BEFORE: Man, I messed up big time.
I went ahead and watched "Brick", then posted my review, before realizing that I missed a link - the actor who's in both "Frailty" and "Brick", Matt O'Leary, is also in "Time Lapse", which is one of about five or six films about time travel that have been sitting in my list for a LONG time - like, several years. And I made my chain, the McConaughey films linked to the Joseph Gordon-Levitt films, but I forgot to check to see if Matt O'Leary was in any other films on my list, probably because I was so happy to have found the connection, the mortar between the bricks, so to speak.
If I HAD checked, I would have jumped at the opportunity to clear one of the time-travel films off the list - because they don't connect to each other, and so to watch them, I'd have to wait until a time when my linking method was done, or I wasn't using it any more, and I just don't know when that's going to be. So, I'm going to do something I've never done before in the nearly 12-year history of this blog - I'm going to retroactively switch two films around in the chain. I feel just terrible about this, and I swore I would never do this, but which is the bigger sin, messing with my published order, or skipping a film altogether and never watching it, when I have the opportunity to do so?
I have messed with the timestream before, so to speak, by watching some films (especially new releases, like important Marvel movies) and then sitting on the review for months, like I did last year with "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", when I saved the review for October but I had watched the film in June. I've always been honest about doing that, and I'm going to be honest about it now, so I don't compound the movie sin. To be clear, I watched "Brick" before "Time Lapse", but I'm going to retroactively place "Time Lapse" earlier in the countdown, between the two other films with Matt O'Leary, in order to maintain the unbroken chain for 2020. I hope you can forgive me, you and the Movie Gods.
Of course, this happens with a time travel movie, right? If ever I wished I had a time travel machine myself, it would be now, I'd go back 24 hours and watch the films in the right order, but I can't do that, so instead I'm just going to switch them. I also hope that I don't come up one slot short in December, because I'm going to think back to my obsessive need to go back and include this one, and no matter what I do now, I can't get an extra slot back in December, so I'll just have to watch my numbers and don't over-schedule any more. Now, if "New Mutants" doesn't get released, it could greatly benefit me, because the path without that film (and the films needed to link to it) will be four films shorter, and that's just going to help me get to a Christmas movie or two in December. We'll have to see, I can't predict what's going to happen in the future with the virus or when theaters will re-open. So I just have to try to make better decisions every day and hope for the best.
Matt O'Leary carries over from "Frailty".
THE PLOT: Three friends discover a mysterious machine that takes pictures twenty-four hours into the future, and they conspire to use it for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop.
AFTER: OK, so that was easier than I thought it would be, to copy the review of "Brick", change the date on it, and repost it after this one. A little too easy perhaps...I could be tempted to change the order retroactively again in the future, but I don't want to be tempted again. I could just write reviews for hundreds of films and then publish them all at the end of the year, once I've worked out the best order and the proper count to make sure I have an unbroken chain of 300 films. But I do sort of like the uncertainty of living in the moment, like right now I'm not 100% sure I'll have another Perfect Year, but I'd like to think I can work it out on the fly, because I'm super good at that now. And that's not bragging if it's true - but it's just unfortunate that my personal unique superpower is not appreciated by more people, and darn close to useless in the grand scheme of things. If only I could be great at something that people cared about...
But that's sort of the theme of "Time Lapse", in which three friends/roommates (two of them are romantically involved, but more on that in a bit) discover that there's a camera in a nearby apartment that's been taking pictures of them. Kinky, right? The first impulse would be to call the police on the guy in that apartment, or at least invest in some window blinds. But they quickly figure out (a little too quickly, perhaps) that the Polaroid picture coming out of the camera is depicting events happening 24 hours in the future. Or, perhaps more accurately, at 8 pm every day, the camera clicks, takes an image and somehow sends that image BACK 24 hours, to emerge from the camera yesterday at 8 pm and start to develop.
The friends themselves make this not-too-critical error in understanding the device - logically if you see the flash go off at 8 pm, and a self-developing photo ejects from the camera a minute later, it's easy to assume that the camera flash you just saw results in the ejecting image. But if you stop and think about it, the camera is taking TODAY's photo and transmitting that image backwards in time to yesterday, and today's photo will be taken TOMORROW and sent back to today. Got it? Still with me? So that camera flash is not related directly to the photo that pops out a minute later - the causality was easily misinterpreted, and we're only just getting started on that point. "Post hoc ergo propter hoc", or "after this, therefore because of this" - namely, chronology does not necessarily prove causality. Fnishing all those episodes of "Arrested Development" while on lockdown didn't bring about an end to the pandemic, but if a vaccine had been announced the next day, I might have made the incorrect assumption that finishing my task somehow had a hand in stopping Covid-19.
Now, we don't really know what the man who lived in that other apartment was doing with the photos he took - apparently he spent weeks or months taking photos with this device, and then waiting to see, 24 hours later, what those three people were doing in their apartment that night, and whether those activities matched the photo that came out of the camera the night before. So these people were the guinea pigs in his experiment and they didn't even know it. But there were hundreds of photos on his wall, so how long was the period of time needed to confirm that the machine worked? And what was his goal in taking photos of THESE three people, and nobody or nothing else? The film is very unclear on this point, so perhaps this man built a time-predicting camera, then didn't know what to do with it? That doesn't make any sense, because "necessity is the mother of invention", right? So what was the need for this device, and why wasn't it put into action, fulfilling that need?
Perhaps its best use would have been for espionage work - certainly knowing what your enemies will be doing tomorrow would be very handy information, provided, of course, that you somehow get them to do all of their important actions at 8 pm every night, and you can rent the apartment across the courtyard from them. That's a real long shot, right? Anyway, something weird happens (I know, right?) when the scientist goes missing, and the lab rats in the experiment find out that they're lab rats, and this leads them to go into his apartment and find the pictures of themselves from the last week, and more importantly, from the next day.
One roommate, Jasper, is a gambler, so he believes the best thing to do every day would be to post the day's track results in their window, so they'll appear in the previous day's photo, giving him enough time to place bets on the winning greyhounds, and therefore start winning at the track. Another roommate, Finn, is a painter, and he finds that though he hasn't been very inspired lately, seeing what he's going to paint tomorrow is very inspirational, and it also motivates him to paint exactly that image, and that turns out to be very easy - knowing what's possible gives him the confidence to do it. OK, but now I have questions. Betting on dog races with tomorrow's results is one thing, and it's actually one of the more straightforward uses for this camera - but it calls to mind the time-travel paradoxes seen in the "Bill and Ted" movies - the classic "Don't forget to leave the keys, Bill and Ted" situation, where their escape from a locked room TODAY is based on something that they'll have to remember to do TOMORROW, and if they forget to do that, then things won't go well for them TODAY. It helps if you don't think about this one too much, after all, it's just a silly joke in a silly late-80's comedy, but it carries some giant implications for time travel, if it ever becomes a real thing, which of course it can't.
How do I know that time travel will never be invented? Because we haven't seen any evidence of it yet, and if someone in the future invents a time machine, don't you think they'd come back and prevent our worst situations (like, I don't know, Trump getting electric, the Corona virus pandemic, 9/11, and that's just for starters) from happening? Why would life in the U.S. suck so much ass right now if there were/will be someone in the future who could (will could) make it better? Are they asleep at the switch? Or did they travel straight back to either kill baby Hitler or save JFK and found out that they couldn't do that, not without making things worse, and then putting them back again? Maybe they've already changed our timelines around a few dozen times, and therefore, as bad as things are, we're still living in the best possible 2020 scenario? I find that hard to believe - so, therefore, the easiest, most logical conclusion is that time travel doesn't exist, and never will exist.
But let's roll with things a bit more and see where this film ends up - and you just get the feeling it's not going to be any place that's good. What happens is that once they have photos of what they're going to be doing the next day at 8 pm, they then feel a need to make that scenario happen, whatever it is. They know what clothes to wear tomorrow, whether they're home or not home, and this of course starts to color all of their decisions for the next day. In fact they become afraid of NOT bringing about the events in the photo, because that would mean changing the future, and the implication is that if you change the future, maybe you don't HAVE a future, and therefore they may die. There are some pretty big leaps in logic there, and if it were me, I'd try to change just one, small, meaningless element in the photo, just to determine if the future is set in stone, or can be changed. Because we'd all sleep better if we knew if we're in charge of our own destinies, right?
This is perhaps where the roommates make their chronology/causality mistake, because the mysterious man in the mysterious apartment apparently saw a vision of his own death (HOW? He had the camera trained on the other apartment, not himself!) and then set out to change it. Which he couldn't. But just because he saw a prediction of his death and then died, that doesn't mean that his future couldn't be changed. More likely is the scenario where he panicked and went to extreme measures to prevent the scenario in which he died/will die, and in so doing, somehow accidentally brought his own death about.
Other questions - if the roommates DID try to change the future, like do things differently from the photo at exactly 7:59 the next day, just to mess with time - what would happen? If they were successful in NOT re-enacting the photo, would the photo change? More to the point, how is the photo tangible and existing, 24 hours before it was/will be taken? Until this question gets answered, everything is just speculation - but it's notable that the film doesn't even want to take the time to ASK this question, let alone answer it. Also, how far are they willing to go to make the scenario in tomorrow's photo happen? If they get the photo from the next day, and it depicts them performing a low-budget version of "The Pirates of Penzance" in their apartment, are they going to go out and buy some costumes and start rehearsals?
Also, for Finn the painter, this scenario raises the question about WHO painted the painting, if he painted his Monday painting to match the one that he saw on Sunday in the Monday photograph, and that image hadn't been in his head up until he saw it in the Polaroid, then who "created" the image, who thought of it, current Finn or future Finn? It can't be current Finn if he based his painting on the one that future Finn will make, and it can't be future Finn, because future Finn was once current Finn, and we know that current Finn got the idea for that painting from the photo, so WHO MADE IT? You can go around and around on this point and never determine which of them had the notion first...and, now my head hurts again.
My point is that none of us can cheat the time stream - if I wrote a novel and then traveled back via time machine to give the manuscript to my younger self, sso he could publish it earlier and I could become rich as a young man, then who wrote the book? or if I stole the instructions on building a time machine, went back and gave those plans to myself, then who invented the machine? When you can see the effect happen before the cause, then where does creativity come from? And can this be a metaphor for something related to the creation of art or film - like if you know where you want a story to end and you start there, then go back to the beginning, does that make everything in between some kind of fait accompli? Or perhaps this is a looser metaphor for our daily lives - if you know, or you think you know exactly what your day is going to be like tomorrow, that can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Like if you think tonight about what you want for breakfast tomorrow, it's easy to get locked into that, and then if it doesn't happen, like if that restaurant is closed unexpectedly, it may set you into a bit of a panic, because suddenly things aren't what they're supposed to be. The better strategy, especially in these uncertain times, is to have a looser plan for your day, keep things open and enjoy whatever the day might bring you, and try to be satisfied with that.
For the story, it turns out that a certain bookie doesn't like that one of his longtime clients has suddenly gone on a winning streak - he figures that Jasper's got an inside source or is somehow fixing races, and he wants to stop that. Which I think is almost a NITPICK POINT, because wouldn't any bookie set the odds on a race so that even if a bettor went on a streak, that would be covered, either by the odds or the vig or the assumption that every winning streak is going to come to an end? Just wondering - but once he turns up at the door and sees the Polaroids, now some very bad people want in on the deal, and so naturally the bookie wants to go on a winning streak of his own. But, won't that just put him in trouble with someone else? Just wondering.
Our three roommates, who've been progressively butting up against each other more and more throughout this encounter with the magic future camera device, devolve into a state akin to madness, as one might expect. Or maybe they've always been mad, it's tough to say. It seems they had certain personality problems before, and this situation highlighted them more - or maybe the takeaway here is that nobody should know too much about their own future, or be too rigid in their thinking about it. Also, I guess you can throw in "be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." And just to be on the safe side, invest in some really good window blinds, and choose your roommates very carefully.
As for me, now that I've exercised free will and changed my own timestream, I have to find a way to work in the other time-travel movies now, I can't just leave them for the end of the chain, or the end of the world, whichever comes first. So that's "Project: Almanac", "The Butterfly Effect 2", "The Butterfly Effect 3", "Time Freak", "Paradox", "Synchronicity" and a couple others that might fit somewhere in a romance chain. But the big problem right now is that most of these films don't connect to each other, so I can't make a chain out of them, I'll just have to be more diligent in the future about working them in whenever I can, like I do with Christmas movies.
Also starring Danielle Panabaker (last seen in "Mr. Brooks"), George Finn, Amin Joseph (last seen in "Baywatch"), Jason Spisak (last seen in "Everything Must Go"), David Figlioli, Sharon Maughan (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Judith Drake, John Rhys-Davies (last heard in "Aquaman").
RATING: 6 out of 10 basement storage units
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