About Time

Time travel stories are often more fantasy than science fiction and so it is in About Time. Our hero turns 21 and his father takes him aside and says-‘Men in our family can travel through time.’ Oh, right-and that’s it for any explanation as to how or why this might be so. We then spend the rest of the film watching him bounce around in his own past, changing anything and everything that strikes his fancy, but mostly concentrating on finding the love of his life. His fathers sets a few ground rules, he can’t go forward in time and…

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Time Travelers Never Die

I’ve always had a soft spot for time travel stories-from Groundhog Day to Back To The Future to The Time Traveler’s Wife-I love them all.  So when I saw Time Travelers Never Die it sounded like my kind of book. For the most part Jack McDevitt does a good job with his time travel story, but it has a little too much Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to it for my taste.  There are endless bits when our heroes have to hop about in time so that they can hide something, retrive something, or just skip waiting in line.  A…

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The Night Bookmobile

The second time I saw The Night Bookmobile it was another chance encounter. Something wonderfully odd happens to people who have huge bestsellers-they kind of lose their minds.  Stephen King, James A. Michener, and J.K. Rowling all decided that having a base of reader meant they could crank out stories with millions of words.  Other writers have decided that this means they have been touched by God and need to do a bit more preaching than they used to.  And some decide to explore other mediums besides the boring world of the novel. Audrey Niffeneggerwrote one of my all time…

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The Time Traveler and Charlie Chaplin

There are few things I love better than people looking at mundane images and deciding that something amazing has been captured. I really liked that whole Face on Mars business and the Woman on Mars photo really does look like a woman. So I have to be impressed with this little bit of video showing what looks like a woman talking on cellphone in 1928-pesky time travelers. On first viewing I didn’t even notice anything odd about her. Even having been told that I was looking at footage from 1928, I am so used to seeing people walking around talking…

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