Monday, August 17, 2009

Reviewing fun

The Time Traveler's Wife. - By Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine

Eric Bana's latest movie is receiving some pretty bad reviews in the States. This is not an entirely bad thing, as it allows critics to be pretty witty. This opening paragraph from Dana Stevens, for example:
Physicist Dave Goldberg has a fascinating Slate piece this week on how The Time Traveler's Wife stacks up against other movies with a time-travel theme. In a survey of physicists' speculations on the possibility of time travel, he mentions one theory involving "gargantuan cosmic strings […] of matter of almost unimaginable density and length." That about sums up The Time Traveler's Wife, adapted from Audrey Niffenegger's best-selling novel by Bruce Joel Rubin (who also wrote Ghost, another metaphysically inflected love story). I'll take Goldberg's word that the movie obeys the laws of Einsteinian physics (no alternate universes, you can't change history, etc.), but it's in flagrant violation of the rules of narrative logic, character development, or the most basic audience satisfaction.

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