Great Scott

[nolweanna]

I saw Back to the Future II for the first time the other day. I know, how can I, a child of the 80s, manage to have lived this long without seeing that? I've seen the first one and the third one a lot- the third one I may have seen in the theatre, but possibly just on an ABC rerun

Comments

[doubtful_salmon]

Realistically, the death of Grandpa Biff in the past would not affect the future in a way that we could notice within the movie universe. I mean it probably would as everything does in the ripple sort of sense, but since we don't see past that point in the movie, it's impossible to know how it would change the future. I think parts 2 and 3 are essentially lessons for Marty not only to try to mess with time and omniscience but to reign himself in a bit. And there are some issues with the transition from the first to the second and third movies, but you have to consider that the latter two were not slotted for production until after the first had already been successfully released. I don't think the thought they might do more had even occurred to them (although it would nowadays before it even got released), because they had to re-shoot the scene where future Marty falls back into the '50s and is like, "I'm back...FROM the future!" If they thought there was going to be more and that it would be kind of like that, I think they would have shot that just in case because it wouldn't have cost very much money to add that part. The fact that the first does not blend into the second and third movies seamlessly is a result of a forced entryway back into the plot when it had already been closed. This is why you will find a lot of Part II and III troubles with movies that weren't initially intended for sequels--like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Matrix. They could have begun anew with the second two parts but I think they thought it would be more fun--and draw in more intrigued moviegoers--if it did somehow. And it didn't do it too much so it could draw in people who hadn't seen the first part. But you will still notice how parts 3 in all these trilogies seem the weakest in the court of public opinion.

And I know what you mean about the natural shoddy feel to the '80s movie, but I mean, that's my point. Aesthetically that was the way you did movies in the '80s, and it looks crappy now in a way it wouldn't have then. You can argue this if a lot of older movies but they've had time to become more "novelty" or "classic" in a way '80s movies haven't yet. You can hear this especially in the music, which always sounds like the decade it came from and makes it feel old and weird. Particularly 80s music has this sort of...I don't even know how to describe it...echoey, whispery business going on with it that I think makes it more noticeable. But it's in everything, so you just have to hope that the sounds became legend and recognizable (like in John Hughes' stuff--really, really '80s, but "Don't You Forget About Me" makes you think of The Breakfast Club--and not really the other way around in the same way). You could also attribute the difference to technological changes. For example, in the middle of the '70s, Technicolor basically died and got swapped out for Eastman. Home video appeared. All of these things alter how a movie will ultimately look, in the same way that they record a ton of other footage now for alternate releases on DVD and extra features. The changes are always noticeable even if you don't really think about them, and in a lot of cases you could show people random frames of random movies and they'd probably be able to tell you the decade because we see the changes even if we don't really consider them. I think that with more time, the horrid '80s movies will pretty much wholly fade away, and they will become more fun and "classic" than they seem now.

Also, I think BTTF 3 seems less like that...to me, anyway...because a lot of period pieces stayed away from the '80s-ish business. Sometimes they manage to miss the mark in only color (which is pretty much the same throughout the '80s unless the movies in question have been copiously digitally remastered) and occasionally music (because they can get all the costumes and everything right but it's all pointless if the music sounds like Labyrinth, although I think that one continues to function because of its odd mix of fantasy and being really dated).

And also...A Knight's Tale is 2001. I mostly say that because yeah, I know what year it came out, because I'm awesome.

[nolweanna]

Damn. I even saw Knight's Tale in the theater, so I should've known too. My friends made it a ritual viewing, like Rocky Horror. The only part of the elaborate thing I remember is that when Will's father's in the boat you say, "It's Jesus! Hello Jesus!" and every time Heath Ledger says "Kate," you cheer, which you also do in Ten Things I Hate About You (once, he uses Kate instead of Kat)... which is '99 and the movie I should've said instead. Er, anyway.

Yes- they made the second two movies more or less concurrently after the first one was such a huge hit. They had to write around the problems they introduce in that final scene, and, I dunno, I just think maybe there could've been a more compact way to deal with all of that. I like my time travel Douglas Adams style.

I almost said exactly the same thing you did about dating by film qualities, but deleted it because no one has ever known what I meant before. I do this with pretty decent accuracy and people think I'm strange, so I'm glad to finally find someone else who knows what I'm talking about.

So that particular look is to the 80s what extra dark action sequences are to movies now? I'm talking to you, Hellboy, LOTR, Harry Potter, Revenge of the Sith and Pirates of the Caribbean. I just saw the first Pirates for the first time the other day and hated myself for not seeing it in the theatre- it's made for a big screen and feels dark and crowded on a 27 inch TV.

I guess that's another part of it- I'm not seeing any of these the way they were intended to be seen: big. I got to see the re-releases of Star Wars on a huge old Cinerama screen, one those 90 foot curved deals with amazing sound. The city tore the whole thing down in 2002, but seeing movies in there was completely different from a TV, or even modern 50 ft screens.

[doubtful_salmon]

I think you may be right about those dark action sequences, but I can't even tell which thing I'm going to consider the defining characteristic of movies from this decade. I think of it as mostly the scoring and the color for the '80s, and the fashion and the music for the '90s...I dunno. I even think you see it in the style instead of the aesthetics, because you'll find a lot of '90s conventions that had faded out by the time 2000 hit. You can see this happen with like a surge in non-linear movies following Quentin Tarantino's successes and then, dumping it because everyone was doing (except Tarantino who was allowed to continue because he was like the original).

I do feel a lot of Douglas Adams in the attitude of BttF, though, too. I mean a lot of stuff that happens in Hitchhiker's has very little to do with anything that happened earlier, and anything that will happen later. I just think Douglas Adams had an incredible knack for making up nonsense on the spot which is why he can feign connections that weren't there. I don't think it would have worked so well for movies, either. But Douglas Adams himself said that, at least in the case of the radio series, he wrote every episode without really knowing where he was going to end up or what was going to happen in the next one. I mean a lot of it is just the characters you love getting into hilarious situations and then having to get out of them again, which makes it feel more whimsical. I think BttF does have more of that feeling, too, because it functions almost wholly on Marty and Doc, and in the first one Marty's parents. And Biff I suppose. I mean I think you can tell it revolves more around the ongoing adventures of the characters because there is never really much question of who is right, who is good, etc, because Marty and Doc = the good guys is probably the first thing they came up with.

I do agree about Pirates--it is really dark and I remember it as such even in the movie theater, and I don't remember a whole lot about that particular trip to the movies, but it doesn't have the same flair as it did when I watch it on a smaller screen.

[nolweanna]

I meant Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency more than I meant Hitchhiker, but your comparison between the two is spot on. Hitchhiker is huge and sprawling and not as nicely packaged, but Dirk Gently is strange and compact in huge and sprawling ways. Everything ties up, even if you think about it too hard.

I need to watch more movies.

[doubtful_salmon]

Yeah, in a literary sense, Dirk Gently and its sequel are much better books, although...even in Dirk Gently, the paradoxes created in time travel are dismissed as being unavoidable. So, I dunno. It ties up, but it still had to take liberties (that Hitchhiker's doesn't really take...like Zaphod's lineage, for example). But it was also written more like a book, and made to tie itself up. The sequel didn't need to necessarily be linked to the first, either, because that's not why people were going to read it--they were going to read it because they loved Douglas Adams, and because the first Dirk Gently was hilarious. But had they been movies...I dunno. I think it would've turned out similarly.

I just think the problem with time travel is there is always some major logistical flaw that has to be explained away by another (such as yeah, there are all those paradoxes in space/time but it happens all the time...so deal with it like in Dirk Gently) or excused (like in BttF where things don't necessarily add up).

I also think it's easier to get away with some of the tricks pulled in the Dirk Gently books with predominantly British readers, as opposed to predominantly American moviegoers. I'm not necessarily saying the latter are all stupid because I don't think we are, but for one, there's a lot more time in Dirk Gently to explain these things because it's a book, and for another, much of the explanation relies on basic British comedy (which is weird but true, I think). Although I think if you tried to make Dirk Gently into a movie for the US now you might succeed because American comedy is getting increasingly British these days (I mean if you watch SNL anymore, like half of it is pure bizarre surrealism).

[nolweanna]

A Dirk Gently movie... Hold on while I contemplate what that might be like.

Tea-time would probably make a better traditional Hollywood movie, but I think there could be some awesome potential in Holistic Detective Agency. I mean, The Prestige works (the book of which I still need to read).

It just occurred to me that the rules of time travel very rarely apply in Doctor Who. I haven't seen the new seasons, but in the older ones, they spend the whole series tooling around in a time machine and even though the whole point in every episode is "Do we get involved in this situation?" the implications are never really explored.

Genesis of the Daleks is the only one I can think of off-hand, which is all about being sent back in time to destroy the Daleks before they become a menace. The Doctor decides he doesn't have the right to destroy life, and the emphasis on changing time and history isn't really brought into it. In fact, most times they could focus on the effects of changing time, they avoid it by focusing on the morality of their actions in the present, regardless of the impact on past or future, which is an interesting way to do it.

The only real exception I can think of is one involving seven copies of the Mona Lisa, which was mostly written by Douglas Adams and is basically a Dr. Who version of Dirk Gently.

[doubtful_salmon]

Ah, Douglas Adams. But The Salmon of Doubt had some serious plotholes...

My friend and I have had this idea for a web-series for years, which basically involves us going back in time, seriously (and always accidentally) destroying some major cultural or historical event, and then at the end of every episode we'd go back to the present and see that we'd messed up everything. Then by the beginning of the next episode it would be back to normal. I think this spawned from a similar conversation, in which we decided that there were too many shows that just ditched plotlines that pretended they were going to continue by the next episode (it must have been a specific episode of something, because I remember being really perplexed that the episode prior ended in the middle of something big and by the next episode all was back to normal). That, coupled with time travel in movies and TV in which people always manage to fix everything before it gets seriously demolished.

[nolweanna]

Didn't The X Files used to do that? I never watched a lot of X Files, but every single time I managed to see two episodes in a row, it was always like, "Oh, so they're shape shifters... but, wait a minute, what about the face sucking monsters from last time that suddenly stopped plaguing the city. Didn't you say you were going to search for clues and find out, you know, why they were doing that?"

But it does seem like there was another show that had that sort of sometimes continuity, because I remember watching things and swearing they ran the episodes out of order, or something. Gonna drive me nuts now...

[doubtful_salmon]

X-Files may have come up, although to be honest, I have never watched it within memory. I saw the first movie and I'd seen an episode here or there, but I can't casually watch episodes of shows like X-Files (or anything...about all I can casually step in and watch an episode of is Law & Order). I have to watch them all start to finish, which means I haven't (although lately it's been bumped up my queue significantly, because I want to believe!). But the friend I spoke of is a big fan. Boston Legal did this a lot, which may have been another thing that got mentioned, but wasn't the main point. A lot of old sci-fi shows seemed to be guilty of this. It was excusable in anthology shows like the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits, but I dunno...even then. There're still all these old movies and shows where people get to the point at which everything is screwed up, but it never gets resolved, so it just sort of ends abruptly. I mean it's allowed to end, in a Planet of the Apes-like twist, but if you spend all this time screwing it up and then it's just over...it's different. It's like you ended in the middle. You forgot any kind of resolution. No one says the problem has to be resolved and that aliens aren't allowed to take over the Earth at the end, but it should still be like a story. I dunno.