Welcome, Intraloper, to the blog (otherwise the amber-shifted VR timecode for a portal to Hades II) of Vincent Marsden Hendrick, daydream navvy and insinceritist. Here, compressing unfeasible rage, I'll precipitate a meandrous downpour of wet thinking for the unparapluied.
Showing posts with label Back to the Future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Back to the Future. Show all posts
The Twelfth of April Two Thousand and Twelve. Thursday.
Oh, hi there! Glad you could make it. You know, I was just chilling here, enjoying this very refreshing mug of red bush tea (no milk, thank you) and reflecting on this modern world of ours. Yes, things such as jet aviation, instant noodles and satellite navigation (or 'stnv' for short) are everyday miracles and sometimes it's too easy to take them for granted.
I had a vegetable finger and cheese sandwich earlier and I left half of it because I wasn't that hungry. But as soon as I've finished pondering life's imponderables through my keyboard I'm going to pop it into my microwave and 30 seconds later - biff! boom! pow! (or whatever it is Will.i.am says on The Voice (other 'talent' shows are available...)) soggy but warm grub. It's amazing! My only disappointment is that we don't have those pizza rehydration things they promised us in Back to the Future II. I don't give a monkey's about the hoverboards - I could never get the hang of the wheeled variety anyhoo (I had a rubbish rubber-wheeled one that my Mam and Dad bought me when we were on holiday at Butlin's. A redcoat asked to have a go, but mindful of what my parents said about strangers I refused (and just to reiterate what a miraculous wired up world we live in now, five mins googling has found a picture of it:
Oh, man. I tell you, all this time-travelling is making me dizzy...)). I seem to remember coming a cropper on the steep hill near the hothouse in Buile Hill Park. Even with a board as cheap as this I couldn't afford knee pads.
A bit of an aimless meander, this one. I think what I'm trying to say is that it's brilliant living in the future (although I don't know where my Legion of Super Heroes flight ring is. It was pretty cool - I got it to work once). Although there was that problem with the robotic uprising of the mid nineties.
And now the artificial brain stimulants are wearing off and as a cyborg I must go into sleep mode.
The Thirteenth of September Two Thousand and Eleven. Tuesday.
Can you believe in an early draft it was going to be a fridge? The time machine in Back to the Future, I mean. There’s lots of material, out there on the interwebs and on the DVDs (and even books!) and such, about the development of this fab film, my Fifth Film Recommendation. For genuine facts a ten minute google session will reveal everything you need to know. No, this is going to be nothing more than ill-considered thoughts thrown together without any research or due diligence. In other words: as usual.
Let’s start with this one: if I had a time machine I would go back to the eighties and prevent the sequels from being made. I know, not exactly up there with going back to kill Hitler in the changing history stakes (and here’s a thing. I’m writing the first draft of this on Word. The auto-correct has just capitalised Hitler for me. I don’t know why, but I find that a little disturbing…) but you know what I mean. In the very specific area of movie-related time travel I honestly think the original is diminished by its sequels. That's not to say they're not good films in their own right - they are (the romance between Doc and Clara in III is particularly sweet). And of course they've made a bucket load of cash, so simply telling the movie execs of the late 20th Century not to make them isn't going to work either - it'd have to be some complicated chain of event-type alteration of the timeline. You know, where you make someone delivering a pizza five minutes late and the knock on effect is that someone isn't in the right place at the right time to make a crucial decision and the movies are never greenlit (greenlighted? Whatever...). That sort of thing.
While we're at it the DeLorean's pretty cool isn't it?
Apparently they were rubbish cars, but they look good.
Cos the first film is just ace. It has a slightly harsher tone, in keeping with a lot of 80s movies (even ET has cussing kids in it) that gets mellowed as the idea of the multiplex blockbuster takes over (II and III are very much in that 'big film' mould compared with smaller indie sensibililties of the first). It's got Crispin Glover in it which is pretty much a solid 'yes' to any film. The man's middle name is 'Hellion'. Here he is on Late Night with Letterman just doing his stuff. I remember him on The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross with his musical animals trapped in tar pits. Here is another example of his genius.
The whole thing just holds together so well it doesn't need anything adding on. Yes, the repeated jokes in the sequels raise a smile but they dilute the aceness of how everything comes together in the original. I must have watched it six times before I noticed the name of the mall had changed when Marty gets back to 1985. There's the clock at the beginning that has a man dangling from one of its hands. There is the tightness of the plotting that has Jennifer writing her phone number (cos she's not at home) on the back of the 'Save the Clock Tower' flyer so that Marty keeps hold of it to let the Doc know exactly when the lightning will strike. It has great character work between Fox and Lloyd that sells the bond between these two mismatched friends. And it does the most important thing you can do in any time travel story which is use a cheap gag ('I thought "what the hell?"') to disarm any worries about paradoxes, etc.
I went to see it on a free offer from the Sun with Karen Summers. As I handed my paper over to the ticket lady at the ABC Deansgate I said 'can I have two tickets for this Back to the Future lark?' 'It's no lark,' was her solemn reply.
That's a great comedy cliffhanger too. Oh, if only they'd left it as such. A sequel's such an obvious payoff to the DeLorean flying off. Mind you, I've a lot of time for Elisabeth Shue (star of my Sixth Film Recommendation, Adventures in Babysitting (which for some reason was renamed A Night on the Town in this country) even with a daft wig so maybe II isn't all that bad.
Let's leave the last word to Huey Lewis (and the News, of course). One story has it that they got the gig providing songs for Back to the Future as part of the settlement for when they sued the makers of Ghostbusters for ripping off their song I Want a New Drug. All I know is I had The Power of Love as a 7" single and it's an essential part of the BTTF experience. Take it away, Huey.
