This week in time travel (#SFWApro)

Due to my sloppy time management, not much done, though I did watch quite a bit of TV for the book (I’ll review that when I finish another season of something).
As I won’t be including visions of the future, I was confident IT HAPPENED TOMORROW (1944) wouldn’t fit, but I had to watch to make sure. Dick Powell plays a reporter in the 1890s (this may reflect Gay Nineties nostalgia was popular in this period, also influencing 1943’s Heaven Can Wait) whose career spikes upward when a deceased colleague starts giving him copies of the next day’s paper. Unfortunately, the police want to know how he anticipated a couple of robberies, and then there’s the paper announcing his obit … With Linda Darnell and Jack Oakie as fortune-tellers, this is amiably forgettable; according to the credits, it adapts something by Lord Dunsany but I don’t know what. “Remember—I didn’t give it to you.”
IN HIS FATHER’S SHOES(1997) is one of those time-travel films that focus on family relationships and dynamics (others being Frequency, Back to the Future and the Wizards of Waverly Place movie) though it’s about grandfather/grandson rather than father/son dynamics. Robert Ri’chard plays a teenager who on the death of his father (Louis Gossett Jr.) finds a pair of shoes can magically transport him into his father’s teen years in the early 1960s, where he begins to understand why Dad and his gruff father (Gossett too) became so estranged. Unfortunately the past feels mostly like a Happy Days knockoff (they touch on race relations briefly, then move on to the fun stuff) so this didn’t work for me. “How am I going to get those kids through the rest of their life?”
JUBILEE (1977) is a pointless British film that might have worked better (though I doubt it) back when “punk” was a new movement: London punks strut around, work on their art, rage against the system and waffle on pretentiously (“I didn’t realize I was dead until I was 15.”), while Queen Elizabeth I appears in a few scenes (having been brought forward by court astrologer John Dee) to shake her head at what her kingdom has become. One for the appendix, as the time travel element really is irrelevant (removing the virgin queen wouldn’t have affected anything). Adam Ant has a part. “Crying is a negative reaction—help me make these firebombs instead.”