BEFORE: We canceled a few streaming services the other day - Hulu, Disney and Peacock. Well, not really, what happened was that the price of Hulu-Disney+ went up again and my wife was complaining about it, she's been covering that lately what with me being under-employed. I got Disney+ free for a year when it started, as a birthday gift I think, then we upgraded our phones and got another free year, then another but eventually we had to start paying for the service. It was affordable back then, and now, not so much.
I kept getting e-mails from my cable service that streaming services were available through them, and would be covered by our monthly cable bill - well, they did just eliminate a couple HBO channels without any warning, so we were kind of overpaying for cable, because it's not like they're ever going to issue a refund or lower their rates. But we activated the three services - Hulu, Disney+ and Peacock, with the instructions provided by our cable-providing overlords, and that meant we could cancel the accounts we've been paying for. I know, I know, they're probably just going to over-charge us in some other way, because nobody ever gets ANYTHING for free, but on paper at least we went from paying $36 per month for these three services to paying only $6 per month. It would have been $0 but she wanted to upgrade to ad-free Peacock, she watches a few shows that way so it makes sense.
New York Comic-Con is coming up, and that's another thing I've been getting free for years, entry to the Con. Obviously I worked for an animator who was an exhibitor, and I ran his booth for the last decade and a half, that always came with a badge so I could get into the event and work my ass off, but hey, that's also free entry to an event with an expensive ticket. I maybe didn't have too much time during each event to explore and buy stuff and have fun, but any of that which I did was free, free, free. Now I've been trying to work at the upcoming event for the same reason, but working crowd control for four days straight, sun-up to sundown, would be even more exhausting, and I'm just not a young man anymore. SO maybe it's best that I take some time off from NYCC, like I did with San Diego Con. I thought maybe I'd buy a ticket so I could go have fun there for one day, but it costs $85 and also, it's sold out. I'd have to buy a ticket on the resale market, which could be even more expensive.
Iman Crosson carries over from "The Present", where he supplied the fake voice of Barack Obama for that iPad. I mean, there's just no way anyone ever recorded the real Barack Obama saying, "Bring that clock over here." At least, it's very doubtful.
THE PLOT: A woman from Miami, Florida decides to solve time travel in order to go back and be the person she always wanted to be.
AFTER: Ever feel like you're watching the same movie, again and again? Two time travel films in a row, one where a magic clock allows kids to relive the same 12 hours again and again, and now a film where a magic pill allows a woman to relieve the same week again and again. It's really the same story, just a few different elements, here the woman isn't trying to save a marriage, she's trying to save her own life. She knows that she dies at the end of the week, but just before she dies, if she takes a pill, she goes back in time one week and wakes up in the hospital with her family around her. Her fatal condition is that she's got a black hole in her chest, and it's growing - yes, that kind of black hole, like the ones in space that take in all matter and light and that nobody really understands. Fortunately, she's some kind of physics expert, so maybe she can take the next week and race against the clock and figure out what's happening to her and these mysterious pills that were given to her when she was a young girl.
Obviously this is all some kind of metaphor because such pills don't exist, just like a magic grandfather clock doesn't exist, they just represent the desire to go back to better times, or the wish that we could rehearse key moments in our life and get them 100% right and then by extension stop screwing everything up. Sure, we can learn from our mistakes but most of the time we can't FIX them, can we? You don't get do-overs, you can only deal with the mistakes and the hurt and the regret and move on, try to do better next time. But, OK, what if you could go back and do things four, five, eighty-seven times?
After going around the loop several times (which includes numerous rides on the Miami monorail system, which happens to be named Omni Loop), Zoya Lowe is just sick to death of her family, and how they're treating her during her final week of life. They coddle her, they over-protect her, they celebrate her birthday a few weeks early (those bastards!) and they give her gifts and a cake - but notably they do NOT sing "Happy Birthday", and really, this is how I like my birthdays, too. Cake, yes, please, definitely cake, but please don't make me sit there and do nothing during those AGONIZING 20 seconds while you're all singing a horrible song in three different keys. Zoya, I feel your pain. Cake and beer, but no song, that feels right. Time after time, she gets to blow out the candles, but her nose starts to bleed before they cut the cake, and she excuses herself to go in the other room and take the pill, and then somehow the whole universe resets and it's one week ago and she goes around the cycle again.
I kept thinking, well, why not just NOT go through it again? Why not just get out of there and go do something else for a week, go to Boston or Paris or try that new restaurant you've been meaning to try, eat and drink whatever you want, because it doesn't matter, you're just going to take the pill and reset everything, so screw it. Thankfully, the number of pills in the bottle never changes, as a fortunate side-effect of resetting the universe, she never took the pill in the past so she'll always have more pills. Well, go crazy then and fly to Japan or Bora Bora, spend your last week on the beach, if that's your thing, just don't lose track of that pill bottle.
Instead, she goes to find a young physics student that she bumped into while visiting her elderly mother on one of her last-week go-rounds. Maybe she and this student can analyze the pills, figure out how they're resetting things, and/or open up some new field research into black holes or how the time/space continuum works or try to figure out who gave Zoya the pills in the first place, something that will break this cycle, or better yet allow Zoya to go back further than one week so she can really make different life choices. However, this could mean that she'd marry a different guy or not have children, so let's put a pin in that for now, but maybe remember this because it could be important later.
Zoya gets some flack from her old professor, who somehow is still teaching at the university, despite his advanced age. He holds her accountable for always being lazy in college and never doing "the work", despite the acclaim she's received for writing several books on physics with her husband. (Oh, the irony of having a black hole on the cover of their latest book, when she's got a tiny black hole in her chest that is threatening to kill her...) But the professor is correct, because it turns out that Zoya just used the pills to pass her exams, she'd take the exams, fail them but learn the answers, and then just go back and take the exams again. (But that's still a form of learning stuff, right?)
Zoya and Paula, the student, enlist the help of the Nanoscopic Man, who is a test subject from another experiment that got miniaturized (think Ant-Man) only the experiment worked too well, there was no way to keep him from shrinking more and more, so eventually he will go sub-atomic, or get so small that he'll just blink out of existence. But in the meantime he can help analyze the pills on the atomic level, and this proves... well, something, the pills have a rotating chemical structure, but they still don't know how the tiny pills are affecting all of time and space. Plus, are the pills working with the black hole in Zoya's lungs, or did use of the pills CAUSE the black hole? They don't know this either.
After many attempts to analyze the pills, their research keeps hitting the same dead-end at the end of the week. Zoya is the only one who retains the memory of the research through all the universe resets, so she breaks out of the pattern again and looks up her old colleague from Princeton, Mark. Unfortunately she learns that he died four months ago, but his son allows her to look through his research files, and it turns out he was working on some of the same mathematical formulas that she was, and so it's possible that she could put her research together with his and come closer to figure out what's going on. But in all this time spent away from her family, she didn't factor in the cost, how concerned her husband and daughter are about her, since she disappeared from the hospital. So in the end Zoya decides to stop all the research and spend the best possible week with her family and then maybe accept her fate.
Again, it's all one giant metaphor, we all die but we don't "blip" out like we got sucked into a black hole. (It would be convenient, though, no body to dispose of.). And few of us think about the symbolic hole that we leave behind, really that's just their problem, knowing that people are going to miss us is all one big final ego trip, right? And maybe we all have some sort of black hole inside of us, it's kind of a symbol for cancer or heart disease or whatever's going to kill us eventually, because entropy.
But I was reading up on black holes last week, you know, as you do, and it's remarkable how much they don't know about them. First off, the articles I read were all in the present tense, like "we can now look at this black hole that's 15 million light years away, and we know that it's growing larger.". That's incorrect, we know NOTHING about what that black hole is doing now, because it's 15 million light years away, so we only know that it WAS growing larger 15 million years ago, it took that long for light from there to reach us, so we're always looking at the distant past, that's how time and space are connected, as in the further we can look with a telescope, the further we're also looking back in time.
So, our best model of the universe is that it's constantly growing, but perhaps we only think this because everything seems to be moving away from us. The most logical conclusion is that the universe is constantly expanding, because in that model everything would be moving away from everything else - but another conclusion would be that the earth is the center of the universe, and, well, we've made that mistake before, it's too arrogant a thing to assume though, so we've moved on to the notion that the universe is always getting bigger and thus other galaxies are always moving away from us. But think of another model, where the universe is a big container of popcorn and each galaxy is a kernel of popcorn. If you toss the popcorn up in the air, every kernel would be flying away from every other kernel, but the mass and volume of the entire batch isn't changing. Plus kernels could crash into each other, and eventually the whole batch is going to end up on the floor - so we don't know enough about the universe to think that it will always be expanding and never shrinking in the future, because you have to wonder if there's a limit to the infinite, which would mean that it wasn't in fact infinite to begin with.
Also, we still don't really understand how black holes work. I remember as a kid findiing out that there's a black hole in the center of our galaxy, and so I would stay up at night worried that eventually our solar system is essentially circling a giant drain that we call the Milky Way, and eventually we're all going to get sucked in and disappear, and we've got no defense against this, it's just going to happen one day, but fortunately that day is a few million years in the future. So the human race will either have expanded to other solar systems, or be dead from climate change or using up all our resources. Whew, what a relief. But maybe there's a black hole a the center of every galaxy, maybe that's the gravity source that helps galaxies form, it pulls solar systems closer to it and they all start orbiting around it and that's just a natural part of how the universe works. That sounds maybe a bit more comforting.
But still, what do we really know? We know that a black hole is a giant gravity well that absorbs everything, crushes all matter into a single point, and, umm, then what? What happens to everything that goes into a black hole, does it come out somewhere else or just cease to exist? We talk about the "big bang" as being all matter in the universe compressed into a single point before exploding, but doesn't that sound an awful lot like the opposite of a black hole? Is every black hole compressing matter into a single point to create some future form of big bang? Maybe a lot of "little bangs"? What is the purpose of a black hole? Is it part of some cosmic sewage system or garbage disposal? Is it a worm-hole or portal to somewhere else, or just a big trash compactor? Theories have shifted over time...
Stephen Hawking's work showed that black holes emit radiation and possess entropy themselves, so they're not some weird fluke of the universe that doesn't follow the laws of physics, they are thermodynamic by nature and thus subject to the same laws, however when you're dealing with SO much gravity in one place then Einstein's rules of relativity kick in, and so it seems like the impossible is happening, so much matter compressed into one place that it seems like matter is being destroyed, but we also know that is impossible, matter can be converted to energy but it can't just disappear. So now scientists have come up with the theory of gravastars, that would be like a regular star but composed of dark energy. Well, we all know what the speed of light is, but what exactly is the speed of dark? Is dark energy the thing that is driving the expansion of the universe, and if so, how?
The most recent study of two black holes colliding (and by recent, again, I mean millions of years ago, news travels fast but only at the speed of light) showed that the black holes are defined by mass and spin. Gee, that sounds a lot to me like electrons or quarks or other things that are very very tiny but are also defined by their mass and their spin. So on a very very large scale, the universe seems to operate the same as it does on a very very tiny scale, what does THAT mean? Are galaxies just very big molecules at the end of the day? Are all the stars and planets just atoms inside that molecule? We talk about the massive relative distance between atoms, like even objects that we think of as "solid" have a lot of space between the atoms, and don't the stars also have a lot of space in-between them? What contains the universe, anyway, and if galaxies are like molecules, what do those molecules form? Is Earth just a giant electron, and if so, what happens when our atom loses an electron, where do we go? Also, if there is no limit on how big the universe can get, can something be infinitely small instead of infinitely large? Plus, if something keeps getting smaller and smaller, does it loop around again and become very big?
Another theory is that our whole universe is already inside a massive black hole - or was formed by one. This is called the "Cosmic Bounce" theory, an alternative to the Big Bang, and this theory says that everything has expanded and shrunk, maybe many times already. At some point all matter collapses to a high-density point, but doesn't form some kind of infinite singularity, instead all that stored energy bounces back, which creates the new universe. So our universe is just one step in a larger cosmological cycle that's constantly driven by gravity and quantum mechanics. When things get boring, as they tend to do after a few billion years, everything just kind of turns around and heads back to where it started, or all the black holes at the center of all the galaxies grow big enough to collectively suck in all the stars and planets, and BOOM, we just start everything over again. Just think about all the new and exciting sandwiches we'll all get to try! Oh, wait, we'll all be long dead.
But that just means that we should all try to seek out more interesting and flavorful sandwiches while we are alive, we simply must try them all before the collapse of the universe or a rogue black hole sucks in both our solar and digestive systems. This is commonly called the "Big Bun Theory", which states that if we keep on adding ingredients to sandwiches, we could theoretically create a sandwich that is so massive, so flavorful that nothing can escape from it, not even mayonnaise. It hasn't happened yet, but my research continues - I'm hoping to get a grant so I can search for evidence of the Big Bun Theory in other cities around the country. Prior research on po'boys in New Orleans and brisket sandwiches in Texas seemed promising but was ultimately inconclusive.
Directed by Bernardo Britto
Also starring Mary-Louise Parker (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Ayo Edebiri (last seen in "Bottoms"), Carlos Jacott (last seen in "Barbie"), Hannah Pearl Utt (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Chris Witaske (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Fern Katz, Steven Maier (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Jennifer Bassey (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Maddison Bullock, Riley Fincher-Foster, Jacob Bond, Harris Yulin (last seen in "Game 6"), Eddie Cahill (last seen in "Miracle"), Michael Laurino, Efren Hernandez, James Benson, Rick Moose (last seen in "Saturday Night"), James Healy Jr. (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Roberto Escobar (last seen in 'Transporter 2"), Tracy Wiu, Diana Garle, Mike Benitez (last seen in "Pain & Gain"), Hugo Fuentes, Ester Tania (last seen in "The Comedian"), Amanda Tavarez, Ron Magill
RATING: 7 out of 10 chest x-rays (if it IS a black hole, maybe don't bombard it with X-rays? just saying.)
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