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About Time

A girl in a red dress, laughing in the rain, alongside a tall red-haired man wearing a suit.

I watched a boring movie recently.

Through DVD sent through the snail mail by Netflix (by now a very old-school system) I watched a fantasy about time travel.

There is nothing wrong with fantasies about time travel. H.G. Wells', THE TIME MACHINE is a classic novel and gave rise to an equally classic movie of the same name. More recently, the Harry Potter novels/movies had time travel elements, as did the Terminator films, etc.

The movie I saw last night, ABOUT TIME (2013) was an effort to do something different from all of that, to make time travel a plot device within a romantic comedy.

The closest analog would be THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (2004). There too, the story was about the multiple paths possible in the life of an apparently ordinary person who can travel back in time to correct what he sees in retrospect as his mistakes. But in BUTTERFLY, the emphasis is on how efforts to fix the mistakes of the past keep backfiring, so each time line seems worse than the one before, and the movie makers seemed to have to draw a miracle out of their Hollywood hats in order to keep their film from ending tragically.  It wasn't a great film, but it wasn't a bad one.

ABOUT TIME is much more determined to be a comedy.  as a result, we keep putting the actual plot (such as it is) aside for scenes instructing us that playwrights are misanthropes and that our lead character has an idiotic uncle on his mother's side.

Everybody seems to like idiot uncle, indeed to find him charming. But I didn't.

Anyway, nothing in this mess worked. Just thought I'd tell you, dear reader.

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