BEFORE: New York is finally melting. Temperatures are going to be above freezing for the rest of the week, and the rain is doing its part, plus people are outside chopping up the snow piles so they will disappear faster. I think that says a lot about how much everyone hates winter right about now.
Linking from "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry", Michael Buscemi carries over, having played a firefighter last night, he plays a pedestrian tonight. Yeah, I'm pretty desperate for links at this point.
THE PLOT: Ruby has man trouble: she tries to fix them, so she's stuck herself with a string of losers. Her current lover, Sam, informs Ruby that he's from the future.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Time Traveler's Wife" (Movie #424)
AFTER: I can't say that this film consciously set out to be like "The Time Traveler's Wife", because it predated that film and the book it was based on, but often there is a successful film that leads to a less-successful, low-budget knock-off, and in this case, I'm betting that this film is riffing off of "Twelve Monkeys". That great film also featured a man from the future, or perhaps a man who thought he was from the future, sent back to our present for mysterious reasons, who also falls in love and then starts to question the nature of his reality.
The thing is, "Twelve Monkeys" had big-budget effects, and this one doesn't. To its credit, it tries very hard to do more with less. And here we never see the alleged future world, so we're just left with a man and what he says about it. This creates a very talky-talky film (or screamy-screamy when the couple starts to fight) and we have to make judgments based on little more than dialogue alone.
You know I'm going to start trying to figure out the endgame right from the start, and again to this film's credit, it's a long time before we get any definite answers. Oh, there's plenty of evidence that this guy is from the future, but it's all potentially explained by his insanity - plus there's plenty of evidence that this guy is insane, but it's all potentially explained by his time travel. So I'm saying that this one could keep you guessing.
I suppose a time traveler could easily be mistaken for a nut, asking people "What year is this?" or talking about what year the icecaps melted, or how there are no housepets in the future because of some virus. And it's easy to see how a crazy person would retreat into a fantasy about being from another time, a better time where things are better, in order to escape some harsh aspect about the present.
Thankfully this fits right in with this year's romance chain, because it's all about lies and deception, or people not revealing the whole truth about themselves, and falling in love when they seem to have very good reasons not to. In the end you have to decide for yourself whether the time travel is real, or a fantasy, or a metaphor for something else. Fate and coincidence certainly play their part, but they're no substitute for going with your gut.
Also starring Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Brooklyn's Finest"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "The Ides of March"), Holland Taylor (last seen in "How to Make an American Quilt"), Jose Zuniga, Tovah Feldshuh, Nadia Dajani, with a cameo from Anthony Michael Hall (last seen in "Six Degrees of Separation").
RATIN: 5 out of 10 bar codes
No comments:
Post a Comment