This week’s theme was “It’s Not A Weekend, It’s A Wrinkle In Time: how to time travel (according to films).” The weekend was forecast to be rainy and miserable, so I figured it would be a good time to smash out a few of the suggestions. I watched… two out of the five films. Better than nothing, I suppose, seeing as I felt like sleeping the whole weekend away instead.
I started out on Saturday with Back to the Future. Teenage boy meets up with his crazy inventor friend one night and inadvertently travels back in time 30 years in said friend’s time machine Delorean. While waiting a week before he can go back home he has to make sure his parents actually meet and get together so that he doesn’t fade out of existence.
(I know the quality’s not great on this, but I thought the original trailer would be the most appropriate to use.)
I wasn’t really that interested in watching this, if I am honest with you. My brother would make me watch this (and the sequels) so many times over the years, and I am the kind of person who will not enjoy something out of spite when someone tries really hard to get me to watch/read/listen/do something. So because I’d seen it so many times and had that particular association with it, this felt like a bit of a chore. But I figured I’d give it another go for old time’s sake.
I guess the different atmosphere made a difference, because I actually enjoyed it this time. Maybe because I paid attention to it instead of sullenly trying to ignore it. Some of the acting was kinda wooden, but Michael J Fox was actually pretty good in it! I kinda always thought he was a good actor, especially now seeing how he hides his Parkinson’s quite well. I still never really got the whole hype about the trilogy, and probably won’t watch the others in the trilogy, but I did like the film.
I think I liked the storyline of the second Back to the Future film better. This one was a good intro to the characters and the series’ universe, but out of the trilogy the second film was the most interesting to me story-wise. I guess I’m a sucker for futuristic settings, even though by now that one is so hilariously incorrect and dated. That’s probably what adds to its charm. The first film was cute in that the 50’s seemed like a much more innocent time, but what people thought it would be like in 2015 is also cute in its own way.
On Sunday we watched Twelve Monkeys. It’s the future, and a virus has caused humans to go underground to survive. A prisoner ‘volunteers’ to go back and forth in time to get information about an organisation that claims to have created the virus.
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this film. I didn’t really know anything about it, but I had a strange hunch that it wasn’t going to be my thing. Ben liked it and seemed excited aboutit being a suggestion though, so I figured I would at least give it a try. My first impression was that it most definitely was a film by Terry Gilliam. He seems to have a very definite set of things he likes to include when making a film, so all the movies I have seen that he’s done feel very similar. I think it’s mainly the kinda dirty, dystopian future where everything looks like it’s about to fall apart that I noticed more than anything else. It’s like Tim Burton with Johnny Depp and swirls; you know once you see those two things in the one film that it is almost certainly a Burton Film. And I guess I just don’t really like the look of everything seemingly held together by duct tape.
Also it seemed that it took a while to get to the ‘good bit’. I watched about an hour of it waiting for Bruce Willis’ character to get to where he needed to and still didn’t get there in that time. I’m sure that’s all part of the pacing or whatever, but it just resulted in me getting bored and wanting things to pick up a bit. After an hour I realised that I had pretty much stopped caring about any of the characters and hadn’t been paying attention to it properly for a while, so I turned it off. I’m a bit disappointed because the storyline sounded interesting and I could have potentially really enjoyed it, but I guess I’m just not a fan of Terry Gilliam’s style enough that it distracted me too much to try and tough it out. Ben is probably Very Disappointed that I didn’t like it, but I tried! I watched almost half of it! If a film hasn’t grabbed me by the halfway mark I feel like it’s time to try something else.
That was it for the weekend, it seems. Next week is one of the themes I have been looking forward to a fair bit. That’s right people, Next weekend is Nicholas Cage weekend in this house. My mum is going to be visiting, but I am going to try and watch three of the suggestions anyway.