Hello, friends in time, and welcome to a regular feature on Cinema 52 where I put my weekly viewing of Back to the Future on hold and watch another movie featuring time travel for comparison. It may not keep me sane, but it will probably always involve one guy shouting, “This doesn’t make any sense!” And that’s good enough for me.

IDAHO TRANSFER (1973)

Little did I know before I randomly selected these movies, it’s Boring Week here at Time Out! Our last flick, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, was so mind-numbingly stupid that it fizzled out after its already mediocre premise. On the other end of the boring spectrum, we have Peter Fonda’s directorial debut, Idaho Transfer, a movie that tries so hard to be smart that it can’t be bothered to pick up the pace, lest it lose its art house cred. So, we send sexy teens into the future to study the post-apocalyptic hell that it appears the world will turn into. Can we stop it? Is all really as it seems? And where are my pants?

Hello, friends in time, and welcome to a regular feature on Cinema 52 where I put my weekly viewing of Back to the Future on hold and watch another movie featuring time travel for comparison. It may not keep me sane, but it will probably always involve one guy shouting, “This doesn’t make any sense!” And that’s good enough for me.

TIMERIDER: THE ADVENTURE OF LYLE SWANN (1982)

It’s time to level with you nice people; just don’t watch this movie. Trust me, you already know if you’re going to see it from the moment I tell you not to. It’s in your nature. But believe me, even if you love seeking out terrible movies and having a laugh at them, this just isn’t good in any sense of the word. I’m going to spoiler the entire thing because, if I don’t, there’s nothing to write about. This is a boring, pointless anti-movie. It came up with one (1) premise and one (1) twist ending and called it a fucking day.

If you’re never going to watch it, you have chosen wisely and may finish this article. If you’re already putting on pants so you can head to the movie store, read no further. I’d hate to lessen the surging, life-affirming rush of hatred that only Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann can provide people of your ilk/fetish community.

WHERE: In the living room of my apartment in Portland, ME (Isla Nublar)

FORMAT: Blu-Ray on a Vizio 32″ LED HDTV

COMPANY: None.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE: Tired, trying to cram this in before work.

So, if you thought I was freaking out when I saw my first DeLorean, you’ll never guess how much I lost it when a certain somebody came strolling through my city just four days later…

Tony’s Donut Shop, located in scenic Portland, ME. And Michael J. Fox, located in picturesque My Childhood.

No, I never ran into him, though I did type up a couple mildly desperate tweets before I knew that the poor guy was in town for a funeral. I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Fox.

Needless to say, when I sat down for my weekly viewing of Back to the Future as mandated by the Cinema 52 project, I had Michael on the brain and figured it was time to analyze his work as Marty McFly. Yet, as much as he is a central part of the film, it’s difficult for me to break down his performance. I’m going to level with you: I don’t really know how to talk about acting.

Space: the penultimate frontier.

Fuck space! Time is where it’s at!

Seriously, for a movie franchise that prides itself on exploring the stars, they can’t seem to get asses in the seats without throwing in a little violation of the space-time continuum. The numbers don’t lie; out of the four Star Trek films that hinge upon time travel, three of them are the high-grossing installments in the series. And yes, the odd one out is Generations, which barely qualifies since it’s about Magic Space Heaven and its script was written with scented markers.

I’m embarrassed to be responsible for some of these numbers.

Before darkness becomes the newest of the final frontiers, I thought it would be fitting to take a closer look at time travel in the Star Trek movies for this week’s Time Out. (And seriously, if there are any chrono-vortices or temporal transmogrifiers in Star Trek Into Darkness, Paramount is officially tapped for ideas. Also, I’ll be amending this article.) Does the story benefit from a journey through time? How do the rules work in each film, and are they consistent with each other? Was time travel necessary to keep the franchise fresh?

As Han Solo would say: “Punch it.”

Oh, and if there’s time travel in Star Wars, J.J., I swear– sorry, moving on.

[Crash course for newcomers: We're conducting a three-year experiment in which, for every year, we have to watch the same movie once a week. I had Top Gun last year, in the category Movie You Don't Love, But Don't Hate. This year I have Back to the Future for Movie You Love. Check out what everyone else is watching on our Cinemanauts page. These are my experiment results for April 2013.]

Before we talk about anything else, this happened.

In case you’re wondering, I never got the interview with the DeLorean’s owner. Guy came out, got in, took off. And who could blame him for such a speedy departure? He probably gets accosted by every Me in every city he goes to. He was hired as part of an orchestral tribute to the ’80s that Cinemanaut Becca just happened to be attending, and I was told the proceeds went to charity, but I’ve been unable to find any information on which organization it was.

Where are you now, mystery man?

Hello, friends in time, and welcome to a regular feature on Cinema 52 where I put my weekly viewing of Back to the Future on hold and watch another movie featuring time travel for comparison. It may not keep me sane, but it will probably always involve one guy shouting, “This doesn’t make any sense!” And that’s good enough for me.

THE GRAND TOUR (1992)

Ben Wilson (Jeff Daniels) is coping with the death of his wife by fixing up a small guest house with his daughter Hillary (Ariana Richards). Although he isn’t finished, a busload of weirdo tourists show up insisting that they be allowed to stay. Over the course of approximately fourteen hours of screentime, Ben discovers that these nutjobs are actually tourists from the future. But wait a minute… what’s the historical significance of this little podunk town? Unless– OH SHIIIIIIT…

WHERE: In the living room of my apartment in Portland, ME (Isla Nublar)

FORMAT: Blu-Ray on a Vizio 32″ LED HDTV

COMPANY: None.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE: Groggy, eating a chicken salad sandwich and drinking a beer.

If you’ve been reading a lot of my Time Out articles, you’re probably aware that I hate magic time travel. You know, somebody owns a magic mailbox or falls into a magic moat or… just really, really, really wants to go back in time and wishes for it really, really, really hard.

This is my one exception.

No, I want my time travel to involve lab coats and goggles and machines. Wonderful, beautiful machines. Machines that operate on rules. Scientific time travel doesn’t run on emotions. There are numbers and logic and diagrams. Oh, those wonderful diagrams! While magic time travel is busy tugging on your heartstrings and ignoring your brainstrings, scientific time travel is governed by unbreakable laws and doesn’t yield to the power of love.

Which brings me to why Back to the Future is totally magic time travel.

Explain this bullshit.

Hello, friends in time, and welcome to a regular feature on Cinema 52 where I put my weekly viewing of Back to the Future on hold and watch another movie featuring time travel for comparison. It may not keep me sane, but it will probably always involve one guy shouting, “This doesn’t make any sense!” And that’s good enough for me.

FREEJACK (1992)

In the distant future (2009!), time travel is used to harness bodies from the past at the exact moment they died, usually in horrific accidents that would leave no trace of a corpse anyway. These bodies are then used as meat-suits for the aging rich, buying themselves the closest thing to immortality that science can offer. But what would happen if one of these bodies escaped? Could a Mick Jagger pushing 50 catch him? Most importantly, would you want to watch it for 90 minutes?

Hello, friends in time, and welcome to a very special edition of Time Out. When I first set out to watch at least one time travel movie every week of 2013 to offset the effects of watching Back to the Future every week of 2013, most people responded appropriately by not having sex with me. A few, however, began to question what really counts as time travel (and still refrained from sex with me). Is a ghost technically traveling through time? What about the mummy from The Mummy? Isn’t there a bootstrap paradox in White Chicks?

Nope.

One subject that came up frequently was Minority Report, the movie about the tub people that see murders before they happen. “C’mon, Bill, you have to do that one,” these frigid film fans cried. “There’s one of those Bill & Teddish scenes where they do stuff before it happens; that totally counts.” Which brings us to our first This Might Not Count But Let’s Do It Anyway subcategory: prophecies.

NO. Doesn’t count.

Hi, Junior Movie Science Cadets. For this week’s Back to the Future viewing, I thought I’d try something different, but only to gain a better understanding of Doc Brown. See, when Doc meets Marty, he has a limited amount of time to learn all about their lives up until 1985, particularly in regards to the night of the first temporal experiment, which he has portions of on videotape. This means that Doc has to “accidentally” send Marty back to 1955 in this new timeline, except now he knows it’s going to happen; still, he has to replicate every event perfectly so as not to cause further paradoxes.

With this in mind, I thought I would read my viewing entry from last year’s corresponding week of the Top Gun experiment and immediately try to recreate the conditions of that moment, but instead of a future teenage friend of mine interfering, this time it’s a different movie. How difficult is it to retrace your steps? Feel free to open that link in another tab and compare.

Here we go…

WHEN: 4:46am EST, April 20, 2013

WHERE: My apartment in Portland, ME (Isla Nublar)

FORMAT: Blu-Ray on a Vizio 32″ LED HDTV

COMPANY: Becca asleep in the other room, not really paying attention

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE: Eating cereal, no pants, groggy, didn’t have any dreams last night, no back pain, mostly just trying to get this over with

REACTIONS OF NOTE:

• Nothing in Back to the Future makes me think of New Hampshire. I’m from New Hampshire.
• I hate when the characters in a movie can’t see an aircraft just because it’s out of frame (see: the helicopters at the end of GoldenEye). The helicopter that flies over the clock tower does not exploit this trope, I think.
• I groan at Marty’s use of the word “heavy.” Is he trying to impress someone? Is he trying to tell bodybuilders, “I’m one of you”?
• Who else lives in Hill Valley? What’s living there like? I’d investigate if it were a real place.
• Marty looks like a creep when he stares at those aerobics ladies because every guy looks like a creep when he stares at aerobics ladies.

“Join me for intercourse.”