Not much time travel in my movie watching (#SFWApro)

SUNSHINE STATE (2002) is a John Sayles’ slice-of-life (all rights to image with current holder) set in a small Florida island town under siege by developers, with the main dramatic arcs being former runaway Angela Bassett working out her family issues and Edie Falco as a motel manager tempted both by developer dollars and by architect Timothy Hutton. Shot on location (Amelia Island mostly) and really struck a chord with me as a former Floridian—apparently development issues and Florida tourist architecture are universal. Ralph Waite and Jane Alexander play Falco’s parents, Marc Blucas is Falco’s golfer boyfriend, Mary Steenburgen is the mayor and Alan King, Miguel Ferrer and Eliot Asinof (the author of Eight Men Out which Sayles adapted for the screen) appear as developers. “People think it just happens, like Thanksgiving and Christmas—they don’t realize how hard it is to invent a tradition.”

THE BABADOOK (2014) is a bogeyman tormenting an Aussie single mother and her son, or possibly the son’s imagination, or possibly mommy’s … This starts well, but when the middle period became mommy having repeated hallucinations (or—are they?) it lost me, maybe because it could so easily have been a straight Mad Act film (and I pegged the pet dog as Doomed the first time it appeared). “I’ll make you a wager/I’ll make you a bet/The more you deny me/the stronger I get.”

MOCKINGJAY PART ONE (2014) is, of course, the first half of the final book, wherein Katniss reluctantly becomes the face of the revolution, only to find herself just as stressed against equally strong odds as when she was in the arena. Good, though I think they could have managed turning the tale into one movie without any difficulty. “Everyone in that hospital is guilty of treason.”

Now, time travel—TRIPPING THE RIFT: The Movie (2008) would double well with the Futurama movie as they’re both based on TV SF animated series, and both involve a Terminator parody, here a killer clown with a German accent trying to whack one of the regular cast. While I enjoyed the first Rift cartoon which was pretty short, this raunch doesn’t expand well to full length, so I have even less impulse to watch the series than I did with the other film.“I was about to suggest we hand you over to the psycho so the rest of us can live.”

MALICE IN WONDERLAND (2009) is a British film in which wealthy twentysomething runaway “Alice Dodgson” gets hit by a car and ends up wandering through a world of low-lifes and psychos who look oddly familiar. I figured this was a long shot but it’s one of those with a last-minute time-travel twist, so it qualifies for the appendix. I can’t really review this, though, as the dogs were clamoring for attention to much for me to really absord any other details. “We think we’re going in a straight line, but what goes around comes around.”