Here we go with another time travel review. This one is particularly for The Butterfly Effect 2 but since the shittiness of the sequel made me rewatch the first one, I’m going to explain why I think TBE1 is good and TBE2 is utter shit in comparison.
In the first movie, four kids grow up with fucked up lives: Evan, the main character, has blackouts; his love interest is molested by her dad; her brother is a total sociopath even as a child; and their friend has a mental breakdown because of the brother’s antics. The movie picks up when they’re in college, or at least Evan is, because the other three characters are fucked.
Through a weird series of events, he finds he has the ability to read his journals and travel back in time to his blackouts. So he does that, which changes life. It makes some things better, but other things worse. So he tries to fix the other things to make those things better (he fucks over colleagues to climb his way up the ladder) and ends up destroying everything. His motives are to save his fucked up friends. All Evan wants to do is to make everyone’s lives better, even at the eventual expense of his own.
In the sequel, the main character is a vapid cunt of a man who is surrounded by one dimensional characters who are all killed off after the first five minutes. One year later, as he stares at a picture of his dead friends, he finds he can totally travel back in time! He saves his friends, ends up living with his girlfriend. He spends the rest of the movie worried about himself and changing time for his own gain. At the end he has some crisis of conscience when he learns about that (gasp) twist that his girlfriend is pregnant when she dies. So he sacrifices himself.
Honestly, don’t mind that I just ruined the end. I didn’t ruin anything. The director and writer ruined the movie when they decided to make it. It’s not that the cinematography is bad. It’s not that the dialogue is stilted or that the editing looks shitty. It’s just that I honestly didn’t give a fuck about the characters.
I must say though, I do really enjoy movies that do time travel like this: it just happens. No technical mumbo jumbo (Primer – don’t get me wrong cuz I love that movie but it’s pretty sci-fi) or bull shit science (I’m still irritated about A Sound of Thunder.
If you like time travel, this is interesting alternate dimension super-paradox stuff. I’d say watch it, but don’t worry about thinking any character means anything. You’ll be rooting for the main character (I don’t even know his name and I just watched it) to die at the end. I’m going to watch the third one eventually, but I don’t think I can stand the bullshit anytime soon.
Okay, this New Years Day (and partially today), Dan and I did our normal ritual of a movie marathon. Two years ago it was the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy — extended editions. Last year when Dustin and Chris were here, we watched alternating horror movies and Disney movies, meaning that Cloverfield was followed by Beauty and the Beast or something similar.
This year, I let Dan choose, and he went with “available Coen Brothers movies in chronological order.” A few days beforehand, we had watched Barton Fink (which he had never seen before) because it was only streaming on Netflix until December 31st, so we had that covered. The marathon started with Raising Arizona, a movie we had both seen before. Miller’s Crossing is streaming on Netflix and it’s one of the rare Coen movies neither of us had seen, so we watched that. And then Fargo.
Today we skipped a few (uh…I played Dragon Age: Origins all day) and just watched No Country For Old Men. I’m ashamed to say we bought that DVD over a year ago and just got around to watching it because it was really great. So now that the only Coen movie we haven’t seen is Blood Simple, I’m gonna put them in some kind of arbitrary order for my pleasure.
Here’s my top eleven starting with the “worst” one (quotes because even a bad Coen movie is still awesome:
- 11. Raising Arizona (1987) – An interesting but early film, has all of the Coen charm but they’re still figuring it out.
- 10. The Ladykillers (2004) – The characters in this movie are fucking amazing but the plot barely holds my attention.
- 09. Intolerable Cruelty (2003) – I like this movie a lot but Catherine Zeta-Jones really irritates me and that doesn’t help.
- 08. The Big Lebowski (1998) – A hilarious classic with plenty of quotable lines. Also Philip Seymour Hoffman.
- 07. Barton Fink (1991) – It’s just strange enough to be surreal and I love that it’s about a writer with writer’s block written as a way to cope with writer’s block.
- 06. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) – My memory might be clouded with time since I haven’t seen it in 5 or so years, but I loved this one.
- 05. Burn After Reading (2008) – Probably the most laugh out loud of the Coen movies.
- 04. No Country For Old Men (2007) – There’s a reason everyone always talks about this movie. Cormac McCarthy is also amazing.
- 03. Fargo (1996) – Everything about this movie is perfect. I don’t even know how to surpass it.
- 02. A Serious Man (2009) – But somehow they did. Tighter direction and editing make this untouchable to me.
- 01. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) – Even though I just said ASM was untouchable, it’s not a movie I could watch every day if I wanted to. One of the top ten movies of all time.
Now, if you haven’t seen any or all of these movies, I can tell you they are each worthwhile and amazing and you should check them out. Joel and Ethan Coen are definitely the best filmmaking duo out there.
I wanted to talk a lot about this, but as someone who hasn’t read the book Pride and Prejudice, it’s really hard for me to say whether or not the British miniseries Lost in Austen is good. What it is though is a nice example of a time travel story that ends up breaking all the rules.
The main character somehow transports into the story of the original novel and she manages to screw everything up. Characters don’t marry the people they’re supposed to marry and she (kind of predictably) falls in love with Mr. Darcy. If I knew the book better, I’d assume she was taking, a little too closely, the place of the original main character, Elizabeth Bennett, who is supposed to fall in love with Darcy.
Thankfully, everything doesn’t quite work out as planned. I thought it was going to be boring and trite, but it ended up being a passable attempt at a modern vs. manners story. The biggest complaint that I had was that they barely showed the main character’s boyfriend. He ends up being polite, gentle, and forgivable, and then, randomly says if she takes one foot back into Darcy’s world that he’s done with her. They never explain it and it seems completely out of character for the acts he did in the ten minutes beforehand.
Otherwise, it’s a pretty good watch for a time travel buff or someone who just loves British shit.
I want to write a little bit about this without spoiling too much of the book/movie, but it’s kind of impossible. I’ll probably have to get at least a little specific.
A page of script is about a minute of film time, give or take, but a book page has way more content than any page in script format. Unless a story is around 80 pages long, it’s obviously going to have way too much information in it than you need or can use for a script. Usually characters are removed or plot details can be changed. That’s ok. Movies are adaptations of books. They cannot be perfectly the same.
The problem I have with Hollywood is that since the beginning of time, stories have had completely tragic endings where everyone dies, but Hollywood does not accept this. In The Ruins, a group of tourists end up in an unescapable situation and all of them die. The movie (which I haven’t seen, I’ve just read a detailed synopsis) has a person survive. It bothers me, not only because I love the tragic and fatal, but because I have seen this happen in many movies.
Sometimes it’s nice to read a story where no one is happy and everyone dies. Sometimes I want to read a story where the cycle isn’t broken, where nothing is out of the ordinary for their situation, but only for us. I see there’s no way out, and it’s comforting for me to watch them attempt it.
As you all may have inferred by this point, I am a huge time travel nut. I also love Futurama. Over a year ago, I bought the first three seasons of the show because they were on sale for $20 a piece, which is really cheap for a season of a tv show. I’ve watched them four or five times by now, but I never bought the fourth season.
I’m currently in St. Louis at my friend Erin’s house and I noticed she had season four, so we watched it. I had seen a few episodes, but not all of them, and I enjoyed the ones I hadn’t seen. The show is much better than any other cartoon, for me, because of the element of science in it. (Also the fact that they’ve dipped into time travel a few times doesn’t hurt.) When we finished it, I still wanted to watch more, and I saw she had two of the movies they made recently (Bender’s Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs) so I gave them a watch.
Both of the movies were a good length and multiple plot threads that kept my attention. You definitely need to watch them in order. The first one was all about time travel. Bender recites some binary code that’s written in a tattoo on Fry’s ass and it causes a portal to open up that he walks through to steal things for these creepy nude aliens. Not much is explained technically, but the Globetrotters show up again to help like in the time skipping episode. There are very few paradoxes contained within the movie (some can be explained by Bender’s inability to consolidate his trips, but the one that causes the final moments of the film is impossible) but a lot of things that happen in normal episodes of the show become paradoxical.
The Beast with a Billion Backs starts off right at the end of the first movie. Fry starts dating a girl who he is very into and ends up asking to move in with her. When he goes to move in, he finds out she has four other boyfriends who live with her. He’s first uncomfortable with it, but grows to the idea until he realizes she’s still looking for more men. Here I’ll omit some of the plot that would ruin the first movie, but Fry ends up falling in love with a space alien who then says he’s in love with the whole universe. It’s kind of a mockery of polyamory and monogamy so I really enjoyed it. At the end, Bender says something like that real love is jealous, which made me laugh. I haven’t much talked about polyamory and how it relates to me on this blog, but it people are interested I could give it a go.
Anyway, two great movies that made me really think that the writers of Futurama were writing specifically for me. I suggest the show and the movies (though there are two I still haven’t seen) for anyone who likes scientific themes and coherent cartoons for adults.
I hate move trailers. I never watch them unless I knew a ton about the movie before wanting to see it, like having read the book or the movie being a sequel. It started when I was sixteen, ten years ago, and went to see Final Destination.
My sister, my mom, and her boyfriend needed a movie to go see and my sister was interested in Final Destination. She told me it was something about a plane crash, so I agreed. I had no idea what I was going to see and that made the movie’s twists and turns a lt more exciting for me. Since then, I’ve made it a point to not watc trailers or read much about movies that look good to me.
Cloverfield was a movie that looked amazing just from seeing the short teaser and I refused to read anything else about it. I was not disappointed; it’s one of my favorite movies. District 9 was another movie that seemed interesting from just hearing the commercials at work.
I knew nothing going into the movie except there were mutants or aliens or something, and that they were segregated from normal humans. The movie was so much more than that. Part mocumentary, part action movie, part opposites-attract buddy comedy, part scifi CGI bonanza, District 9 lives up to the small hype it was given in my mind.
I don’t wanna say much more except that both J.J. Abrams and Peter Jackson are true scifi lovers, allowing directors with new fresh takes on monster and alien movies to get a chance, so we don’t have to watch remakes of Halloween or Final Destination. As much as I love those two flicks, I’ve seen them. Give me new stuff.
I finally got around to watching this Spanish horror movie called [rec]. I wanted to watch it because I heard they were making an English version and because I also saw some trailers that made it seem really different from how it actually was.
The movie wasn’t bad. The premise is pretty much a first person realism feel like Cloverfield (though this came out the year before) with zombies. A news reporter who is working with some firemen over night on her show goes out on a call with them to a building where all hell breaks loose.
The realism is broken quite a few times. I’m trying so hard not to compare it to Cloverfield because I love that movie before, but to be honest, Cloverfield did it better. It’s not [rec]’s fault because I don’t know of any other movies in the “genre” besides those two. The movie has a few pacing problems and that’s one of the most annoying parts about it.
It’s worth watching for the last fifteen minutes where they enter the penthouse. The ending is scary and visceral and will make you excited all the way through, which is more than I can say for the middle of the movie.
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About As a poet, I feel like any photography I do will always be a reflection of the words I use. When I think, I think in words, not images, unlike visual artists. This site houses a minimalist dream log, my poetry including poems from You May Waltz To Your Doom In Sanguine Stained Shoes, my photography, and a blog with Let's Play related entries.
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