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Some would say that it is hard to believe that we have had 6 of these Harry Potter films. Some would say that time has just flown by. I don’t know that it the case. Especially this sixth film which is tedious and rather boring. And worst, all of this adds up to an unwillingness to believe in Harry Potter. He was once a cute, endearing kid who charmed his way into our hearts. But now he’s become this pampered teenage celebrity at Hogwarts. Girls swoon at the sight of him and his teachers suck up to him. Worst of all everyone rushes around him telling him that he is so special and that he is the chosen one.

There is really nothing in the film to explain why Harry should be such a hero. On the contrary, he isn’t really at all very special. He is just a bland, ordinary, uncool, middle-class geek.

My antipathy is not all Harry’s fault. It’s weariness with the juggernaut effect of a franchise that has little to do with filmmaking and a lot to do with brand visibility. Forget the book, ignore the hype and consider this as a film in its own right – it simply doesn’t come up to scratch.

The curious thing is that the director, David Yates, has produced a good-looking film. He manages to create an attractive mix of Dickensian and gothic grandeur. For once, the world of Harry Potter looks authentic, not like an overdesigned film set. And there are some really nice moments, as when Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) cleans up a wrecked room in a manner we haven’t seen since Mary Poppins snapped her fingers. That said, it’s the dullest of all the Potter films, lacking a real purpose or dramatic focus. It spends a lot of screen time dwelling on the past and planting plot points for the future films (therell be two – the final book has, conveniently, been split in half for the cinema).
This is partly due to the screenplay by Steve Kloves, who is best known for writing four of the other Potter films, but is also the genius who wrote and directed The Fabulous Baker Boys. My, how the talented have fallen. Kloves’s screenplay rambles along, weaving in and out of a series of story lines that never add up to a satisfying whole. For example, the film is called Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but the film shows little interest in who this half-blood prince is. So when all is eventually revealed, there’s a terrible sense of anticlimax.

Even the grand struggle between good and evil has been reduced in size and impact. The film opens with an attack on London by the Death Eaters, but settles down to a mood of menace, a worry that bad things are just around the corner. They are – but you will have to wait for the next film to see them.

The trouble is that most of Lord Voldemort’s Death Eaters don’t quite live up to their name. Both Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter) and Narcissa Malfoy (Helen McCrory) – the anxious mother of Hogwarts’s bad boy, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) – lack on-screen scariness. You have only to compare them with the truly frightening corpse-like Inferi or the brooding malevolence of the superb Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) to know what I mean.
Most disappointing of all is the way the film never exploits the dramatic potential of Draco Malfoy. He should be a great char­acter in his own right – a sneering, disturbed, malevolent figure who has a real hatred of Harry – but the role is underwritten. Here, Malfoy has become the alternative chosen one, who must carry out a special mission for Voldemort. It’s Draco’s big moment, a chance for revenge and fame. And what happens? His mummy turns up and pleads with Snape to look after her boy.

To defeat the Dark Lord, Dumbledore uses Harry’s celebrity status to lure the former Hogwarts potions professor Horace Slug­horn (Jim Broadbent) back to the school. Dumbledore wants Harry to extract some crucial information about Slughorn’s former pupil Tom Riddle (Frank Dillane) – who grew up to become Voldemort.

Slughorn is such a tedious character, a celebrity-infatuated social climber, but Broadbent insists on trying to make him a rather lovable old codger, rather than a vicious snob. No doubt former public schoolboys will smile in recognition at the type, but the rest of us will just yawn.

The other great on-screen battle is with raging teenage hormones. Harry and his peers are all facing the green-eyed monster of jealousy, which comes via the tyranny of love. Harry has a crush on Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), sister of Ron (Rupert Grint), while Ron has fallen for Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), which upsets Hermione (Emma Watson), who has a crush on Ron, but is faking interest in another boy. All this love stuff is meant to give the film heart and humour, but it provides neither. It’s a safe and tepid look at young love that bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever. That would be fine if the film had more thrills and magic to it. But this is a Potter film that will be quickly forgotten, even by Harry’s most ardent fans.

Capricorn One is one of the seventies’ most audacious paranoia flicks. Like the similarly minded conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View (1974) and Soylent Green (1973), Capricorn One plays on the “ordinary man” fears of government corruption and cover-up. Coming nearly a decade after the Apollo moon landing, the movie dives into fringe conspiracy theories that erupted after the 1969 landing and paints NASA (which refused to assist the production) as a hotbed of maliciousness and greed. Changed, none too subtly, to a Mars mission, the landing is faked on a soundstage and the astronauts who took part murdered. The poster for the film cried: “The mission was a sham. The murders were real.”

Three astronauts, Charles (James Brolin), Peter (Sam Waterson), and John (O.J. Simpson), are preparing for the first manned mission to Mars when they’re removed by NASA’s Mars mission director (Hal Holbrook) only minutes before liftoff. Taken to an old military base, the astronauts are told that they’ll have to fake the landing. Sure enough, there’s a soundstage with plenty of red sand and a lunar module ready for the shot. Deciding that it’s better to go along with the hoax that ruin NASA, the astronauts shoot not only the landing but play their part in faking the entire journey including their time spent in transit. All goes well until the unmanned capsule burns up on reentry. Now, what’s NASA going to do with three astronauts who should be dead?

The film starts with a bang and in our current climate of rampant conspiracy-theorizing (what with all the 9/11 debunking docs and books) and concerns about government deception or ineptitude (the Iraq War), the anxious provocation of Capricorn One remains startlingly effective. Sadly, the film loses much of that nervous momentum when Elliot Gould is introduced as a cynical reporter (were there any unquestioning reporters in the ’70s?) who stumbles upon the conspiracy and sets to blow the lid off it. His investigation is interesting but clunky, and the back half of the film quickly devolves into an extended chase with the astronauts running for civilization (and avoiding rattlesnakes and NASA goons) and Gould racing to get the story to print before he meets an “accidental” demise.

Capricorn One has a great premise. It’s not only deliriously obsessed (and gleefully paranoid), it’s cleverly scripted by director Peter Hyams. Crackling one-liners and nuanced dialog abound. The film looks good too. Director of photography Bill Butler captures the action set pieces dynamically and brings the desert-set scenes to sun-scorched life. (I’ve seen Capricorn One used as a DVD demonstration film at a number of home theatre stores.) On the downside, after the landing is faked, the fun dissipates quickly. NASA also gets unfairly reamed here. It’s hard to paint an under-funded agency run by, let’s face it, astrophysics nerds as a real threat.

This was Hyams’ first foray into science fiction (he would follow this film with the underrated Outland and 2010). Capricorn One remains something of a cult film beloved by conspiracy theorists and those with a Fortean bent. While ultimately disappointing, the outrageousness of the premise (and the skill with which it’s carried out in the first half) is enough to place it in the pantheon of paranoia. Get ready for the remake in 2010.

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Just so-so; use some discretion. 


Fight Club is an exciting, dangerous, and intense story. It is a story of violence, a story of loneliness, a story rife with macho head games and as unreachable as the story’s goals, this is also a story you can relate to. This movie is well made and like David Fincher’s other films feels like someone has just plugged into your brain to deliver you the right signals. It is also the movie of a generation, much like the book.

Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban uber loner filled up with nothing but angst. He describes his world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones. He also begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at meetings. She’s a “tourist” like himself–someone not addicted to anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he’s a faker, but wants to believe everyone else’s pain is real.

His life gets turned around when he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on one of his many trips for work. The two start an underground “fight club,” which becomes a sort of secret society that continually grows, even though its members are not supposed to talk about it. Fight Club allows members to feel alive by triggering primal emotions not usually tested in modern life. The powerless feel powerful once again.

It’s at about this point that the movie turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed. Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard enough, you’re going to end up with broken bones, the guys in Fight Club have fists of steel and heads to match. The club is a secret society of men who meet in order to find freedom and self-realization through beating one another into pulp. Durden teaches us that it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of modern life, which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. He’s a shadowy, charismatic figure, able to inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club and beat one another up.

Gradually the final outlines of his master plan revealed. The questions of whether Tyler Durden is a leader of men with a useful philosophy will remain. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything,” he says. The movie, like life, does not offer tidy little answers. The film brings about many questions which seems like its purpose. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership, if anything they are reduced to cult status. Some might argue this is a step up from their previous cloudy existence. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole–but is not able to escape through, because Fight Club is not about its ending but about its action.


The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls, who adapted the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. In many ways, it’s like Fincher’s movie The Game (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages as well as the 30 year old boy in all of us. There is also Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty chain-smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks having sex with her is as much fun as a broken nose. I also enjoyed seeing Meatloaf in the role of Robert Paulsen.

Some will argue that this film’s violence is an argument against the very behavior it shows, others will complain that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Nonetheless both Pitt and Norton give awesome performances. As for the philosophical debates, they will rage on like a fight in a basement with each side pounding the shit out of the other.

Fincher is a good director. Seven, for instance is a grisly and intelligent thriller. With Fight Club he has gone over the top and created a visceral and hard-edged film with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action. It is a great film. In trying to grasp the deeper meanings within the film I am also reminded of Clockwork Orange and Kubrick’s attempts to place philosophy within the frame of that movie. Whatever Fincher believes the message to be and no matter what message the audience walks away with, Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy–the kind of ride where some people puke and others can’t wait to get on again.

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Excellent – A Must See Film.

Part II of the Best Time Travel Movies
This installment covers 1980-1990.

Time travel and story telling has been a device since the earliest stories. People always want to go back in time and change something or go forward in time to see what time has produced. Of course it is one thing writing about time, rather sticking it into a story for the sake of bringing point A to point B and it is quite another to tell a time story well. Going beyond the story and actually making the time lines logical and adhering to logic when it comes to traveling through time is very difficult and most stories find themselves in a time paradox. Most films do not bother working through the paradox. There are some basic themes when in comes to time travel: taking technology to the past, trying to guard the past against evil changes, and lastly the unintentional change that has to be corrected.

The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out]].
        —Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)

The following is a list of films that handle time travel pretty well. Of course it is impossible to handle time travel without flaws or outright paradoxes but this list of films handles the time issue to the best possible logic. There are temporal anomalies in all time travel movies, even the best of them. This list tries to examine the good and the bad of these films. As with all of my lists they are listed by year as to not assign excellence to one over another. These are all good films and you should see them all.

Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981)
A group of disgruntled dwarves working for the Supreme Being have stolen a map showing the imperfections in the fabric of the universe. Using these holes the group embark on a mission to travel through time plundering the riches of history. A hole leads the Time Bandits unexpectedly into the bedroom of a young boy in modern day. Kevin finds himself unexpectedly swept up in their adventure as they travel from Napoleonic to the Middle Ages, to Ancient Greece and to the time of Legends and the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness where they confront Evil.

As with much of director Terry Gilliam’s work Time Bandits is a visual treat to watch. Where Time Bandits does suffer though is from a lack of focus as Gilliam tries to do too much within the confines of the film. The moments that work the best are those between the dwarves and Kevin, exploring their relationship and Kevin’s yearning for a father figure. Michael Palin’s cameos as Vincent and John Cleese’s appearance as Robin Hood play out like Monty Python-esque skits sandwiched in the middle of this otherwise inventive tale. Perhaps a case of Gilliam not being confident enough about his own work to go it alone, or just giving too much free of reign to co-writer Michael Palin. In any case Gilliam’s films are unique in that they look and feel like no other films being made today.

To the best of my knowledge Time Bandits is the only Time Travel movie (or novel for that matter) that I am aware of that incorporates God or the Supreme Being into the plot. The film is explained that in God’s rush to create the universe there were holes that were over looked. A map was created to document them so that they could be fixed up at a later time. Instead the dwarves hit upon the idea of using the holes to plunder the past.

Not only is the Supreme Being chasing the bandits to force them to return the map, Evil also wants the map, seeing it as an opportunity to seize power and remake the world in his image. Evil loudly disdains God’s wasteful effort in creating Earth and all its inhabitants claiming that if he controlled the world, he would have “started with lasers day one!” Evil is keenly interested in the potential of technology even though he doesn’t quite understand how it works.

The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)
A Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenneger) cyborg robot from the year 2029 is sent to back in time to the year 1984 on a mission to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and prevent her yet to be born son from becoming the leader of the resistance. A lone soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is sent by the resistance to assist Sarah and stop the Terminator.

Written and directed by James Cameron, The Terminator represents a ground-breaking film that established not only Cameron’s presence as a film maker, but also solidified Schwarzenegger’s reputation as A-list action star. As a work of science fiction it holds up remarkable well after almost twenty years. Stan Winston’s spectacular special effects on the terminators and the futuristic scenes of 2029 still look fresh.

While The Terminator is typically thought of as science fiction film, there’s a traditional horror film at its core. In addition to unfeeling inhuman Terminator as the unstoppable monster, Cameron weaves a number of modern fears into his plot. The fear of serial killers is realized on screen as the Terminator stalks and kills the suburban housewife Sarah Connor in her home in broad daylight after seemingly picking her name out of a phone book. Cameron also plays up 1980s fears of a nuclear holocaust by envisioning a global nuclear war launched in 1997 by the machines of Skynet to eradicate mankind.

As for the time travel aspect of the film, Reese argues with Sarah that he is from only one possible future and that time is not immutable. The audience however suspects otherwise since through the course of the film we come to realize that Reese is in fact John’s father and that if he failed to send Reese back in time on the mission then he would not have been born. It appears from our perspective that time and fate have conspired to create this time loop that connects the past and the future and that time is immutable.

Back To The Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
High school student Marty McFly (Micheal J. Fox) befriends eccentric inventor Doc Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd) who has built a plutonium-powered time machine from a DeLorean car. When Marty is accidently transported to 1955 he discovers that his presence has interferred with the meeting of his odd ball parents. It becomes a race against the clock (literally!) for Marty to reunite his teenage parents and find a way to return to his own time.

In the original Back to the Future entry, we see very clearly the complications of altering a timeline.  As Marty McFly explores the world of 1955, he is confronted with the fact that the history he learned of the events of his parent’s life is changing before his eyes, and his own existence is in jeopardy.  He has interfered with the meeting of his parents, and must correct the situation before it’s too late, or he will cease to exist.  This is very valuable to us, because right from the beginning we can see two distinct timelines:  the original A-B timeline in which George McFly gets hit by a car, marries the daughter of the man who hit him, and lives the rest of his life as something of a nerd and a loser; and the altered timeline, in which Marty has prevented that, and is trying to correct it.  It appears at first glance that we have an N-Jump: an original timeline which ends at the point at which Marty returns to the past, and an altered timeline which continues into the future beyond his return to the future.

However, this is not the case; and neither this movie nor any of the sequels recognizes this. We have not an N-Jump, but either an infinity loop or a sawtooth snap. Let me explain this.

In our A-B timeline, shortly after point A, George McFly meets Lorraine (through the aforementioned accident), marries her, and gets a job working for the bully who has terrorized him all his life, Biff.  They have three children, the third of which takes an interest in music, and so connects with Doc, who provides him with access to technological equipment he might not otherwise have had.  As a guitarist myself, I am quite aware that amplifiers, effects boxes, mixers, microphones, and other equipment all cost a great deal of money.  Being able to repair or even build some of these things for your own use is a bonus, and Doc has the skills to do so.  Marty would find his friendship with Doc useful in this way, and Doc would enjoy having the lad around, teach him bits about the equipment, and use his help in some of his experiments.  This is the relationship we see at the beginning of the movie.  Eventually, at point B, just after Doc is shot (and probably killed), Marty ends this timeline completely by returning to 1955, creating point C.

Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986)
Continuing from Star Trek III, the skeleton crew of the Enterprise is returning home in a stolen Klingon Bird of Prey, having blown up the original Enterprise NCC-1701 to get it. They are departing from Vulcan to stand trial for their unlawful and irresponsible actions in the rescue of Spock’s body in direct violation of Star Fleet orders.  However, Star Fleet has its hands full at the moment: some huge alien device has attacked the earth, vaporizing the oceans, and threatening to destroy all life on the surface in the process.  Becoming aware of the problem, Mr. Spock determines that the device is trying to get a response from the long-extinct humpback whale.  Kirk determines that the best hope for the world is for his tiny crew to take their ship back to the twentieth century, steal a couple of whales, and bring them back to the present to reply to the device, which they decide to refer to as a probe.

There is an absurdity in the premise which for some reason is never asked.  Given that the probe has traveled from light-years away (beyond anywhere to which the Federation’s fleet of faster-than-light exploratory starships has been) because it no longer hears whale song, and given that whale song is an audio frequency signal, traveling roughly a thousand feet per second (much slower than the 186,000 miles per second of light) and incapable of traveling through a vacuum, how did the aliens who sent the probe receive the sounds of whale song in the first place?  But the movie does not attempt to offer an explanation, so we have no way of evaluating it.

There is another problem at this point.  The team is going to use the technique of sling-shotting around the sun to go back in time. Forgive my confusion. Although this technique is used in the Star Trek television series, and elsewhere, it makes no sense. It is a fallacious extension of the notion in relativity that as velocity approaches light speed time for that object slows, and that time for that object ceases at light speed.  Thus we are given to imagine that if we exceeded light speed, we would go backward in time. But relativity also makes it clear that anything which traveled at that speed would have infinite mass and absolute density, and would be reduced to a singularity. The complications of accelerating an object of infinite mass, absolute density, zero dimension, and static time are–in short, well beyond the capabilities of anything so insignificant as a small yellow star in the outer arm of the galaxy. But somehow they want us to believe that moving somewhere in excess of warp nine (which I am told is not nine times the speed of light, but exponentially faster) will cause you to move backward in time. They also want us to imagine that this small increase in gravity will propel the ship at such a velocity even though their warp engines, which permit them to travel between stars in a matter of hours, will not–and that at these speeds we won’t fly right past the sun so fast that it will be light years behind us before we achieve the necessary velocity!  But just so we all understand the absurdity of the notion, they suggest at the end of the film that the process can be reversed by using the same method, but flying around the sun in the opposite direction!  I’m sorry to burst the Star Trek bubble, but if you can fly faster than light to reach other stars, you can’t also use it to go back in time, and you certainly can’t use it to come forward in time again:  it is the velocity which causes the temporal reversal, not the direction.  (I should also mention that the concept of relative time does not mean that the object moves through our time at a different rate, but that it experiences time itself at a different rate.  The astronauts who travel to another star at 90% of the speed of light return to us in the same number of years we would expect–about 11 years to go 10 light years–but they would only have aged slightly.  Following this logic, to exceed the speed of light would result in the craft continuing to be perceived in our own time, but the persons aboard getting younger.)

Back To The Future, Part 2 (Robert Zemeckis, 1989)
In this sequel to Back to the Future Marty McFly (Micheal J. Fox) travels with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) to 2015 to prevent Marty and Jennifer’s son, Marty McFly Jr. from landing in jail. While in 2015, eldery Biff Tannen steals the DeLorean and travels back to 1955 to give his younger self a copy of a sports almanac which drastically alters the timeline. Arriving back in 1985, Marty and Doc discover that Biff’s actions have considerable altered the 1985 they left. In order to restore the timeline Marty must travel back to 1955 and prevent the almanac from falling into young Biff’s hands.

Sideways time was not new with this movie, nor has it been ignored since. My earliest peek at it was in an old John Pertwee Doctor Who episode, in which the Doctor slides into what is frequently misnomered a “parallel world”.  “An infinite number of choices, an infinite number of parallel worlds” is how he describes it (and wrong on two counts:  a very great but finite number of choices, a very great but finite number of divergent worlds–but it was a mistake which took genius to make).  In each of these contexts, the idea that divergent timelines exist based on events which could have been different is basic.  However, Back to the Future treats such divergent timelines differently–and I think in a way which makes better sense in many ways.  The divergent timelines in Back to the Future are presented as alternate possible worlds, not actually existing:  only one timeline truly exists, and if the past is altered, the known future ceases to exist, replaced by the new future which is built from that past.

I will mention that I find this position much more satisfying in both a subjective and an objective way.  Objectively, I find it absurd to imagine that each choice, each event, each occurrence, splits the world into two co-existing alternate histories.  By this view, either the universe is splitting into billions of divergent universes every second (after all, how many other things could you alone be doing right now?), or determinism is far more pervasive than any of us could imagine, such that even if you hesitate to push the mouse button, you have no alternative but to push it at the precise picosecond at which you will do so.  Subjectively, I do not like the prospect of imagining that for every moral or ethical decision I make correctly, there is another universe in which another me is making the opposite choice–and if so, how is that person really me, if he does not share my basic morals and ethics?  Although the existence of such worlds in sideways time–worlds in which the same people and places exist, and it is the same day and time, but the history is different somehow–is very appealing from the viewpoint of the storyteller, it is not so appealing as an explanation of reality.  (I would further mention that, as a theological position, I find the idea of dividing anyone into billions of divergent selves each with his own moral and ethical self-identity, his own spirit and soul, almost entirely indefensible.)

READ MORE ON BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II, TIME TRAVEL ANALYSIS.


Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989)
Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are two teenage slackers that dream their garage band the Wyld Stallyns will one day bring them unlimited fame and fortune. Bill and Ted’s failing grades in History class jeopardize their dream as Ted’s father threatens to ship Ted off to an Alaskan military school should he fail his upcoming oral presentation in History. Divine intervention arrives to help Bill and Ted in the form of a visitor from 700 years in the future. Rufus (George Carlin) explains to the bewildered pair that he is from a future where the civilization is founded on Wyld Stallyns music and Bill & Ted’s philosophy of “Party on Dude!” and “Be Excellent To Each Other”. Rufus loans the pair his time machine / phone booth and instructs them to use it to help them with their History presentation since the future of the world depends on them passing it. Rufus then turns the pair loose on the past to kidnap historical figures to use in their presentation.

The very premise of the film is faulty.  We are introduced to a character named Rufus (George Carlin) living in a utopian society in San Dimas, California, seven hundred years in the future, in 2688.  This world is based on the music of Wyld Stallyns, a band formed by the movie’s main characters, Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves).  But, according to Rufus, that won’t happen if the boys fail history, and they are about to fail if they cannot get an outstanding grade on a history report.  If they fail, Ted will be sent to military academy in Alaska, and the band will never exist.

READ MORE ABOUT BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, TIME TRAVEL ANALYSIS.

Millenium (Michael Anderson, 1989)
When Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson), an airline crash investigator, is called in to investigate a crash in 1989, he begins to suspect that time travellers may have caused the crash. In reality the team of time travellers from the future, lead by Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd) are rescuing passengers of doomed airline collisions in the past.

Back To The Future, Part 3 (Robert Zemeckis, 1990)
In the final installment in this popular trilogy (See Back to the Future Part I and Back to the Future Part II) Marty McFly (Micheal J. Fox) must travel to 1880’s Wild West to rescure Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) from certain death at the hands of the Tannen Gang. Once in 1885, Marty discovers that getting the DeLorean up to 88 MPH without the assistance of gasoline might prove to be a bit of a challenge.

READ FULL TIME TRAVEL ANALYSIS OF BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III.

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During 1985 the industry was pumping out movies like Porkys. The Sure Thing feels like a small independent film and is the beginning of the “falling in love” genre. Although the premise of the film is to be fixed up with a sure thing, the hero of the film learns that falling in love has become more important and rewarding to him.

The movie’s love story begins in an Eastern college English classroom. Walter Gibson (John Cuzack) walks into his class and falls love at first sight with Allison Bradbury (Daphne Zuniga). She is smart and good looking and in no way does she fit the typical brainless chicks we’ve seen in countless flicks. Gibson asks her out, but succeeds in the nerdiest of fashions. Not as geeky as he appears in “Sixteen Candles” but nerdy. The date does not go well.

Gibson’s buddy convinces him to come out to LA where he has set Gibson up with a gorgeous girl that is a sure thing. He must hurry up and be there by Christmas vacation. Allison also plans to go to LA to visit her boyfriend, a studious bore. They both sign up for rides and of course end up in the same car together. There are some great scenes here with Tim Robbins, the driver of the car. Robbins’ character loves to sing showtunes as they drive which is pure torture to Allison and Walter.

Along the trip they fight, they’ll share experiences and they suffer together. This, of course, is how they eventually find themselves falling in love. There are some genuinely funny moments and though there is some predictability, the story never waivers and stays true to inself. These two particular characters, Walter and Alison, played by these two gifted young actors, Cusack and Zuniga, make The Sure Thing into a special love story.

Cuzack, who follows on the heels of his bit part in Sixteen Candles, comes into his own with this picture which is a launching pad for his career. The part is the start of his leading man/slightly geeky/loveable underdog career and a series of films that turns this teenager into a Hollywood Star.

One of the unique perhaps even odd things about this movie is that the characters show a normal shyness about sex. I say odd because even though they are shy about having sex, they are not shy about making jokes and talking about it. Most movie teenagers seem to have an advanced degree knowledge about sex. They are also, of course, not shy, not insecure, not modest, and occasionally not human. Walter and Alison are closer to real teenagers, with real doubts and hesitations and uncertainties. The other surprising thing about the film is that it successfully avoids an obligatory sex scene with the Sure Thing (Nicollette Sheridan, in a thankless role). This film is so revolutionary, it believes sex should be accompanied by respect and love!

By the end of the movie, when Walter and Alison finally do kiss, it means something. It means more, in fact, than any movie kiss in a long time, because it takes place between two people we’ve gotten to know and who have gotten to know each other.

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Excellent – A Must See Film.