13 Jan Grand Tour: Disaster in Time (1991)

Genre Baseball

One of the joys I find in film, is the ability to see a movie the way I want instead of the way the market prefers. Because the market likes to sell discrete things, it sustains a metanarrative that you buy one experience at a time and they manage the interstitial connections among those experiences. It is why the celebrity machine is so well managed, as a controlled connection among discrete films.

But I like to create my own experience, my own connectives. Among the benefits is the possibility of encountering a dreadful movie like this and seeing it with real relish. Yes, I know there is the “camp” game, and the related nostalgia amusements. But that depends on living in regrets. You can do better.

I’ve been studying baseball, and where its appeal might be. It is a profoundly boring game. It has teams but that is only to organise what is a solitary competition. Each player is not there primarily to win the game, but to beat history. The competitive unit is a career, not a game. The narrative one finds in baseball is not in the packaged, sold unit, but in the connectives that fans can make. These can be as rich as the skill of the viewer over his experience in the game allows.

It was a real insight, this, that baseball is a sport that allows creative, freeflowing personal narrative to be constructed — even passed down from father to son — outside the bounds of the marketplace. It is all about statistical connectives. A life in constructed narrative in film doesn’t have the advantages that statistics provides for baseball. But it has something as good: overlap in genre and players.

This film is a great setup for such an adventure. The plot has to do with observers from the future who can travel from (what amounts to) film to film, watching the explosive narrative unfold. They are not allowed to get involved because that would “change history.” We, of course do the same thing, jumping from one time to another, one tragedy to another.

In one of these times/films is a hapless Jeff Daniels, who lives in his own drama, carrying his own observer to his pain in the usual device of an alert, knowing daughter. She’s the girl from “Jurassic Park” if you would rather play that game than mine. I’m off into genreland skipping from “Plan 9” through Riddick, Fugitive and Waterworld — a sort of tourism that follows Twohy as he visits one resort after another.

Our new time traveller, Daniels, is known to me as the guy who jumped from here with his magical passport to “Pleasantville” and then back to “Dumb and Dumber.” Once you find this portal among movies, you are free from the expectations of the market and can grow your own life in film.

It is a “Purple Rose of Cairo” kind of thing.

Posted in 2009

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB