Fanatical Pupil

Time Travel + Chicago + Jake Gyllenhaal. It makes me feel pretty good that somehow a movie that involved these three things is being promoted as heavily as it is because I would have thought that combining those three things would narrow the target audience size down to 1. Moi.

I mean, let’s just do a quick (abbreviated) recap of Jake G:

• Prince of Persia – Awesome except for the fact that it was a Disney movie (bonus points for time travel, of course)
• Zodiac (loved him in it)
• Brokeback Mountain (haven’t seen, but I guess it won some awards or something)
• The Good Girl (in which he legitimized Jennifer Aniston)
• Donnie Darko

Yeah, there were other movies… but the four of those that aren’t based on video games make for a pretty good filmography by themselves.

Time Travel movies I liked:

• Back to the Future (all of them; classic)
• Time After Time (not bad, really)
• Terminator (again, all of them, even the bad ones, and the canceled TV series which was awesome)
• The Butterfly Effect (Ashton is dreamy, but also, it was kind of good)
• The Jacket (wicked awesome)
• 12 Monkeys (one of the best evar)
• Timecrimes (AWEsome)
• Primer (modern classic)
• Groundhog Day (if it counts)
• Deja Vu (underrated if you ask me)

Others that weren’t that great, but still good cause of the time travel part:

• Timeline
• Flight of the Navigator (when I was young)
• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
• Timecop

Throw in TV shows:

• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (mentioned above)
• LOST
• Journeyman (another show canceled just when it was getting good)
• Flash Forward (dealt with time travel themes)
• Daybreak (fits in the Groundhog Day bucket)
• Quantum Leap
• Phil of the Future (sorry, I liked it)
• Tru Calling (not great, but good enough)
• Heroes (which I stopped watching, but I am considering going back to finish since I made it half way through season three; I was almost there)

That’s kind of a lot of good stuff there. Hopefully I won’t get too hung up on the fact that the Source Code is evidently a computer program that allows you take someone’s body for the last 8 minutes of their life… over and over… So, it’s like the Matrix, but for time? As someone who writes code for a living, the movie is just unfortunately titled. But at least it provides for a fun Twitter Meme that probably won’t catch on. And having a bit of Michelle Monaghan can’t hurt.

Now, if I just had a time machine so I could get to a point where I’d actually finished writing something…

I watched Primer last night (I’d been meaning to watch it for a long time). I’ve been watching Terminator all season. I’ve known for a while that I’m a sucker for time travel.

I haven’t quote*unquote written anything for a while. But, I realized that I was putting too much pressure on myself to get it done while also having (or creating for myself) a significant amount of pressure at work. But I’ve finally recovered from that, and have gotten to the point where I am ready to start writing again. This time, I’m not going to pressure myself with word counts or anything like that though, since clearly that didn’t work for me.

So, I’m revising the outline of a project that I’d started on with the intention of adding time travel elements (easier than it sounds, actually, now that I look at it) to make it more interesting to my unconscious mind. Hopefully, by making it align (even more) closely to something that I’d be interested in reading, I’ll keep myself interested in writing it.

I’ve also rearranged my Netflix queue so I’ll get some good time travel movies that I’ve been meaning to watch for a while anyway. I also want to get some good scifi books about time travel, but I’ve got so much other stuff to read anyway, that I’m not going to dive into that just yet.