September 2009 Archives

Watching this film was like watching luggage being sorted at an airport. A suitcase has no control over its fate, no ability to change its destination, and isn't great at conversation.  A suitcase isn't "fighting" to get to San Francisco Oakland International. It doesn't charge forth to find JFK. It is a passive participant in the luggage sorting process and it goes where its tag specifies that it will go.

Eric Bana and Jennifer Connolly are very pretty designer luggage.  

The wife is the most passive of the two - she is manipulated from an early age, her entire life defined by a man who himself has no ability to give her a long term relationship and who knows this as he manipulates her.  She is also, curiously, not the lead character in the film. The director has aimed his lens at Bana, the husband, and kept it clearly focused in his direction. Bana's character is constantly confronted with hints of predetermination - he must do this or that because it is foreordained. 

The device of time travel itself is almost a disaster due to logic failures, but really, this is a minor problem in a film that treats its characters as incapable of changing their own circumstance. By the end, we understand that neither character has really changed at all - they have just followed a script, been good little pawns, and have completed their rounds. And that's a real snooze. Neither of these characters is aspiring to anything specific - they are just reacting to input. 

This film drove home for me the importance of clearly understanding your central conflict before considering a story to be "done". What on earth do these people want? How do they change? Where do we end up in comparison to where we started? This film provided no answers - just helpless pawns moved around against their will. 

Spent some time recharging my creative juices in one of Minnesota's many state parks last weekend.  Big Woods State Park is a fragment of the original Eastern Broadleaf Forest that once covered over 3,000 square miles in the southern third of the state. The arrival of white settlers brought maps and grids which parceled out this forest to all comers, and with the help of lumberjacks, beasts of burden and the revolutionary John Deere plow, the forest was chopped down, stumps removed and the ground broken into the gentle farmland that is much of MInnesota today.

This Big Woods fragment was just too inconvenient to destroy, and survived. In the middle of it is a rectangular waterfall that evokes Frank Lloyd Wright . While I was there, two small boys stood by the side of the creek and attempted to bring the waterfall into submission by throwing rocks at it. Their father stood nearby, disinterested, checking his cell phone.  The waterfall persisted. The boys grew bored. After a time they moved on and I was able to snap some pictures.