Year 13, Day 66 - 3/7/21 - Movie #3,769
BEFORE: Alexandra Daddario carries over again from "Can You Keep a Secret?". And too late, I've realized my mistake - there's another time-loop film called "Palm Springs", with Tyler Hoechlin in it - and he was in both "Hall Pass" and "Can You Keep a Secret?" Perhaps the correct viewing order for me would have been to fit "Palm Springs" in between those two films, then save "The Layover" to come later, in between two of these films with Alexandra Daddario. That way I could have had two time-travel sort-of romance films in the same week. I've got a bunch of time-travel films that I've been trying to get to, I would have loved to knock off two of them.
BUT, I'm in a bit of a time-crunch myself right now, especially if I want to hit St. Patrick's Day right on the button, and with luck I'll be visiting my parents next weekend, so I may be short on time for that reason, too. So I've already squeezed in one extra film this weekend, I'd really be pushing things if I squeezed in two, right? I made a bit of a linking mistake, but who knows, maybe everything happens for a reason, even my mistakes - for all I know, I'm going to need an extra slot at the end of the year to work in something else - and I'll be glad then that I didn't double up again in March. I'll just try to work in "Palm Springs" later, and it doesn't even have to be in February/March, OK?
THE PLOT: Noah meets Avery at a Halloween party and falls in love but gets friend-zoned. Three years later, she's engaged to someone else, but Noah returns in a time machine to fix things.
AFTER: Believe it or not, this isn't my first film that straddles the genres of time-travel and romance. Before this there was "About Time", and to a lesser extent, "The Time-Traveler's Wife", which took a slightly different tack. And I've still got so far to go - there's "Paradox" and "Project Almanac" and "Synchronicity" and "The Butterfly Effect" 2 and 3, there are even THREE more films on my list that (I think) are specifically time-travel romances, and those do link together, so who knows, maybe next February, if I can't work them in before then. Then, of course, there's "Tenet", which links to "Paradox", and I may want to focus on getting to those two somehow.
Today's film sort of takes elements of "Groundhog Day", "Frequency", "The Butterfly Effect" and even "Big" and mashes them all together - the main character finds that he can travel back in time, to the day he met the girl he's fixated on, by putting a coin in the photo-booth in the bar, while drinking a beer and thinking about Halloween three years earlier. Noah discovers this, of course, after attending the engagement party of Avery and Ethan, and his one regret is that he blew his chance with Avery after the Halloween party, he ate all her cereal instead of kissing her, and the next day while she was buying more cereal in the grocery store, she met Ethan. So all he has to do is go back to Halloween 2014, meet Avery again for the first time, and NOT eat her cereal.
Things go well at the party (I note that this is the THIRD time this year where a potential couple met at a college Halloween costume party - this also happened in "Made of Honor" and "Life Itself", so it's possible that screenwriters are very lazy people...) except that Noah stays too long at Avery's place, her roommate Carrie comes home, and Noah had a bad interaction with Carrie earlier in the day, before he figured out he was time-traveling. So Carrie pegs him as a stalker, he's chased out of her apartment, and when he wakes up back in 2017, he and Avery are not even friends.
But that's OK, as long as the photo booth is still working, he can just go back and try again, only the second time doesn't really work, either. He tries to be a real confident a-hole type, the type women go for, and that time he wins Avery over, only this time he finds that in the present, he's an a-hole for real, sleeping with Avery casually, but there's no solid relationship there. OK, third time's the charm, he lands a solid job at his friend's company this time, gives up playing in the piano bar, and becomes the type of guy who can really provide for her. But now he's not happy in the present, because work is so much, well, work. Back to the photo booth...
It's not really a time-loop, because it doesn't connect back with itself like a pure time-travel movie should - it's more in the vein of "Groundhog Day", because Noah keeps trying to make that one day of his life perfect, over and over, with the mistaken belief that's going to make things better. But "Perfect is the enemy of good", as they say, so you may start to wonder if he'd be better off just trying to get a good result, or better yet, maybe learn to live with things the way they are. If someone can't be happy, as they define it, maybe it's better to shoot for contentment - that may be the way to inner peace, accept the things you can't change and all that.
This model of time-travel is a bit more like the one recently seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where if someone goes back in time via the quantum realm and changes the past, they don't necessarily create a different present, but instead create a parallel timeline where things are different, then in order to get back to their own reality, they just have to travel forward from a point before the divergence. Umm, wait, is that right? It doesn't really matter since there is no time travel (well, there IS but we can't control the direction or the speed...) so let's just roll with it. I also haven't seen a time machine before that just jumps back and forth between two particular days, that may be unique.
There is some cleverness to this all, and it's also (eventually) easy to understand why Avery put Noah in the Friend Zone in the first place, and this also, by extension, jibes with that feeling of sharing a lot of things in common with someone when you first get together with them, and then later you might tend to focus on all the differences between you, and over time it may get harder and harder to get that old feeling back. Noah's convinced himself that initial commonality was a clear indicator, even though Avery perhaps never saw it as such, and he's based his whole philosophy on the concept that things aren't the way they're meant to be. But maybe things aren't meant to be any way at all, and we're the ones in control of our fates by our actions. Placing an intent on the random happenstance of the universe might just be an illusory feeling.
That being said, when we wake up each day, how do we know for sure that the last day we experienced was yesterday? We could all be jumping through the days of our lives in random order and not know it. Or maybe we sometimes jump back to a day three years ago if there's an important lesson that we learned that day that we need to remember again. Who's to say? Oh, right, we invented calendars and computer clocks so we could keep it all straight. Plus there are so many things we do, like study for tests the night before, that seem to confirm that we're living our lives in a linear fashion, more or less. It just gets harder as you get older to remember what you did or ate the day before, if someone should ask you that.
Anyway, the point of this film seems to come from Noah learning that you have to become friends with somebody before you take the relationship to that next level - it's a valuable lesson as I enter the final week of the romance chain (which is now 41 films instead of 40, c'est la vie). Also, you can't force a relationship to happen, you've got to just let it develop naturally, also great advice, even if you don't have a time-traveling photo booth.
Overall, though, the "time loop" moniker seems to be the closest one, the one most commonly used, even if this isn't a "loop", like in, say, "Looper". But "time loop" seems to cover "Source Code", "Edge of Tomorrow" and so on. But there's a certain irony in some filmmaker essentially re-making "Groundhog Day", right? Or what do you call it when you've watched "Groundhog Day" too many times?
Also starring Adam DeVine (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Andrew Bachelor (ditto), Shelley Hennig (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Robbie Amell (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Dean J. West, Tony Cavalero, Chris Wylde, Noureen DeWulf (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Daryn Kahn, Peter Jaymes Jr., Martin Bats Bradford, Chelsea Bruland, Adam Henslee, Tenea Intriago, Kyler Porche, Audrey Bishop, Bill Rainey.
RATING: 6 out of 10 flavors of Red Bull
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