Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox

He has a bit of a Looper complex. Instead of wanting to kill Hitler or attend a Coltrane concert, Tim Travers uses time travel to kill himself, so he can explore the resulting paradox. It is an ambitious but very bad idea that inevitably goes spectacularly awry in director-screenwriter Stimson Snead’s Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox, which opens this Friday in theaters.

The titular paradox boils down to the notion that if you kill yourself in the past, your time-traveling self would still be alive thereby creating a paradox. It is a thought experiment that Travers takes to ridiculous lengths. Ill-advisedly, he also discusses his research with James Bunratty, an “alternate science” talk radio host. This will be a mistake, because it creates a trail for the hitman hired by the terrorists, whose plutonium Travers stole to power his time portal.

Fortunately, by the time Helter the assassin starts tracking Travers, he has already created at least a dozen other selves through time travel. He started by murdering his previous others selves, but then he started letting his selves from other times (merely one minute apart, but often enough to make considerable differences) live, so he could consult with himself. It also means Helter must keep killing every Travers he sees. To make things extra complicated, several of the Travers take time out for his/their date with Bunratty’s resentful producer Delilah, but it always ends badly, because neither of them is really suitable relationship material, especially him (all of them).

The loopy Looper-esque chaos of the first half is wildly entertaining. However, Snead has trouble maintaining the manic energy during the second half. It is also clear how desperately he was searching for an exit strategy—judging from the nearly incomprehensible speed of the double-talk. Nevertheless, Snead earns credit for developing a fresh take on time travel and for mining the science fiction material for a good deal of laughs.

It’s a Wonderful Knife, Co-Starring Joel McHale

Lionel Barrymore's nasty financier in It’s a Wonderful Life won’t look so bad anymore after watching this movie. Sure, he’s greedy and unethical, but he isn’t violent. George Bailey and Bedford Falls didn’t know how good they had it. Over in Angel Falls, rapacious town developer Henry Waters also happens to be a serial killer. Winnie Carruthers stopped him on the night of his first killings, naturally on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, next year, when Carruthers is feeling unappreciated in the manner moody Gen Z’ers so often do, she wishes she had never been born and magically gets her wish. To return to how things were, she must stop Waters again in Tyler MacIntyre’s It’s a Wonderful Knife, which opens this Friday in theaters.

Waters wanted Roger Evans’ old family home, but the unintimidated old man refuses to sell, promising to pass it along to his granddaughter Cara instead. In his “Snow Angel” costume (which almost too closely resembles Moon Knight), Waters slashes Evans to death at home and then does the same to his granddaughter at the Christmas party she was attending. Things get pretty messy at this point, but Carruthers manages to save her brother Jimmy and kill the homicidal Waters.

A year later, everybody seems to be taking her for granted. NYU declined to accept her, which rather makes sense now, since she prevented mass murders, rather than demonstrating in favor of them. Her parents, David and Julie, focus solely on Jimmy and her boyfriend is openly cheating on her. Hence, her George Bailey wish. Then, presto, she finds Angel Falls is suddenly a dreary shadow of its former self, broken by the Snow Angel’s year-long reign of terror. Sadly, nobody is more damaged than her family, with the exception of her cool aunt Gale Prescott (a Scream reference, as horror fans have surely heard by now). Aside from Prescott, only the perennially bullied Bernie Simon (a.k.a. “Weirdo”) might help her and maybe also make her rethink her orientation.

Probably a third of Knife’s characters are LGBTQ which is way over the actual 7.1% share of the population, according to google. In contrast, 13% of the population are disabled (again, per google), but there are no such characters in Knife. There are no Jewish characters either. Apparently, MacIntyre and screenwriter Michael Kennedy believe some people deserve to be over-represented and other should be made invisible. Merry Christmas, if Knife thinks you should be seen in public.

This point is worth making because Knife is so preoccupied with identity and representational issues. As a result, it starts out slow as molasses and craters with a downbeat, almost surreal climax. In between, there is an underdeveloped germ of a clever movie, somewhat akin to Happy Death Day or Totally Killer, which had issues of its own.