Decades Apart (Director's Cut): Worth Keeping Even Closer

Hey, it's rare that I review a 20+ minute movie, and even more rare (as in never before) a "Director's Cut" of a movie I've reviewed before.  But I can almost never resist a time-travel narrative, and seeing as how I enjoyed Decades Apart, literally a week less than a year ago (here's my review), I couldn't resist the brand new "Noir" aka Director's Cut of Andrew Di Pardo's little movie.

The story, in case you didn't read my review last year or see the movie, is about a phone call from a train station in 1953 that lands in a home in 2018.  The caller is Diane.  The receiver is Nathan, who takes the call on the landline kept in the house for his grandmother.   The conversation that ensues is savvy, tender, deep, and endearing.

It also occurred to me, as I was just watching this new cut, that the story of a possible couple who get to know each other only via phone, separated not by miles but something much more impenetrable -- decades -- has special relevance to our pandemic times, perhaps now just beginning to come to an end, as more and more of us get vaccinated, after more than a year in which the only way most of us could relate to each other, unless we already were living together, was via Zoom.  When Nathan rushes over to the train station near the end of the movie to finally see and with any luck embrace Diane, they can talk and see each, but their hands, as they reach out to touch, are separated by some temporal barrier far more potent than social distancing.

Now the old-fashioned phone, as media theorists (including me as a doctoral student) realized back in the 1970s, is a profoundly personal, even intimate, instrument, in which the speaker's mouth goes right into the listener's ear.  That's much more personal, all the time, than a Zoom or any video conversation usually is.   So because of that, Diane and Nathan already have a lot going for them.

And there's a power in this Director's Cut, as in the pre-pandemic original, that stems from this telephonic connection, and makes you believe that Diane could be talking to the future, and Nathan to the past.  It's what I had in mind when I wrote "If I Traveled to the Past" (I wrote the lyrics, John Anealio wrote the music) in 2010, and recorded it for Old Bear Records in late 2018 (released in 2020).   It's what I had in mind in every time travel novel and short story I've ever written.

Deborah Hahn was good as Diane, and Martin Tylicki as Nathan, as they were in the original (of course they were, it's the same performance).  The original is still on Amazon, and I saw the new Noir Cut on YouTube.  I have no idea if that link will work for you, or how long, but with any luck you won't have to travel too far into the future to see it.

Decades Apart: Worth Keeping Close

I thought I'd resume reviewing one of the hidden little treasures of Amazon Prime Video: literally little, as short to very short, time-travel movies.

Decades Apart is a little under 20-minutes.  The 2018 short tells the story a phone call made by Diane in 1953 that unintentionally reaches Nathan in 2018.  A tender, charming, understandably awkward conversation ensues, and that's the movie.  Well, there's a little more.  When Diane runs out of coins to feed the telephone in the train station that has long been abandoned in 2018, Nathan rushes to what's left of the station to see her.  I won't tell you how that works out.

The strength of the movie is that tender, even touching, conversation, and the two cellos (by 2Cellos) that provide musical accompaniment.   Deborah Hahn is fine as Diane, and Martin Tylicki as Nathan. The telephone as an extra-sensory, even extra-dimensional instrument is something that goes back to the beginning of the 20th-century, and figured in music and postcards.  That was the part of Decades Apart that I liked best.

But there are let's call them temporal clunkers in the dialogue.  Diane protests that she's not a "telemarketer".  That term didn't come into common use until the 1970s.   The two talk about "landlines".  That term didn't come until use until the 1980s and later, when mobile phones began to become massively popular.

But I still found this little movie worth watching.  Kudos to director Andrew Di Pardo, and writers Andrew Di Pardo and Gilbert T. Laberge.  I look forward to seeing more of their work.

 

Broken Sleep: Wanting More

Time travel is my favorite genre - as a reader, writer, and viewer - so how could I resist watching Broken Sleep, which turned out to be a 12-minute gem of a short, on Amazon Prime (2018, year listed as 2017 in the movie).

Emily from the 1840s travels into Nathan's tattoo parlor in the present.  There's no scientific explanation offered for how this happens, which makes Broken Sleep more magical realism than science fiction.   But that's ok.  The same is true of Outlander.

The time-traveling has something to do with Emily drifting off to sleep.  The two fall in love, and need to figure out a way of staying together, which takes into account Emily's sleep cycles and its effects.   See the movie to see if they succeed.

Broken Sleep is beautifully filmed and touchingly told.   Tom Dowuona-Hyde wrote and directed. Tom Beaurepaire and Senie Priti are fine as Nathan and Emily.  There are, basically, two kinds of short movies which are good:  One kind leaves you thorough satisfied after watching the limited number of minutes on the screen.  The other kind leaves you hungering for more - a full-length treatment.   The tender story in Broken Sleep was definitely the latter for me.   I'll definitely be back here with a review of the full length move, if ever one is made, and I get a chance to see it.   No, I'll make sure I see it.

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Remembrance: Philip K. Dick Would've Liked It

Hey, it's December.  That being the case, I thought I'd get back to something I was doing December last year - reviewing some of the plethora of short science fiction you can find and watch for free on Amazon Prime Video (that is, free if you have Amazon Prime).  I'll review as many of these as I can, until the creative demands of the New Year say otherwise.

First up is Remembrance, a 13-minute short with a 2016 date on it, but listed as 2017 on Prime Video and IMDb.   Mining our memories - that is, technology that allows someone to look in on someone else's memories - has become something of a staple in science fiction, and almost seems natural in this our world of Philip K. Dick, the writer whose stories have become the basis of more movies and television series than the works of most other science fiction writers combined.

Remembrance, indeed, is Dickian with a vengeance, in that it combines memory retrieval with murder, or the tapping of memory as a means of nabbing a killer.  I don't want to give too much away about this short film, so I'll confine myself to mentioning that it tells the story of two woman who are twins, one boyfriend, and a memory technology that is being developed by one of the twins.

On the one hand, there's not all that much that's new in Remembrance.  On the other hand, the acting is convincing (Selena Moreno as the twins, Will Lurie as the boyfriend), and the short is memorable and even powerful at times (directed by Madison Campione, written by Madison and Troy Campione).  So I'd say see it if you have 13 minutes to spare.  And I'll be back here soon with another short review of a short science fiction movie on Prime Video.

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Time Travelers: Old Friends

Just caught this 30-minute short on Amazon Prime, listed as from 2012 on IMDB and 2017 on Amazon Prime.  Well, it is about time travel.

Speaking of which - this has to be about the worst title for a time travel movie - short or long - I've ever come across.  What happened, the producers got tired?

But otherwise, it's pretty good.  The scenario of two old friends in a conversation - not old chronologically but rather old in length of friendship - is a natural for time travel.  In fact, although there's a bit of action in this story, the flavor of Time Travelers is a lot like Primer, a now classic time-travel movie in which talk was the main medium (other than the time travel itself).

And the story has some good meta elements, with mentions of not only of time travel but H. G Wells and other writers of the human condition who didn't deal with time travel per se.  That's because (at least) one of the two friends is a writer, a science fiction writer, in fact, and the two discuss the thorny issue of plagiarism - thorny, that is, in its largest philosophical context, which is whether anything is really ever truly original.

Names of known and lesser-known works of science fiction are thrown into the conversion.  I was happy to hear "Loose Ends" at least half a dozen times - ok, it was just "loose ends," without the caps - since "Loose Ends" was a triple-nominated 1997 novella of mine (for Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards), later expanded into a four-part novel.

And there's jealousy not only of writing but love, with one of the two sleeping with the other's wife, which provides a handy motive for murder.  But, ok, I've said enough.  See the short, try to forget about the title, and enjoy.  There's good acting, by the way, by Elliot V. Kotek and Gabe Bettio.

6 Years, 4 Months & 23 Days: Neat 14 Minutes

And my last review of a short film on Amazon Prime for the evening - not sure yet if it's for the year - this time of 6 Years, 4 Months & 23 Days.  First, as you may know, I tend to review mostly time travel, and if not time travel, some kind of science fiction when it comes to short films.  Because ... well, life's too short not to (and time travel has always been my favorite genre, with science in general my next).  But sometimes the title of a short film suggests that it could be about time travel.  So I watch it ... and if it turns out it isn't about time travel at all, but I enjoy it as much as I do a good little time travel story, then ... I give it a review.

That doesn't happen too often, but it did earlier today with The Weekend, a memorable vignette of a couple who connect over a weekend.  And lightning struck twice today, with my viewing of 6 Years, 4 Months & 23 Days a little while ago, a neat and expressive untangling of modern life that unfolds on the screen in just 14 minutes.

The time in the title is the amount of time that our hero, David (well played by John Mawson - who's been on Outlander! - and who also wrote this) has gone without sex - because his wife was in a coma and then died due to the car accident that David who had been drinking got them into.  The night before the short film begins, David's in a bar.  He puts on a hat which makes him look younger, and winds up in bed with a dancer half his age (good job by Augie Duke).  They wake up the next morning, she's shocked at his age, and that's when the complications and the fun ensue.

There's a heart-warming quality to this narrative, and a mix of humor and profundity that reminds me of Neil Simon, though I'm so old myself that I can't recall the last time I saw one of his plays (definitely more than 6 years ago).  In any case, one of the benefits of the Internet, and of Amazon Prime in particular, is you don't have to go to Broadway to see the story, and in fact you can see it on your screen, for free, any time night or day.

So don't wait 6 years or even 23 days to see this.  And if you wake up on New Year's Day with someone half your age in bed, someone you met just the night before - well, this movie is especially just the thing for you to see.

 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 

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The Weekend: Ala McLuhan

Hey, The Weekend (a 20-minute short from 2016 on Amazon Prime) isn't about time travel - though it is reminiscent in more than the title of the 1945 classic The Lost Weekend (which actually isn't about a time travel either, though its title is suggestive) - and it's not even science fiction.  But The Weekend is nonetheless sensitive, well written and portrayed, and definitely worth watching.

It tells the story of a guy, recently jilted, who takes in a woman he meets on a walkway by a beach. She offers him French fries, he declines, but changes his mind, and off we go.

I won't tell you any more of the story, so you can enjoy seeing it yourself.  I will say that, except for one big thing, the story is about nothing - other than two souls brushing against each other, somehow finding a few days of peace in the noise and craziness of the real world all around us, and that's everything.

A short like this - the epitome of McLuhan's cool, because it bids you, the viewer, to fill so much of it in with your own thoughts and feelings (see McLuhan in an Age of Social Media for more) - is absolutely dependent on the acting. Danielle Guldin is quietly outstanding as Chloe, the bearer of the French fries, and Taso Mikroulis is just right as the guy.

The Weekend takes place in New York City.  The shore and the apartment could be anywhere, and there's just one small shopping-for-groceries scene where the street is clearly in the city, but somehow New York City is very much a part of this short film, which somehow also gives it a kinship in my mind to some of the work of Woody Allen.  All of which is to say that Dennis Cahlo, who wrote, directed, and has a cameo in The Weekend, did a fine job indeed with this movie.


 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 

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The Fifth Wall: Meta Meet Her

A delightful, significant little short - 12 mins - on Amazon Prime: The Fifth Wall (2016), about a character with no name who has a conversation with her creator.  Interestingly, the writer is Scott Meridew and the director is Sinisa Radosavljevic aka Sin Radot, but the creator's voice in The Fifth Wall sounds the same as the actress, Tina Vrbnjak, who plays the character.

I say "interesting," because I'm not quite sure of the import of that move, other than making it seem as if the character is talking to herself, which I guess means that "she" exists both in the heads of the writer and directors, as well on the screen, in the apartment we're looking at.

It's a pretty philosophic, meta conversation, as far as these kinds of things go.  As some of you may know, there's a long tradition of fictional characters aware of their own existence, and usually contesting that, or otherwise complaining about it.  See the entry "Metafiction" for examples - ok, here it is.  I've always liked the genre - not usually science fiction, but philosophy fiction, or, to be more precise, ontology fiction, since ontology is the branch of philosophy that probes the nature of existence - not physical existence per se, but the deeper existence of everything in the universe, including ideas.

But back to The Fifth Wall, it takes off from the fourth wall, which is the space or "wall" between the performer and audience.   The fifth does one better, because it's the space between the character and the creator - the creator having created the character, in contrast to the performer and audience, in which both exist almost independently - "almost," because one could argue that a performer without an audience is not really a performer, and so the audience therein creates the performer.  One could argue that, but I'm not sure I would, since I once heard a guest speaker at a conference giving a lecture in a stentorian voice, and when I walked into the room I found he was talking to no one.  Though, one could also argue in that case that his talking to no one created an audience - at least, an audience of one - because it got me to walk into the room, and then I felt so bad for this speaker with no audience that I couldn't bring myself to leave.

But back to The Fifth Wall one final time - what the character wants is to continue to exist, after the short film concludes.  Her creator tells her (and us) that she has a chance to live again, any time anyone wants to see this film again.  I'll likely do that - but you can and should do that, too!  Help this nameless character played by someone named Tina live - watch her movie!

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Do Not Erase: Definitely Do See

Well, this one's indeed short - nine minutes - being the short film equivalent of the short-short in short stories - but it packs a punch, and would be worth your time even if it was longer.

Some of the time-travel shorts and feature-length movies I've been reviewing here of late pit love against time travel, or time travel on behalf of love, or even has both love and time travel in the title.  Do Not Erase aka D.N.E is a satisfying little take on all of that.  Brian our hero is at a blackboard, finishing up his time-travel equations.  His love, Sophie, regrets the time he's been giving to the equations and not to her, but she's waiting for him to finish, which will be soon, so they can spend some time together.  While they're talking, a maintenance guy enters the room and erases a crucial part of Brian's math.  He wants to finish his work.  Sophie leaves in a huff.  And then the action starts.

Let me first say, as a college professor, that I've long worried that a maintenance person or clean-up worker would one day come into my office when I wasn't there and accidentally throw out a crucial piece of writing.  Actually, I haven't worried about that since I started writing on computers now decades ago, but you get what I mean.

I should also say that I guessed the very ending, about two minutes into the nine-minute film, but that's ok.  It was still enjoyable and well rendered.  Good job by Brian Otting (who co-wrote) as Brian, Michele Boyd (who's been in NCIS-LA) as Sophie, and (the sadly late) Richard Hatch (yep, from Battlestar Galactica - the original) as the clean-up worker.  And Matthew Campagna did a good job directing.

Hey, I just realized it took me about nine minutes to write this.   Should I post not erase?  If you're reading this, you know the answer - at least, in this timeline.  (Where you might also want to see the excellent but unrelated time-travel series on Netflix from Japan, Erased.)

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The Time We're In: Stopping Time

Stopping time is a highly effective but not often used technique in the time-travel genre, rich in possibilities for mischief and the most profound changes in human life.  Nicholson Baker's masterpiece The Fermata is an example mostly of the mischief variety - erotic mischief, to be more exact - in which the hero stops time to undress women (see my brief review here).  Likely because Baker is not seen as a science fiction writer, The Fermata is not usually considered to be science fiction or time travel, though Neil Gaiman and Robert Zemeckis are reportedly working on a screenplay (scroll down on that page).

The Time We're In is indisputably science fiction - with the hero doing copious research - and about as personally profound as it gets.  Gabriel and Nadia are having trouble conceiving.  Her doctors tell her she has a deadly tumor, presumably incurable.  Gabriel discovers there's a way to freeze time - which would give him all the time he needs to find a cure.

The 25-minute short, free on Amazon Prime, is beautifully written, directed, and otherwise rendered by Damon Stout (he does the music and film editing, too).  The acting is top notch, with Mike Falkow (seen in NCIS and Scorpion) and Mary Thornton (seen in Criminal Minds) in the lead roles.  Even the supporting acting is memorable, with John Kerry (not the former Secretary of State) as the older Gabriel, and various friends of the couple played with sensitivity (especially Brian Graham and Josette Eales).

The Time We're In could easily have relied on mysticism and magic.  But it took the steeper road of science - down to Gabriel explaining that he's not really stopping time but speeding it up, for himself, so he moves so fast everyone and everything else around him is in effect frozen.   When you have a chance, stop a little time for yourself, for 25 minutes, and see this movie.

 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 

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A Promise of Time Travel: Just That, And A Bit More

I decided to expand my time-travel short binging horizons with a feature-length time-travel movie - still on Amazon Prime, and free, as befits my cheapskate ways - a complete hour and 28 minutes, and A Promise of Time Travel.

And for most the movie, indeed, until the very end, it's just that: a clever, colorful, woman-works-in-a-bookstore kind of time travel story.  This part works well enough, as Zelda - well played by April Grace Lowe (who doubles as the movie's producer) - not only reads intelligently about the metaphysics or philosophy of time travel (not the science), but gets drawn into some kind of time travel plot or scenario which is unclear to her as well as the audience.   I should say here that I find this emphasis on theory not science very enjoyable, and consistent with of my own time travel fiction in novels and stories.  Not only that, but the story preceding or being a prelude to time travel is also something I'm partial to, hence The Chronology Protection Case.

[spoilers ahead ... ]

But the promise is amply fulfilled at the end of A Promise of Time Travel, when Zelda and we learn that a kind of time travel has indeed taken place, but it's the projection of minds into bodies, not the actual transport of full human beings to the past.  In this, A Promise has a kinship with Bonnie Rozanski's The Mindtraveler, one of the best time travel novels I've read in years.  (See here for my brief review.)

There's an interesting romance that runs through A Promise - or a romance that runs through the story in an interesting way - and indeed turns out to be the engine that drives everything else that's going on.  I'm glad I saw this movie - written and directed with style by Craig Jessen - and I'd recommend it to both devotees of the genre and the world at large.

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In the Hands of Time: Quiet Gem of a Time Travel Short

Continuing my end-of-year excursion into time-travel shorts on Amazon Prime, I today encountered In the Hands of Time, some 21 minutes from 2016.

This one's a quiet gem.  An inventor and his wife just find out they're expecting a baby.  He goes into his lab, fiddles with the device he's been working on, and is transported 40 years into the future.  He's outside of his home.   He knocks on the door, which his wife opens.  She's glad to see him - but she's now 70 years old.  Their challenge: how can they be together again at the same age?

Since this kind of time travel only works one way - instantly, 40 years into the future - their options are limited.  But they give it a shot.  And, of course, when you're in the hands of time, rather than your own volition, nothing works out as planned.  Or perhaps the message is that we're always in the hands of time, even without time travel, and that's why so many good plans go awry.

There are basically two kinds of time travel stories (in movies, TV shows, and novels and short stories).  In one type, like 12 Monkeys, the world itself is as stake.  In the other type, like The Butterfly Effect, one or more personal lives are at stake.  In the Hands of Time is a fine example of the latter.

Written and directed by Cheickna Kebe, well acted by everyone, especially Joan Q. Scott as the 70-year old wife.   Don't wait 70 or even 40 years to see this!

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Jacob's Paradox: Between Genesis and Milton

I figured I would expand the purview of my year-end plunge into time-travel feature movies and TV series on Netflix to time-travel shorts on Amazon Prime (Netflix doesn't have many if any time-travel shorts).  First up is Jacob's Paradox from 2015, a 36-minute narrative, written, directed, and starring Michael Peake (this is a common configuration in shorts - Jay Kensinger wrote, directed, and starred in The Chronology Protection Case, based on my novelette of the same name).

The name Jacob's Paradox is reminiscent of the Biblical Jacob's Ladder.  But when you're dealing with time travel and paradox, you often wind up not climbing up to heaven as the Biblical Jacob did, but falling into hell, as the Jacob in this short does.   And though I've always agreed with Milton's Lucifer that it's better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, Jacob doesn't even get to do that in Jacob's Paradox.

This Jacob is a professor who lectures his physics class on the grandfather paradox - if you traveled to the past and killed your grandfather before he sired your mother or father, how would you have been able to travel to the past in the first place, since you wouldn't have existed.  Professor Jacob provides two "solutions" - something will stop you from killing grandpa, or, a new alternate reality will come into being with no you, but since the you who traveled to the past comes from the first reality, the paradox is averted.

So informed, the audience is set for what the thrust of the movie will be: Jacob is going to travel a little bit into the past to save his wife, who was murdered by an intruder in their home when Jacob wasn't there.  Jacob's plan is to travel back to the past and indeed be there, and stop the killer,

I won't spoil the ending for you, except to say it's excellent and O'Henry-esque, with good performances by Peake as Jacob and Mindy Heithaus as as philosophy professor.  Recommended viewing, with room for a sequel.

 

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