More Time Travel Fun (#SFWApro)

Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, Disney was more about producing mediocre comedies than A-list animation, for example
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING ODDBALL (1979), a Connecticut Yankee riff starring Dennis Dugan as a NASA scientist whose experimental ship is thrown back in time along with his lookalike co-pilot. Dugan is an incredibly dull lead and the film falls flat on pretty much every level. However it is noteworthy as the only one where Alisande gets to return to the present with Sir Boss. “Tell me, was it the Wright Brothers who discovered radio?”
THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC (1999) has bored Jewish teenager Kirsten Dunst transported back to 1941 Europe just in time for a trip to a concentration camp, making her realize how little attention she paid to the Final Solution (“I was writing notes to boys when we covered it in class.”). Much more effective than I expected, fitting into the Understanding Your Family school of time-travel yarns as Dunst finally makes sense of what her older relatives can’t seem to explain about the Hell they lived through. With Mimi Rogers as Dunst’s mother, Brittany Murphy as her WW II bestie and Louise Fletcher as a Holocaust-survivor aunt. Based on Jane Yolen’s book. “They’ll do anything to delay the inevitable—isn’t that true, Jewess?”
DISNEY’S THE KID (2000) has emotionally detached Bruce Willis discover the kid hanging around his place is actually his eight-year-old self, horrified to learn that as a grown up “I have a boring job, I don’t fly jets, I don’t have a dog, I’m not married—I’m a loaser!” Willis decides this is his golden opportunity to change his past, but in failing realizes that dealing with his past makes it possible to change his future. This has some flaws, such as the rom-com aspects (Emily Mortimer goes almost instantly from sort-of having feelings for Willis to considering a proposal), but overall a fun one. With Lily Tomlin as Willis’s assistant and Jean Smart and Chi McBride as friends. “Somebody send for the waaahmbulance.”
THE VISITORS (1993) stars Jean Reno and Christian Clavier as a French knight and uncouth servant whose attempt to avert a tragedy through time travel instead strands them in the present, much to the bemusement of their descendants (Valérie Lemercier as Reno’s, Clavier playing his own as a lookalike). This slaspstick farce takes the usual anachronism shticks and makes an extremely funny film out of them, though I do think they punish Clavier’s descendant too harshly. Worth catching. “According to her, Hubert has become a stuntman and a wrestler.”