Tag Archives: Time Travel

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LILAC BALL (1987)

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Лиловый шар

Liloviy shar, AKA Purple Ball

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DIRECTED BY: Pavel Arsenov

FEATURING: Natalya Guseva, Vyacheslav Nevinnyy, Vyacheslav Baranov, Boris Shcherbakov

PLOT: In the year 2087, a research spacecraft discovers the wreck of “The Dark Wanderer,” a legendary doomed ship containing mysterious purple spheres.

COMMENTS: Enmity is nasty business, and were it not for one plucky little girl, the future of mankind would fall to self-destruction. So we learn in Arsenov’s science-fiction/fantasy outing, Lilac Ball. It covers a span in time from a century into mankind’s future—when computerized intelligence facilitates deep-space exploration—to the ancient past, the time of Legends, wherein man and myth coexisted (if not in harmony, then at least side by side). In those days, myriad dangers arose for the common peasant by way of the dark sorcery of Baba Yaga and her three sons.

Events kick off in grand future style. Captain Green, the commander of the Pegasus who speaks nearly as mechanically as the ship’s computer, is tasked with escorting Professor Seleznyov and his daughter Alice to a research vacation. All of a sudden, the ship’s sensors detect an anomaly: a craft too large and too strange to be found in the database. Behold, it is The Dark Wanderer, and its floating ruins contain dispiriting records of the crew’s fate, a fair number of vitreous spheres, and the lovable four-armed archaeologist, Gromozeka. The spheres contain a horrible doom, but little Alice knows just where on Earth to find the purple ball secreted—thousands of years in the past—by the Dark Wanderer’s crew to destroy humankind at just the right time.

This movie is not without its charm, and its seventy-odd-minutes breeze by on the winds of adventure and whimsy. The first act, very much typical science fiction, is well executed; the filmmakers push their skills and budget to the limit. The Pegasus’ interior design is refreshingly dissimilar from most outings of the genre, with an open-plan cockpit/convening area (tea is served often) featuring computer consoles, greenery, short staircases, and a central table for four. Zipping back thousands of years into the past—I had had no inkling of a time machine until Alice mentions it for the purposes of returning to the “Era of Legends”—is rather less satisfying, albeit involving some endearing puppetry. (The baby roc is cute—and wholly undeserving of its fate at the hands of the Wanderer’s evil crew.)

Arsenov appears to aim for an all-the-young-adult-adventure-tropes experience, but his reach, alas, exceeds his grasp. Still, it is impossible to feel hostile toward such winsome narrative meanderings of future and past.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Curious mash-up of fantasy and science-fiction from the Soviet Union…  a strange mixture of mythologies, to be sure; part Sinbad, part fairytale, part Wizard of Oz. All in a film whose first act was straight science-fiction! There’s nothing wrong with blending genres, of course, but it’s a tricky business, and the disconnect between the two aspects of the story here is a little jarring, to say the least.” — Mark David Welsh

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan after seeing some clips and remarking that they “resemble something that AI watched in its early stages and picked up on.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Purple Ball / Lilac Ball / Liloviy shar (English Subtitles)

The Purple Ball / Lilac Ball / Liloviy shar (English Subtitles)
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Capsules

CAPSULE: OMNI LOOP (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Bernardo Britto

FEATURING: Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edebiri

PLOT: A retired scientist uses pills that send her back exactly one week in time to try to find a (time travel-based) cure before the black hole growing in her chest kills her.

Still from omni loop (2024)

COMMENTS: Omni Loop wisely puts its best scene up front. In a hospital corridor, a doctor delivers a diagnosis worthy of : Zoya has an incurable black hole growing in her chest. As he delivers the news that she has only about a week to live to her stunned daughter and husband, a crowd of doctors, nurses and orderlies in the background erupt in shouts and applause.

Sadly, this may be the last time you laugh during Omni Loop, which teases itself as a fantastical comedy, then turns into a serious seep dramatic dive character study. The inexplicable black hole and a pill that enables time travel (rewinding the swallower’s life by exactly one week) is joined by one other worthy absurdist touch: the Nanoscopic Man, a victim of a scientific experiment (and a quantum 21st century update on a classic sci-fi B-movie hero).

Now, the black hole and the Nanoscopic Man are two elements worthy of a weird movie, but like the film’s flirtation with comedy, weirdness is not something Omni Loop is willing to lean into. In fact, these plot pieces are completely superfluous; if you just replace the black hole with cancer and the Nanoscopic Man with any sort of scientific gizmo that performs the same function, you will have essentially the same movie. And perhaps the movie would even better without its scintilla of surrealism, which distracts you from taking the characters and their world seriously. The science fiction angle, as well, is barely addressed—there is no transformative technology and no meaningful special effects, its just two women talking about arbitrary scientific theories necessary to advance the plot—but sci-fi at least supplies the film’s essential premise.

That’s not to say Omni Loop is a bad film. On the contrary, it’s cleverly constructed, even if the script seems bit padded at times. The performances are excellent. Mary-Louise Parker conveys the proper sense of a smart, driven woman who’s also understandably conflicted, at times sad, at times weary of living through the same week over and over for what could be several lifetimes worth of research. Edebiri does as well as possible with a less-developed character (a little time could have been taken away from Zoya and devoted to Paula’s personal trauma in order to raise the stakes of the story). The film even raises an interesting moral dilemma: what happens to all those alternate timelines when Zoya takes the pill and resets her personal history? In attempting to save a single version of herself, is she creating an unforgivable multitude of grieving families spread across multiple realities? In the end, the movie settles into a message that fits organically into Zoya’s persona as a high-achieving scientist who’s left it all behind to raise a family, and who’s struggling with regret over missed opportunities. The movie’s resolution is unambiguous, and the resolution of Zoya’s internal struggle feels a bit obvious, but the core message is a meaningful. It’s just a shame that the movie is intent on hopping about through distracting comedy, absurdism, and science fiction, instead of focusing on what really matters to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result, pleasant enough but frustratingly bland, exists in a soupy, ill-defined emotional middle ground—occasionally amusing but not quite funny, and unable (or unwilling) to substantively commit to thoughtful, penetrating melancholia…  Given the relative lack of absurdism present elsewhere, these [weird] bits aren’t so much whimsical background details as candy sprinkles on a savory casserole.”–Brent Simon, AV Club (contemporaneous)

Omni Loop [DVD]

Omni Loop [DVD]
  • "… a really well-done piece of Sci-fi story telling" - RogerEbert.com
  • 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score!
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DETENTION (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph Kahn

FEATURING: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Dane Cook

PLOT: A serial killer is loose in the halls of Grizzly Lake High, and there may be a connection with events 20 years in the past; only a pair of eye-rolling millennials, uncool vegetarian klutz Riley and popular slacker screwup Clapton, can save the day.

Still from Detention (2011)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plenty of movies like to subvert audience expectations by mixing genres and deploying radical shifts in tone. Yet it’s hard to recall a film that pursues these goals with such ruthlessness, rapidity, and thoroughness as Detention. The filmmakers practically carpet-bomb the audience with twists, references, and backstories, producing a tale of such density the only people who could possibly keep track of it all are the men who made it. Detention is a movie that would make Dennis Miller say, “Whoa, Chachi, dial it back with the pop culture smorgasbord.”

COMMENTS: The opening credits of Detention are the essence of the whole film in microcosm: exceedingly clever, with names appearing in every possible location: sneaker brand, chocolate bar, upchuck in a urinal. (The director reserves that last one for himself.) Several have even been thoughtfully chosen to match, like the costume designer’s name stitched on a letter jacket or the sound designer appearing on a fire alarm. The flip side to this visual wit is that the names go by so quickly, amidst so much activity and chaos, that there is precious little opportunity to take the information in. The signal is overwhelmed by the noise, and you feel assaulted rather than edified. This will become a theme.

Even if Detention weren’t determined to be some kind of tonal chimera, it would still be a massive millennial snarkfest. The first five minutes play out as a kind of Clueless-meets-Scream, as a too-cool ice princess outlines the secret to high school success (complete with whip-pan edits and onscreen text) before having her head briskly removed from her body. It’s a whole postmodern vibe, and it telegraphs the desire of director Kahn and co-screenwriter Mark Palermo to pile on the jokes and references like so many hats on hats. But this is just an appetizer. The movie adds characters and plotlines like courses in a fancy meal. After introductions to our heroes, all the other high school archetypes get their turns in the spotlight, including the blond cheerleader, the lunkhead jock, the nerdy sidekick, the tech wizard, the bitter administrator… heck, even the stuffed bear that serves as the school’s mascot gets its own storyline. But Detention finds its own path by layering on incongruous genre elements that stupefy with their appearance. Time travel, UFOs, body swapping, predestination paradox, Cronenbergian body horror, and even a Minority Report-style touchless interface are among the twists and turns that arrive unexpectedly.

It’s tempting to view Detention as a parody or send-up of horror and teen comedy genres, and it does work on that level. But Kahn is such a committed nerd that you have to take all the sci-fi tropes as legitimate ventures into the genre. For all the seeming randomness of each new element, the film studiously connects everything in the end. No matter how arbitrary – a cheesy horror film within the film, a teenager obsessed with the 90s, a legend of a student engaging in sexual congress with a stuffed animal – it all ties into the plot. And cast’s commitment to playing every bizarre left turn earnestly (especially Caswell, who should have found a springboard to stardom here) helps keep you engaged, even as the dense plot pushes you away.

Kahn, an incredibly successful music video director, is excited for the opportunity to try his hand at the big-screen format. (He reportedly provided the bulk of the budget himself.) He’s willing to take his lumps – one student speaks disparagingly of his debut feature Torque, while another snarkily references the coke habits of music video directors – and he puts his experience to work on some appealingly offbeat setpieces. Easily the film’s highlight is a montage of one student’s 19-year-long detention, a one-shot tour backwards through changing fashion styles and popular music of the day. But Kahn also refuses to let a moment be a moment, and every bit of wackiness is decorated with more wackiness, so that there’s no real opportunity to take any of it in. Like a McFlurry with a dozen different mix-ins, it’s undeniably sweet, but dizzying and ultimately too much.

For a film as cravenly derivative as Detention, there’s honestly nothing quite like it. It stands as a fascinating artifact, a celluloid Katamari Damacy collecting genres and tropes and stereotypes into one big stew. It’s a piece of pop art, fascinating to observe even if difficult to admire.   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A seriously (and unapologetically) bizarre piece of work… while Kahn deserves some credit for attempting something different within the teen-movie genre, Detention is simply (and finally) too weird and too off-the-wall to become anything more than a mildly amusing curiosity.” – David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

(This movie was nominated for review by David. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Detention

Detention
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  • AC-3, Blu-ray, Dolby
  • English (Audio Description), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: David Gladwell

FEATURING: Julie Christie, Leonie Mellinger, Christopher Guard, Debbie Hutchings

PLOT: In a United Kingdom ravaged by disorder and want, a solitary woman is forced by the state to take on a mysterious girl as a boarder; the girl grows up quickly, trying to build a new society in cooperation with a charismatic young man, while the older woman discovers a portal to the past that lets her observe an affluent Victorian family.

Still from memoirs of a Survivor (1981)

COMMENTS: Nobel laureate Doris Lessing once told a group of science fiction fans that the closest she ever got to writing an autobiography was her 1974 novel The Memoirs of a Survivor. The narrator goes nameless in that book, but given that the film adaptation of the work dubs Julie Christie’s quiet tenant with the initial “D” in the endcrawl, it’s safe to guess that she’s meant to be the author’s stand-in. Which is the first of this movie’s curiosities, since D ends up playing only a tangential role in the story that unfolds. What, you have to wonder, was Lessing trying to say about herself?

Two storylines do the lion’s share of the work here. We witness the steady decline of a decently sized English city (most of the location work was done in Norwich) as government structures vanish, resources dwindle, and the populace divides into those awaiting support and those trying to hold the community together on their own. But help is not on the way. We see a man standing next to a placard reading “No News Is Good News” telling a small crowd that a bus is coming to take them… somewhere. Meanwhile, a woman holds out food to a group of feral children, she looking like a typical bird lady and they presenting as rejects from a Quest For Fire casting call. (Every scene with the children is artlessly scored to a cloying rendition of Brahms’ “Lullaby.”) For those trying to keep a stiff upper lip, the end is decidedly at hand.

Of more immediate concern is the arrival of Emily (Mellinger), a teenager whose youthful naivete and optimism are challenged by a society too ill-equipped to give her a chance. Beyond the roof over her head and using her as the occasional sounding board for germinating opinions, D provides her little attention. So Emily quickly takes up with Gerald, a naïve young man whose troublemaking tendencies are sublimated into a growing burden to care for the town’s abandoned children. It’s a daunting task, and his compulsion to help even the most damaged puts enormous pressure on those around him, especially Emily and her unsteady transition into adulthood.

While all this is going on, Christie often feels like a guest star in her own movie. Returning to the screen after a three-year absence, her D is very much a distant observer. She watches the suffering of others but rarely seems to want for much, and Christie is simply too beautiful to pull off the dowdy, threadbare look of her character. In fact, boarder and tenant are moving in two different directions: while Emily invests in the future, D literally retreats into the past. She finds she can pass through the walls of her flat into the Victorian era, where she spies on a quietly unhappy family. A tightly-wound father (played without dialogue by Nigel Hawthorne concurrent with his work on “Yes, Minister”) who may be harboring untoward thoughts about his daughter, a small girl also named Emily. It makes for an interesting contrast, as the child Emily desperately wants to attract her father while the teenaged Emily finds herself drawn to and then repelled by a young man with paternal instincts. But we can never be sure how much of this D sees in her forays into the past, and it’s not something that comes up in her own time, until the film’s final scene.

This is where the movie really plays the weird card, with Christie’s discovery of an egg the size of a room, which is evidently all the persuasion she needs to convince Emily, Gerald, and a host of dirty children to follow her into the portal and leave their broken England behind for good. It reeks of deus ex machina to such an extent that it casts the autobiographical elements in a new light. If Lessing is D, and D’s solution is to escape into an imagined past, it’s tempting to view the author’s whole career as a flight from the ugliness and tribulation of her present circumstances. If that interpretation is right, it’s a powerful self-criticism of her ventures into speculative fiction. But it’s also an abrupt and incomplete finish to the compelling circumstances she herself has created. If you don’t like the reality you’re in, find another one? Perhaps, but I suspect this survivor has postponed a reckoning, rather than come out the other side.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Memoirs of a Survivor is the sort of film that would never get made these days. It’s grim, thought-provoking stuff… This is not a film with any answers or a trite Hollywood ending; in fact I’m still scratching my head about the ending… there are many elements within the film that are surreal or just plain weird. “–Justin Richards, Blueprint Review

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Memoirs Of A Survivor [DVD]

Memoirs Of A Survivor [DVD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT (2024)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Michael Felker

FEATURING: Adam David Thompson, Riley Dandy

PLOT: After a bank job, a brother and sister retreat to a safe-house whose operators task them with thwarting an intruder, lest the pair become “wiped.”

Still from Things Will Be Different (2024)

COMMENTS: The finger prints of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are all over Things Will Be Different. Time lopping, mysterious antagonists, and close quarters abound. I can easily see why they hopped aboard Michael Felker’s project as executive producers. But Felker deserves the credit for crafting this delightful outing: he wrote and directed the screenplay. (He was also good enough to slip Benson into a cameo.)

A worried phone conversation over a black screen: something is amiss, the two speakers need to lay low, and it should be all over in less than two weeks. Cue opening scene. Sidney, scoped hunting rifle over her shoulder, enters a diner to meet up with her brother Joseph, seated at the restaurant’s counter, and also carrying a scoped hunting rifle. They retreat to a remote farmhouse, scaring off a few randos who contact the authorities about these gun-toting desperadoes. As the cops arrive, Joseph and Sidney dive around the empty manse, feverishly resetting the clocks and then retreating to an upstairs closet furnished with a rotary phone. Following exact instructions from a cluttered notebook, they telephone someone, leave a cryptic message, and wait.

And wait. Their first fourteen days go by pleasantly. They noodle around the property and consume the provisions provided by someone. On the final day, they clean up, and wait. And wait. And they discover something went wrong, forcing the siblings navigate the strange technology which allows their temporal disappearance, and reckon with their impressively dispassionate minders who inform the pair that they must have them “wiped” in order to minimize trouble. Trouble for whom? From what? And just how, exactly? The days and weeks and months drift by, as Sidney explores archives and sifts through the house’s mementos in search of answers, while Joseph makes a shrine of the bolted metal safe containing the hand-held tape recorder which acts as their means of communication with the future.

Things Will Be Different grips you, whether you’re watching the ups and downs of Sidney’s and Joseph’s relationship, or being drip-fed information about the menacing intruder—not too menacing, though, as there’s a Say Anything boombox nod—and the clerks running the show (and time) off-screen. Felker’s world hints at an administrative grandiosity to space and time, and Benson’s character is revealed as something of an office jockey who just happens to be responsible for some heavy-duty quantum physics-challenging maneuvers.

I suspect there are holes in the film’s logic, though there may well not be. In either case, Felker makes us invested in his characters: the brother and sister who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as the functionaries burdened with the thankless task of pleasing their superiors. At the end of the day, manipulating time is just a bureaucratic chore undergone with the same zeal as any 9-to-5 office work. However, in Things Will Be Different, there really isn’t an “end of the day”—just the hope that on the next run-through, things may be go differently.

Things Will Be Different is currently available for digital rental or purchase. A DVD release is scheduled for late January of 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a funky and eclectic science-fiction tale that aims to keep the genre weird.”–M.N. Miller, Geek Vibes Nation (contemporaneous)