About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013)

[manicsounds]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2194499/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

International Trailer, which is the better trailer.

I'm not much of a fan of Richard Curtis. "Four Weddings" was good, I actually hated "Love Actually", but since I've been a fan of Time Travel/Time Loops in science fiction, the concept of "About Time" looked like a fun piece.

Critics were a bit mixed on this, most of them attacking the science fiction element, but judging from the IMDB user score, and various review sites, the audience score is much higher.

So why did the movie not do so well in the US or the UK? I think the marketing in most places geared the film toward women, the posters, many of the trailers, yet the movie is really more for men actually. The love story between the male-female leads (Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams) is what was marketed, but in reality the father-son relationship (Bill Nighy, excellent as the dad) is the core of the movie.

It's a very well constructed, well shot, and emotionally very funny and sad as well. Of course there are some flaws that I would have liked to fix concerning the time travel aspect, but overall it was probably the most satisfying movie of 2013 for me. (I will be giving a copy of this movie to my father for his next birthday.)

[Movie-Brat]

I rather enjoyed it. I liked the premise and really, I didn't mind that they skewed the rules of time travel established here as one, it does provide for plenty of good comedic moments and two, they had to be done in service of what the film was trying to accomplish.

Random note, I felt Tom Hollander was a scene stealer; I loved every moment the guy was in; I'm just chuckling thinking about very specific moments like that toast at Tim's wedding. Besides that, I felt it was very touching and had a good lesson about life. It was very mature about its subject which left me impressed.

[swo17]

Hoo boy, this movie. It's a difficult one to criticize, as the people I know who have loved it seem to have done so in affirmation of the strong feelings that they have for their own fathers or sons, so tearing the film apart is a bit like murdering their loved one and then trying afterward to explain why you did it. But I don't personally know any of you, so here goes. Don't mistake my meaning here. I fully support the film's message--about the pricelessness of family bonds and the importance of being grateful for every moment that you have with them. In fact, you should call up your dad right now and go do something with him--play a couple rounds of ping pong, take a walk along the beach, or even take him to a movie. Just not this movie.

I haven't read enough to see why others might have criticized the time travel element of the film, though that isn't really my issue per se. The rules of time travel here are no more or less plausible than in any other such film. They're rather fun and simple actually, but apparently not simple enough for the film to remember all of them more than ten minutes after they've been introduced. Consider for example the late development that

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traveling back before one of your children was conceived will result in fertilization from a different sperm, causing your child to become a completely different person. (This would have been nice information for the dad to reveal either when the son got married, when he had a notion that they might be trying to have kids, when he found out the son's wife was pregnant, when the child was born, or any time in the couple of years that followed, but instead he waits for his son to figure it out the hard way.) Never fear though! Because apparently if you go back before your child was conceived a second time and undo the other thing that you did, this will magically cause the sperm the third time around to be the same as the first. Because that wouldn't have been dramatically interesting at all, to have the son have to learn to cope with the loss of the child that he knew for only a little while until being replaced with a complete stranger that was nonetheless still his biological child.

Then of course there is the big cathartic moment at the end, where father and son recklessly go back way before the birth of several of the son's children in order to relive a clichéd postcard walk-on-the-beach moment. This brazen move doesn't replace any of his children with strangers either because WHY ARE YOU QUESTIONING THIS, DON'T YOU LOVE YOUR DAD?

Actually, the time travel element of the film really only exists so that the film can cut, Goofus and Gallant style, between bad-sitcom "Wouldn't it be hilarious if this situation went as awkwardly as possible?" scenes and the flipside wish-fulfillment of getting to relive these scenes as a smooth operator. (So like, in this movie, George Costanza would have gotten to use his "jerk store" line, everyone would have given him a high five, and then he would have lived a happy, well-adjusted life for the rest of Seinfeld. Because that's what an audience wants to see!) The key area where this gets reversed:

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In the initial meet-cute with Rachel McAdams' character, sparks understandably fly. It's one of those rare, magical moments that shows us that these two characters are meant for each other, but even more importantly, convinces them that they are meant for each other. So it's a potentially fascinating turn of events when time traveling exploits render this event non-existent except in the mind of the boy. How do you manufacture that initial spark with completely different ingredients? How do you convince a complete stranger that you're meant for one another? Or does the failure to be able to do so reveal something about the fragile hollowness on which many of our relationships are founded? Oh, never mind, I guess you can just creepily recite some trivia from your now alternate-reality first date and she'll be all yours again.

Since time travel serves such a juvenile purpose in this film, it's not surprising that the characters' inevitable maturation toward the end finds them no longer in need of it. But I'm not sure what it says about your time travel movie when your characters ultimately decide that an unexplained disruption in the space-time continuum is less exciting than their own, wholly unremarkable lives.

[manicsounds]

Yeah, the logic of the last big time jump with Dad was first a bit jarring, even though Nighy says "If we're really careful..." meaning if they don't change anything at all, then it's possible to not have a butterfly effect. But as anyone who knows acting, is it really possible to do 2 takes exactly the same, to every minute detail? Probably not....

But the whole "getting the girl to fall in love with him", which in "Groundhog Day" also showed, but in "Groundhog Day", no matter how much he learned about her and what she wants, it just wasn't meant to be because there never was a real spark between them.

For the character of Tim in "About Time" it was always about the initial awkwardness that he had problems with, not just with Mary, but with any girl we see him with. The only time Tim was really not awkward was after the initial meeting, and he knew with time jumping, once he could get passed that initial moment, he could easily get Mary to like him by just being himself, as he did the "first" time.

Although there is ONE part of the movie which bugged me, and could have easily been fixed in a rewrite:

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Tim wants to make it so his younger sister would never meet the destructive boyfriend Jimmy, so he decides to tell her that he can travel back in time, and the plan is for him to jump back WITH her, and go back to the original party (which surprises both that it worked), and to make sure they never get together. Job is done, she punches the shit out of him instead and they never get together)

They jump back to the present, and she realizes in mind that she is now in a relationship with Jay instead, and she is happy. (So, she immediately has her memories changed, but Tim doesn't for some reason...) Anyway, we find that since he jumped back BEFORE his daughter was born, and he changed quite a big portion of his family's life that now his baby was born from a different sperm, and now a boy.

OK, I get it, but the part that was hard to figure out: How did he get things back to as they were? Did he travel all the way back to the moment of the original party when him and his sister jumped back, and just said, "Forget the plan, just make sure you meet Jimmy, just as you remembered" and then jump back? Possibly... I also assume that his daughter who is born (again) is not the same baby as from before, but still happens to be a girl. I don't know, it's quite complicated since they didn't show anything... But then that also means in that reality his sister Kit Kat would still know that Tim could jump back in time. But then she would ask him to prevent her car accident and.... ugh.

So how could Curtis have fixed it in writing?

Easy, instead of Tim telling his secret to Kit Kat, Tim would jump back to the original party, and make sure Kit Kat and Jimmy never meet, with some hilarious slapstick coverups and pushing them away from each other. He would then jump back to the present, see that his sister is now in a happier relationship with Jay, but then he returns to his house, and you know his reaction...

So then he jumps back to the original party again, but instead of stopping Kit Kat and Jimmy from meeting, he must sadly watch them interact with each other and realize that changing someone else's past is not his job, but the person must realize the mistakes they are making, which he then also realizes.

And BAM!, we can cut back to the crash and hospital scene.

Damn, why am I not a script doctor?

[davoarid]

Domhnall Gleeson's character may have been the first ever protagonist to goes through an entire film without ever encountering an obstacle!

Ugh, I hated this plot-less mess! And speaking of being a script doctor, this idea occurred to me:

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At one point, after Gleeson is "exclusive" with McAdams, he runs into an old crush (Margot Robbie), and after drinks she invites him up to her apartment for sex (that our gaunt, awkward, red-headed hero is able to land Rachel McAdams and Margot Robbie is just something we're asked to run with). So, standing in the doorway, he has a crisis of conscience...and it was at this point I was absolutely certain I knew which direction the film would take: He'd have sex with Robbie (who wouldn't?!?!), then travel back in time and NOT have sex with her, and go back to McAdams. We'd finally get to some conflict: Lake would start cheating on McAdams constantly, then just traveling back in time to (in his mind) erase the betrayal: "Oh, well, in THIS timeline, I've never actually cheated on her--I'm still a good husband!" He'd be trying to have his cake and eat it too, and we'd see how that eats at him, until he finally has an awakening where he changes his ways. (The conflict between his behavior and his Identity--basically, a breakdown of the hero's cosmic narcissism--would be a welcome burst of morality from the picture.)

But...Nope. He just does the right thing, and the last remaining interesting avenue went unexplored. It was at that point I pretty much checked out--I knew there were no more surprises to be had, and was sadly correct.