"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Press Play: Time Travel Via Cassette



So, I just watched Press Play on Hulu.  I don't know why I didn't come across this movie sooner.  It has the two most important elements in my pop cultural life, time travel and music, and, you know, it's quite good.

[Some spoilers ahead ... ]

Here's the set-up:  Laura meets Harrison in a vinyl and cassette shop in Hawaii run by Cooper (played by Danny Glover).  They both have a love of mixtapes, and fall in love.  Then, four years after Harrison is killed on the way to surfing by a car, Laura discovers that she can go back in time, to before Harrison was killed, every time she plays a song on a mixtape that she and Harrison were making.  When the song ends, she's back in the future in which Harrison was killed four years earlier.  She warns Harrison to be careful about that car, but he dies anyway in a different accident. So, the gist is: Laura can change only the circumstances of Harrison's death, not his death itself.

That's a pretty nice set-up writers James Bachelor and Greg Björkman put together.  Glover is always good to see on the screen.  Clara Rugaard was winsome and winning as Laura, and Lewis Pullman was sensitive and cerebral as Harrison (first time I've seen Rugaard, and Pullman was good in Outer Range).  The music was appealing, too, and new to me.

Now, I generally prefer science fiction to science fantasy -- in time travel, that would be a time machine vs. click your heels together -- but Press Play had such a sweetness, a refreshing innocence, that I'm fine with its fantasy.  It kept within the contours of its story -- music takes us back in time, all the time, in our minds, so why not play with the fantastical possibility that it can also take us back in time in reality -- and the ending was ...

Well, see it yourself, and see if you agree with me that the ending was right.

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