REVIEW: About Time

is a little film by the English fellow Richard Curtis, and addresses time travel, though not in the Stephen Hawking, Terminator, Dr. Who, or Primer sense.

(This contains almost no spoilers)

It is a little story about love in three distinct dynamics:

- a boy in love with a girl,*

- a son's relationship with his father (Bill Nighy in a role that will probably have me tearing up a bit more every time I see it),

- the eternal time travel questions of repeatable experiences: will repeating a first experience again for the first time make life better?

It's rather oddly structured as it moves around in time, often with huge leaps, and the logic is largely absent, as it is with most stories involving time travel. But - the best stories involving time travel usually find clever ways of making you not care about the logical fallacies, or address holes in such simple fashion that you can shrug, move along and enjoy the story without getting hung up on the feasibility. It ends up as more of a coming-of-age love story spanning decades that happens to have time travel as its catalyst than it is a time travel movie with a big idea and big villain. The butterfly effect scenarios are integral, of course, and conveniently ignore its own internal laws of TT (time travel). It owes a huge and obvious debt to Groundhog Day, though its tone is softer, sappier, and has red-haired people.

Quite enjoyed it. If you liked Frequency, Love, Actually, or movies with Rachel McAdams and beautiful houses overlooking English seashores and misanthropic supporting characters, then you might enjoy it too. Lovely, simple, sweet, funny, sentimental in the right places, and big important idea about life stuck in at the end.

Also, I try to keep track of who recommends film, books, and music to me, and I remember someone telling me two months ago that they thought I would enjoy this...but I do not remember who, and I am not done inventing my own time machine to go back and figure it out. Thank you, and my apologies. You can speak up now...

And by the way, they have to have spent a small fortune paying for the killer soundtrack. Somebody loves The Waterboys**.

*great chemistry with the leads

**huge fan here