RIFLE RANGE BOY

About Time Director: Richard Curtis You start life telling yourselves you must try to make everything perfect. You think and overthink where anything can go wrong anywhere and make precautionary changes. Still, there will be some black swan events beyond your control that you must overcome. What would you think at the end of it all, at the end of days, that you would have it any better?   What if you have a special gift where you can time travel? Would your life then be perfect, with the ability to travel back and forth to twit events and prevent mishaps when deemed fit? A millionaire who has made millions would dispense unsolicited advice that earning money is not everything. He will say that one has to enjoy life with all its spills and thrills, not go after money at all costs. Of course, all these make no sense to a struggling youngster working hard to make something out of his life. In the youngster's mind, he needs the blessings of the Monkey God, not life lessons.   The ...

Manifest (Seasons 1-3; 2018 - 2021) What happens when a flight disappears from the radar one day and lands at its destination some five and a half years later? A whole lot of questions naturally crops up. Tonnes of conspiracy theories spring from nothing, and the governmental agencies will jump into action trying to put a plausible validation to the whole speculation. The most unsettling part of the entire fiasco would be the relatives, who, after months if not years of trying to get over the presumed death of their loved one and putting their past behind. Imagine trying to place them back in their new lives! The puzzling (maybe not if one understands time travel) is that the plane passengers did not age a day older, even five years later, further complicating the hullabaloo. One twin was stuck as a preteen in this miniseries, while the other blossomed into the hormone-raged teenager. On a happy note, the preteen was sick with cancer when he started, but afterwards, he had five yea...

  Loki (Season1, E1-E6; 2021) Marvel Cinematic Universe When Loki was apprehended and transported after Avengers: Endgame, in the confusion of Hulk creating a tantrum for needing to use the stairs and Iron Man faking a heart attack, Loki escapes captivity through a Tesseract and enter a different realm. He lands in the headquarters of Time Variance Authority (TVA).  Here, the narcissistic Norse God of Mischief Loki learns of variants of himself floating in the multiple timelines creating havoc. The Time-Keepers had set a Scared Timeline for events to happen, but somehow variants have made branches from the main timeline. The TVA's job is to ensure that the correct path of the Sacred Timeline is followed. Some of the variants are evil alter-egos and are hellbent on creating chaos. As he is charged against the 'Sacred Timeline', Loki's plea bargain is to hunt down another Loki variant who had killed TVA officers and stolen the time resetting devices. Time, as we perceive,...

Tenet (2020) This is another movie in which one may go in and come out of the theatre asking, "what was that all about?" It is about time travel and would make sense if one has a little background about time, space and bending time. Viewers of Interstellar should be at a better place understanding the flow and the plot of the story. They would not find it too confusing. Time and space have fascinated man since the beginning from the Hindu tradition to the Greeks right down to modern thinkers. Time is just an arbitrary human construct to keep track of earth's rotation around the sun as to plan seasonal preparation of agricultural activities. It went on to permeate all over our day to day activities. Our mass occupies space and seems to move together with time. Somewhere interspersed in all these is life. And it is all moving forward in an ever-expanding universe, or is it? In an alternative universe, time could be moving backwards as seen here in Tenet, the movie....

An MGM presentation. James . Fitzpatrick's Travel Talk The Voice of the Globe. (the 1930s)

Source Code (2011) Director: Duncan Jones When you switch off a filament lamp, the light just does not go off just like that. There is a temporary time before the brightness disappears. Even life is that. If somehow we can get into the dimension when two people die, one life can mathematically be calculated to get the others and can be made to turn the tide of events. This bizarre time travel where scientists can communicate through a digital interphase to save the world is the theme of this movie. Capt Colter Steven finds himself trapped in the body of a school teacher and on a train where a time bomb is about to be detonated. Through repeatedly moving to and fro between his old self and new, and communication through his computer, the Afghan-missioned army helicopter pilot is actually dead but is sent on a secret mission to find the culprit behind a train attack so as to avert other future attacks. His mission was just to locate the information about the perpetrator...

Somewhere in Time (1980) In the Hindu Puranas, stories were told of people completing various lifeforms (karma cycles) through dreams. Through this process, kings change roles to become slaves or animals and endure punishment or pleasure. Time travel films usually deploy complicated devices to get their characters move through timelines. Surprisingly, in this purely romantic drama, it is made simple. Self-hypnosis in the presence of ancient artefacts is suggested as the way transport one back to the past. Christopher Reeve (known for his role as Superman) plays the role of a playwriter, Richard Coulier. At a time when he gets a writer's block, he drives around aimlessly and ends up staying in a grand old hotel. He is drawn into the intriguing world of time travel after being fascinated with a portrait of a stage actress (the Queen of mini-series of the 80s, Jane Seymour as Miss Elise McKenna). He remembers receiving an old pocket watch 8 years previously from a mysterious ...

Predestination (2014)  Are we fatalistic when we say that life is predetermined? No matter how we try to change it, it would somehow end with an outcome that may not be favourable to us. Is there a reason why the word 'fate' and 'fatal' has the same root word? How much free will do we hold? I am surprised that I never actually heard about this movie before watching it. It is an outlandish movie about time travel, a beautiful hermaphrodite, self-impregnation and changing history! It may sound a bit like the 'Back to the Future' series, but this one is darker. It is pretty confusing as the characters move in and out of timelines. In the beginning, a man tries to defuse a bomb but sustains facial burn injuries. He is treated in a hospital and has extensive skin grafting or perhaps a facial transplant. In the next scene, this man is now attending to a customer in a bar and starts a conversation with him. A nihilistic man tells him tall tales about being a t...

Blind Chance (Polish: Przypadek) 1987(release) I suppose, in conjunction with the Euro 2012 finals co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, it is only proper to review a Polish film. Actually, it the movie upon which 'Sliding Doors' (which I discussed earlier) is based on. Even with excellent subtitles, the first half-hour of the film just whisks by without giving a clue what was going on! Characters were coming and going leaving us wondering what was actually going on. The story starts with Witek screaming on top of his lungs. In the next scene, bodies of dead people are dragged by doctors and attendants along a hospital corridor, leaving a trail of blood along the way. Then it goes to the time when Witek was a child, and his friend Daniel moves to Denmark. And a young Witek with a girlfriend. A cadaver is dissected in full view of the audience stirring up a medical student who could not stomach the gore. Then we see Witek, a 4th-year medical student, coaxing her, who actually...