This post is for Alan.
Marc showed me this amusingly pretzel-y time travel flick a year or more ago; last night at the Thursday Horror Show, we watched it again, with our good friends Alan and Mark. Afterwards, Alan mentioned that while it was enjoyable, around 2/3 of the way through the film, things got extra confusing and diminished his enjoyment of the film.
Here’s what I do when I come home after a head-scratcher of a film: I use Google to find sources that can help me resolve the issues I had with the film.
First I turn to my good friend Wikipedia. While Wikipedia may not be a great source for research when you’re in college (sorry, college students), it’s great for learning more about films you saw and didn’t quite follow. Here’s the page for Los Cronocrimenes (Time Crimes more mysterious sounding Spanish title).
Once I’m done at Wikipedia, I usually hope on over to IMDb. Typically they’ll have section on the page for the plot summary and synopsis, as well a memorable lines (in this case the memorable lines weren’t really that memorable), as well as a discussion board section where people go on and on about things in the film. Here are links to some of the discussions* that I found useful or at least interesting for this film:
- how did the table end up in the house? I thought it wouldn’t fit through the door
- a discussion about paradox and time travel and cinema
- Another discussion about the nature of time and time travel
- And my favorite summary of the film is here; people are too stupid for time travel. However, to answer his point about Hector 2: Hector 2 wasn’t willing to just fade out; he was really, really bothered that this other man, Hector 1, was living his life as he had done with his wife. He couldn’t get past the part where Hector 1 was some other guy getting it on with his (Hector 2′s) wife. Or that’s what I think anyway.
I probably have to do this (both Wikipedia and IMDb) for about 1/3 of the movies we see. And shhh! don’t tell Marc but I also do this in advance for scary movies. I find knowing what’s going to happen before it happens helps me not scream outloud in the movie theater.
* Continue to hit the next link down to follow the discussion(s) to their conclusion(s)
1) this movie sounds ridiculous, and 2) I heard an NPR piece recently that said that it’s actually scarier to know ahead of time what’s going to happen in a scary movie because you are tense just waiting for it which makes everything heightened…or something scientific like that… and, as you know, NPR is always right.
I really enjoyed the film, but I’m partial to Spanish movies (even if this one wasn’t nearly as Spanish in it’s ending as it could have been). I wonder if I’m scaring myself more than necessary with my spoilers – interesting!