A Cross-Stitch In Time [LIFF Preview: Dimensions]

Looking through the London Independent Film Festival programme (April 12th to 22nd) - this year's festival includes several indie feature films with science-fiction or fantasy themes. 

Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle Of Threads , directed by Sloane U’Ren, is showing on Saturday 21st April at LIFF. It's described as a 1920s/1930s sci-fi love story and is currently touring festivals worldwide - recently winning the Gort award at Boston Sci-Fi. If you can't make it to LIFF then it's also on the bill at Sci-Fi London.


Dimensions teaser/trailer from Ant Neely on Vimeo.

Why see this time-travel film? Imagine The Time Traveller's Wife as an indie romance rather than a Hollywood romance, or imagine the complexity and intelligence of Primer delivered by a cast (including Camilla Rutherford) capable of speaking in coherent sentences. I'm rather looking forward to it.

Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger's book The Time Traveler's Wife has everything: it's intelligent and accessible, serious, fun, full of action and emotion, and it tells a great story about human nature and relationships while also exploring a well-worn science fiction concept in new and fascinating ways - time travel portrayed as an uncontrollable genetic disorder. I sometimes wonder whether it could also be seen as a book about the lover of someone with manic depression or another episodic illness who might experience a similar roller-coaster ride.

Robert Schwentke's film is a watchable and enjoyable romance that rises well above the average rom-com but falls short of the sheer resonance of the novel. Claire's life as Henry comes and goes is often bitter and painful and constantly tests her resolve and her love; meanwhile Henry's own life is painful and perplexing too, constantly leading him into danger and taking him away from Claire without warning.

The novel takes all of this to the limit, covering the whole range of experience, the highs and the lows of this unique love affair, while for the most part the film centres on a sentimental rom-com relationship. Occasionally it does go outside this comfort zone and into the much more uncomfortable territory of the book: the first time from Claire's point of view that Henry kisses her, and the way that this single act decided the rest of her life, is an example and the film is the better for including it.

The story is also simplified a little. The pretzel has a few less twists if you like (Damn you, Kate And Leopold! Get out of my head! Bad film!) although when you do get to the paradoxes and twists, such as Henry and Claire's unconventional wedding, or the way Claire manages to get around the limitations of Henry's vasectomy, they are particularly enjoyable scenes.

Casting is great - both leads Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are talented character actors. They can do rom-com in their sleep and in the few scenes where they are given the chance they really bring out the pain and deep emotion of their characters in a totally human and credible way. I wish they were given a little more room to spread their wings. Did I dream that at one point a certain Mr. Pitt and Ms. Aniston were slated for the lead roles? It seems so long ago.

New Girl In The Fireplace [Review: The Eleventh Hour]

We're all Time Lords now. I missed the new episode of Doctor Who as it was broadcast too early for me - each series seems to creep slightly further back in time - but thanks to the dimensionally transcendant alien technology of BBC iPlayer I was able to nip back and watch it.

The Eleventh Hour is a Steven Moffat script. The Doctor is introduced to two new characters - himself, and Amy Pond. He initially meets Amy as a 7-year old, then returns just as her adult self has begun to doubt he was real. It's reminiscent of Moffat's previous script for The Girl In The Fireplace, perhaps my all time favourite episode, and also Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife where the timelines are a little more entangled.

The Doctor is also getting a feel for his new persona, trying out different words, phrases or looks. He's a little disturbed but it's never quite as dark as those first few manic depressive Colin Baker episodes. There's some bits about an alien prisoner on the loose but do we really care about all that sci-fi stuff? Well, maybe. This is a strong, witty episode, a good start to the series, and Matt Smith and Karen Gillan already appear confident in their roles.

The Machines

I was thinking about the various plot devices that allow time travel. In addition to opening the way for a time travel plot, the nature of the device can itself be a symbol, or it can add to a novel or film in other ways - it can give a film a unique style, say something about the traveller, or it can be a source of humour.

Before H.G. Wells, time travel was something spiritual - the ghosts of Christmas Past or Future in A Christmas Carol - or accidental, as in the blow to the head of the Connecticut Yankee. Wells introduced the mechanical Time Machine, bringing time travel into the realm of human control. These trends continue in more recent sci-fi - mechanical Time Machines include the garage physics experiment in Primer, while accidental time travel includes the genetic disorder described in The Time Traveller's Wife. The blow to the head method is also alive and well in Life On Mars, a series heavily inspired by the Mark Twain novel. There are less spiritual time travellers these days. However it makes perfect sense, for example, that Nick Hornby's Sam might be sent back to revisit key moments in his life by his Tony Hawk poster as it represents a kind of father figure/guardian angel.

I've mentioned Kate and Leopold before: it's not my favourite film. However it is a good example of time travel symbolising the risks that are taken in life; and this is portrayed as literally jumping off a bridge.

The bizarre series of committee meetings that led to the creation of the Tardis has been well described. However I think it's also reasonable to think of the Police Box as an authority image, which along with the Doctor's title, is consistent with Doctor Who's interventionalist themes. Another telephone box time machine features in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, perhaps as a reference to Doctor Who, but this time the process of time travel becomes a comic search through a telephone directory and network.

My final example is a classic time machine: the deLorean in Back To The Future - and as Dr. Emmett Brown says: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

Back to the near future

Primeval series 3 ended leaving me with mixed feelings. Some of the most fascinating characters (particularly Helen Cutter and Claudia/Jenny) are gone. Helen's ultimate goal turned out to be a fairly crude wipe-out-those-naughty-humans plot - I was expecting something a bit more subtle and super-intelligent, perhaps a more targetted interference in history that would account for the timeline changes between series. I was also completely wrong about the first episode - the idea of myths and legends didn't really get developed. Instead the series mainly jumped between the present and the near future so there were too few new (or old) beasties and slightly too many encounters with those bat-evolved predators, cool though they are.

Series highlights: Two stories stood out for me: as a cat lover I particularly enjoyed the sabre-toothed tiger and it's misguided guardian who should have known that you can't take the wild streak out of any cat. The parasitic fungus story was also cool. Hannah Spearitt finally got her gloves off and tried her hand at some action sequences; that annoying "intelligent" flying gecko was finally replaced by an ordinary baby dino; action in general was pretty good; and it's still near-faultless CGI with the added attraction of being palaeontologically correct. And nothing with velociraptors in it can ever be all bad.

ITV are also trying really, really hard with their ongoing interactive episodes. The concept is good and the effort that's gone into the polished and feature-packed website really shows; but I couldn't get into the online story. There was a similar problem with the one-off Doctor Who "Attack of the Graske" - these have to be accessible to quite young viewers so for anyone else they can't help but come across as a bit slow and patronizing.

I'm curious as to the future of this show - there's talk of international adaptations and a film, but ITV have confirmed that there won't be a fourth series in the UK. If I'm honest I think this is probably the right decision - this is a good point for the producers to just head for the nearest anomaly, carrying the mostly positive experience of this series with them to new projects.

[edit 23.6.09 - Lucy Brown is the actress who plays Claudia and Jenny]

Review: Primer

This indie film sets itself up as the opposite of Back to the Future and is an attempt to make an "intelligent" time travel film. The plot concerns garage physics experiments; the film is certainly original, complex and almost completely cliche-free; however in the attempt to give an intelligent and authentic feel the dialogue is far too dense, and delivered too fast often to the extent of incomprehensibility; the film is therefore not very accessible, although watching with subtitles on helps a bit. I'm still glad I saw it.

Thing is, I don't agree with the main premise here which is that there aren't other intelligent time travel films. Many films in the last few years have found unusual ways of exploring time travel and related issues, often with a focus on emotion and soft sci-fi approaches; examples if you're prepared to look back include the Jacket, Donnie Darko, Twelve Monkeys. And Back to the Future is a fantastic film, I won't have a word said against it. There was also the recent Simon Wells remake of the Time Machine - disappointing in some ways, but I thought it saved itself by a logical, and as far as I can remember original, resolution of the time travel paradox.

Base-jumping - the movie

I rarely take a strong dislike to anything even vaguely sci-fi. Here's an exception I'd like to share - a seriously misjudged attempt to cross-fertilize genres. I found this disappointing as it really should have worked. There are plenty of good time travel films. Twelve Monkeys and Back to the Future for example. For that matter there are plenty of good romantic comedies. When Harry Met Sally. Breakfast at Tiffany's... er... And the concept here is superb - madcap scientist discovers a way of travelling back and forwards in time by jumping off bridges at exactly the right moment; he accidentally brings the inventor of the lift (!) back to the present where he struggles to understand his environment - and negotiates the pitfalls of twentieth century dating when he falls for a modern-day gal.

It takes real talent to take this starting point and screw up so badly and I take my hat off to this film which is too dull even for a Golden Raspberry. Subplots are introduced and abandoned (as the inventor is removed from the timeline lifts everywhere start to malfunction - but then they don't again) and while the base-jumping time-travel conceit should be a great metaphor for taking risks in life, this is ignored for the most part then used far too crudely at the end. Yes. I watched to the end, by which time I felt like jumping off a bridge myself but feared I might find myself back at the start of the film.