I recently — last Saturday and tonight, to be more precise — watched a couple of movies: Timecrimes (aka Los cronocrÃmenes) and The Man from Earth (aka Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth).
Both were solidly entertaining, Timecrimes for the enjoyable time travel puzzle it creates, and Man for the intriguing ideas it raises. In fact, it’s essentially nothing but ideas: 90 minutes of very good actors just talking to one another. Man has the feel of an old-school Twilight Zone or Star Trek episode — no wonder, given its late author’s background, and the fact that it was first conceived in the 1960s. But that’s not to say it feels padded out to feature length. I think it’s exactly the right length.
Timecrimes was a solid B, B-minus, and I think I liked it better before it was clearly a time travel movie. In its opening scenes, when you don’t quite know what’s going on, it’s actually quite atmospheric and scary. But it’s entertaining beyond that, if never entirely surprising or scary afterward.
(I did like how binoculars and rear-view mirrors were used — maybe intentionally, maybe not. I don’t think this qualifies as a spoiler. In theory, we use these things to see further, to magnify, but they cut off our peripheral vision, the binoculars especially. Anything that fall out of frame can sneak up on us. And in a movie like this, they often will.)
I’d recommend both movies. Both short and entertaining, interesting in their own ways.
Other than that, I’ve mainly been watching some television, including old-school Doctor Who. Having finished Peter Davison’s run on the show (well, aside from Snakedance, which I had trouble finding until recently), I’ve decided to risk Colin Baker’s interpretation. I’m worried, though, that Betty may be right about the character, certainly in her problems with his first episode. Still, it would be hard to disappoint after The Caves of Androzani, Davison’s last. Aside from the always low production values — and a completely superfluous man-in-rubber-suit monster — that was some really excellent work.