through a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump (a Garden of Eden for print humor of the period, and one that lasted all of two issues), Humbug (which is set to be republished in its entirety later this year by Fantagraphics), and Help!

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