Ticket Stubs #7: Time and Space

Would have had something for my loyal Ticketholders sooner, but they called and asked me to work an extra shift today at Safeway, and I was pumped to complete the latest Special Ops mission in Marvel Avengers Alliance (and I did, landing the rare, super-hot, super-cheap Emma Frost for my efforts. Hopefully, there will be a re-release of Mockingbird and the Avengers costumes in the future. It sucks to have to look at those "EXPIRED!" tags every day). Coincidentally, I am wasting valuable time and space on information that is of no interest to some of my readers, so let's hurry up and get back to my third blog post ever, in the days of the Yahoo! Group that is Gods of Melee.


FROM April 26, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #3: Time and Space): As a change of pace, I will actually give a good grade to a movie! If any film is good enough to receive an A or higher it will be named the SW@ Ticket Most Wanted Movie of the Week. But more on that later. By the way, I do play Smash, and I suck at it. The only way I can appear at SmashMania or any other SBM event is on a Tuesday or Saturday. I'll be playing Melee Metroid-style with some Luigi and Fox thrown in from time to time. On with the reviews.

First up is a mediocre effort to adapt yet another Michael Crichton novel to the big screen in Timeline. Everyone's favorite idiot from The Fast and the Furious (Paul Walker) is back as the sex-starved son of a history teacher (played by British comedy phenom Billy Connolly) and the boyfriend of an archaeologist (played by Mansfield Park's Frances O'Connor) who would rather dig for bones than jump his. A government research project to successfully fax 3D objects accidentally stumbles on a wormhole to 15th century France, the history teacher gets predictably stuck in said time and place, and the couple predictably goes back in time to save him, the time machine gets predictably destroyed, the rescue team is predictably mistaken for French spies and captured by the English, the good guy predictably wins, predictably saves the girl, predictably chooses to stay behind with the woman he loves, and more predictably predictable predictability follows. The medieval action is very cool, as one would expect from a Richard Donnor film (eg: the Lethal Weapon Series). But the fact that-since Sphere-film adaptations of Michael Crichton books have been executed with all the grace and quality of a SyFy Channel Original creature feature cannot be cancelled out by a big-name director.

C
Just the Ticket Update August 1, 2012: Timeline also features Donald Sutherland's son, Rossif, Justified's Neal McDonough, brilliant Underworld villain Michael Sheen, and a then-unknown Gerard Butler in supporting roles.

Now the moment you've all been waiting for.................
The winner of the first ever
SWAT Ticket Most Wanted
Movie of the Week Award is:

THE BIG EMPTY! Congratulations on being the only good film I saw this week! Not a huge accomplishment with films like The Matrix Revolutions, Timeline, and Kill Bill Vol. 1 out there, but this is Ghettoville, people. Anything's possible here! The Big Empty is your classic "idiot has to deliver mystery suitcase to myserious psycho without finding out what's inside" caper. It stars John Favreau (Vince Vaughn's sidekick in Swingers) as the innocent idiot who gets caught up in a dangerous game because of his crazy next-door neighbor, who works for a mysterious psycho named Cowboy. I usually hate predictability and lack of sex in a film, but in this case, the two mix quite well and create some uniquely comedic situations. Favreau's character defies predictability by not looking in the suitcase, and when a young girl gets in his car, asks him to have a few beers, and gets hung over on gin and Redi Whip, he does not take advantage of her! Favreau is joined by Joey Lauren Adams (Big Daddy), Kelsey Grammer (Frasier), Rachel Leigh Cook (Scorched-also a great movie to check out), Daryl Hannah, and Sean Bean (The Island) as Cowboy. It's a shocker, I know. But unpredictable films actually are better than predictable ones.

A

Thanks to my faithful audience, Just the Ticket and Ticket Stubs have crossed the 3,000 pageview mark. Next issue, I'll continue to work my way backwards to SW@ Ticket #1 with a review of Kill Bill Vol. 1 (paired, as it was in a later issue, with Vol. 2).