Timecrimes

Last night Em and I experienced something very odd, our first sense of homesickness for Europe, brought on by the most mundane sight one can imagine - a pan of a supermarket parking lot in a Spanish film. Suddenly we were there, recognizing all the familiar Renaults and Peugeots and Seats... a very strange experience. It was a parking lot as parking lots should look, meaning one where the cars were not outnumbered by trucks, yet at the same time, US parking lots also look "right". Multiculturealism is an exotic and confusing beast, it seems.

Our movie was the Spanish SF/thriller "Timecrimes", one of the best movies I have seen in a very long time and especially great after just watching the disappointing "Knowing" and "Mirrors". In a nutshell, Timecrimes is a Spanish SF flick that will fry your brain. I think it's interesting that so many of the better genre flicks I've seen lately are Spanish - must be something in the water over there. The poster misleads, making it look like some intense slasher film, which it most certainly is not. I can't describe it much without spoiling the whole wonder of the movie, but the very rough story is:

A guy on vacation is sitting in his back yard one day. He spies a nubile young woman getting naked in the nearby woods.



He goes to investigate and is attacked by a scary looking character with a bandaged head. (Note, again - This is not a slasher film. It may resemble one in screen caps and advertising, but it is a very different sort of beast)


Escaping, he finds a means to go back in time, literally zigzagging in and out of his own previous timeline. That's the first ten minutes and from there on out, your head will start exploding. What I loved about it was the fact that I kept thinking, "Oh, this is good but I can guess what will happen next", and then events would unfold in such an utterly different way as to make me cackle in delight. It was all, "Whoah" and, "WHOAH!" and, "Wait, pause that, I need to get my head around what's going on". Emily and I discussed it for a good fifteen minutes afterward (She had a difficult time fully getting her head round the structure of the time travel plot, while I was fascinated by the potential repercussions of the events).

It is certainly one of the very best movies about time travel that I have ever seen, and possibly the ONLY one that fits together so well - It is built like an extremely complex clock, and every little piece clicks into place.

Strongly recommended!

John Denver was right

So, here we are again at last, back in North Carolina! And what a long, strange trip it has been. I've been across the ocean and right through hell; I can be forgiven for one hackneyed expression. I've given this blog a bit of thought, probably more than it was ever worth, and have decided to keep it running and keep writing in it from time to time. It was that or shut it down for good... I gave that idea some consideration, on the grounds that I already had the Pipe Blog to write and another blog was one too many, but in the end I opted to keep this going for the simple reason that it's open-ended. The Pipe Blog is a focused subject, with limits, while this one better fits a wide range of rambling and digression. The near future will probably bring a good bit of commentary on what it's like to be back in the USA after seven years abroad, but for this evening, I'll let John Denver sum up my feelings best: