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.

WHEN: 12:40 pm EST, April 20th, 2013

WHERE: The living room of my apartment in Portland

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

COMPANY: None

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE: Eating some delicious lunch. I also feel motivated since I just did a bunch of housework. And I have caffeine to join me on this viewing.

THOUGHTS:

I’ve mentioned before that my viewing habits as a kid were not monitored all too well. As a result, I frequently slept on the couch instead of my bed because the living room was brighter. Wee Becca reasoned that nightmares occurred due to closed doors and rooms with closets. Also, no bed meant no place for monsters to hide.

Stop confirming my fears, Howie Mandel.

Despite the numerous horror movies I watched, the one film that consistently gave me nightmares was The NeverEnding Story. All because of G’mork. I loved the film so much that I would endure the terror anyways. I always made sure that I watched during the day and when the scenes with G’mork were on screen, I covered my eyes and hummed to myself. My mother found this hilarious and not a cause for concern.

G’mork is fucking scary, guys. He’s after Atreyu and his goal is to kill our hero. Probably with his sharp, gnashing teeth. Probably by ripping out Atreyu’s throat and tearing his belly open so that he can feast on the gooey innards. Probably hungering to snap the bones to lick out the marrow with vicious aplomb. These are the places my mind goes because of G’mork. So, I’ve decided that it’s time to face my fears and learn more about my nightmarish foe.

Second Iteration

“With subsequent drawings of the fractal curve, sudden changes may appear.”

-Ian Malcolm

Continuous and inherently unpredictable changes will arise in any complex system; so Crichton’s fictional chaos expert continually insists. While the actual science of the matter is much more complicated, this makes for a useful signpost while watching Jurassic Park every week for a year. Without going into details, life threw me a bit of a curve-ball in February, and much of March was spent putting my day-to-day life back in order. The unexpected had arisen, and while not a cause, Jurassic Park‘s prominent presence in my life was unquestionably a factor in my reactions and responses. Having been shaken up, and in the process of settling back down, is it possible that Jurassic Park will have a major effect on where I land?

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?

WHEN: 3:30pm EST, April 24, 2013 (give or take some trailers)

WHERE: The Cinemagic in Westbrook, Maine

FORMAT:  3D digital projection.

COMPANY: My friend Phil, and two other theatergoers.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE:  Went in tired of Jurassic Park in 3D, but ended up thoroughly enjoying myself.

RICHARD KILEY:

The late Richard Kiley was a respected Broadway actor, known for his rich sonorous voice. But in the fictional world of Jurassic Park, he is also one of the privileged few who know about a secret island of dinosaurs. Is this a face you can trust?

“Don’t worry, I didn’t win two Tonys for being a blabbermouth.”

I bring this up because the months leading up to the opening of the park are a sensitive time, and secrecy is key. Government interference, industrial espionage, and poorly timed media buzz could all result from an information leak. How well is InGen hiding their tremendous achievement?

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.”

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.

LOS CRONOCRÍMENES (2007)

Known in the America parts of the world as Timecrimes, Los cronocrímenes is the story of a man named Héctor (Karra Elejalde) just chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool in his backyard when he sees a naked woman in the forest. When he goes to investigate, he’s chased down by a psychopath with a pair of scissors and, desperate for shelter, ducks into a science facility and holes up in the most convenient place that the nerd on duty (writer/director Nacho Vigalondo) can think of: inside the time machine he’s been conducting experiments with. Is the past really the best hiding spot?

WHEN: 3:30pm EST, April 17, 2013 (give or take some trailers)

WHERE: The Cinemagic in Westbrook, Maine

FORMAT:  3D digital projection.

COMPANY: My brother Matt, about 6 other theatergoers.

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL STATE:  A little worn out.

Watching Jurassic Park in 3D is a bit of a novelty, but after three viewings in this format, its effect is wearing off. After critiquing the 3D and having some fun dressing up, I’m ready to get away from  discussing the viewing format, and get back to the film. It’s a good thing too, because I just noticed that Muldoon got left behind, and no one seems to care.

“They left me behind? Clever assholes.”