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October 6, 2004
Self-Indulgent Link Storage
Working on revising the abstract for my book project and so I was digging around in my archives (procrastination? organizing my thoughts? you decide!), and I rediscovered this Crooked Timber entry by Brian Weatherson on time travel. While sifting through the comments (now, I'll admit that's procrastination), I found a link to M. Joseph Young's "A Primer on Time." I haven't looked very closely at Young's site yet, but his analyses on several prominent time travel movies should be helpful, if only to remind me about some films I need to revisit.
I keep forgetting to rewatch the underrated Marisa Tomei-Vincent D'Onofrio film, Happy Accidents,, for example, but then again, I really didn't need to be reminded about the Meg Ryan vehicle, Kate and Leopold (actually K&L is a little more interesting than it looks). I'm also trying to think about ways of incorporating a chapter or so on television. I'd especially like to write about the original versions of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
What I enjoyed the most about Brian's entry and the comments that followed was the discussion of causality, a topic that I have tended to discuss less often in my work on time travel films. I'm usually less concerned about the specifics about the logic of time travel, and in fact, I'm more interested in those films that are "incoherent" or "inconsistent" to use a couple of terms that came up often in the CT discussion. I realize that I'm being pretty cryptic here, mostly because I'm trying to re-process some ideas that are in need of revision.
Update: Just a quick reminder that one of my conference narratives has a link to and discussion of the DeMille film, Male and Female, which I want to discuss in my early cinema chapter.
Update 2: Another DeMille film that deals with time issues, the reincarnation film, The Road to Yesterday, which is not available on VHS or DVD from Amazon. For some reason, on second glance, Man and Woman doesn't look like the right film.
Posted by chuck at October 6, 2004 11:01 PM
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Comments
One of those remarkably adept commentators on Amazon compared Caitlin Kiernan (do you know her work?)'s Murder of Angels to Kate and Leopold. I'm about ten pages into MoA, and despite having never seen the movie I feel quite safe in saying the first ten pages of MoA contain more references to Lovecraftian horrors than the entire film.
Posted by: Cassie at October 7, 2004 11:19 PM
I've heard of, but not read, Kiernan's work, but having seen the film, I'd guess that you're not really going out on a limb saying that. The main thing that I find interesting about K&L is the nostalgia for the 19th Century, the film's insistence that the past (as mannered as it might appear) is actually somehow "more authentic" than the present (with all of it's advertising and modern conveniences).
I'll certainly add Kiernan to the (long) list of books I'd like to read (maybe I'll include her novel as future airplane reading).
Posted by: chuck at October 7, 2004 11:30 PM
I enjoy her very much, and without the odd guilty feeling that reading a lot of horror that I used to read gives me. (I largely stopped reading it when I discovered Lovecraft and Kiernan and Poppy Brite all within several months of each other quite a few years ago.) She's engaging and creepy and delightful.
Posted by: Cassie at October 8, 2004 12:49 AM