through the natural course of time

Headline from HuffPo: Did Back to the Future Originally End With 'To be Continued'?

They say no. I say, fuck HuffPo, fuck whatever Mandela Effect reality you all are from, it was there on the big screen in my head, and was not some thing they added for VHS. I mean, sure we must've rented the movie to watch again at home once it was on video, and I'm sure the copy we dubbed off cable

(Or maybe off the rental tape, not that I will admit that we ever did that, you know, with the bit of tape over that little indent on the one side so the machine can make a copy... Or was it breaking the tab in the indent and hoping the rental place didn't notice? I can't actually remember that bit because I have recorded things from one tape to another, entirely legally, so many times that I forgot how to do it illegally. Not that I am admitting that I ever knew how to do it illegally.)



included the TO BE CONTINUED and I saw the VHS copy more than I ever saw the movie in the theater, which might have just been the once. But...

Okay, time for some classic Groundhog Day Project material.

Izod (2000) by way of Benesh (2011):

...for viewers, no less than for Phil, an imprint remains as during the film the audience members "introject" or take in its psychic content including symbols, images, and narrative, as well as projecting individual personal concerns. After the film, if it is particularly "resonant," the process continues as the film "plays on" in the viewer's mind. A personal "edition" of the film is thus created and is assimilated into the psyche of the viewer.

I watch a movie, it's not the same movie that you watch. You watch a movie, it's not the same movie that I watch. We've got our own standpoint, weltanschauung, whatever you want to call it, that takes in the movie and makes it a part of us. I wondered yesterday if this was the first time travel film I'd watch. It wasn't my first experience with time travel of course. From the obvious like Voyagers!, to the maybe The Final Countdown on cable, to the cheesy time traveling through life one moment at a time, all day, every day.

I found this link... I think it was last week. I was in the middle of recording an episode of a podcast and Google spits out Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, and this line:

Time travel is just what we do every day, isn't it? Every single day we travel one day ahead in time...

Which is the kind of thing that is inane or profound depending on your mood, and of course, is also the opposite because your mood is stupid and wrong, and that's not time travel, you silly physicist. Keep your fancy, corny, science out of my time travel. Because, time travel is such a wonderful cinematic conceit. Hell, every film is time travel. I've said before, that movies, available on repeat, offer us an infinity in the moment. My turn to be corny. Watch a movie, get to the end, and it made you sad, rewind and start again. It made you mad, rewind and start again, and this time vent about it on Twitter or Facebook or someplace. Or watch something else.

A movie doesn't need to be what you want it to be. It is what it is.

Until you take it in, of course. Then, it's yours. Your Back to the Future. My Back to the Future. Your Groundhog Day. My Groundhog Day.

We can share our opinions on films, of course. And, we may even happen to have the same thoughts about a particular film. But, dig deeper and your upbringing, your circumstance means you see things differently than I do. The differences may be negligible, especially on a shallow pass, but differences they still are...





And to think, I meant to write about bootstrap paradoxes today, like Goldie Wilson running for mirror.

Or was it the idea that Lorraine's father has hit more than one kid with his car that I wanted to write about?

Or how I'm not sure what to do next with this childhood deconstruction because on my list of fixture movies we're about to get into a bunch of movies I've already written about in different contexts in this blog and, despite the whole Groundhog Day premise, I don't much feel like repeating myself...

Or maybe I already wrote about all of those things. And then I went back in time and wrote something else. Or you went back in time to save me from having written something silly.

We may never know for sure.

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