Back to the Future Part III

Now the time has come to talk about the third installment in this epic trilogy, “Back to the Future Part III,” released in 1990. Hal Hinson started his review out by saying, “"Back to the Future Part III," the third and final installment in the time-travel adventures of Marty McFly, is a winge`d thing, full of ingenious pop dazzle and jazzy high spirits.” From its opening scenes, the film is like a refreshing elixir, a movie pick-me-up that gives thrills and races your adrenaline but keeps your head in place as well. It’s beautifully lighthearted, nearly perfect fun.

The story line – which director Robert Zemeckis worked with his partner, Bob Gale – is strikingly knotted, and the director sets it all up as if he is on fire. Even before the credits start, our heads are spinning. The situation at the beginning is this: It’s 1955 and, as the clock reaches the critical moment, Doc puts Marty into his DeLorean and sends him back to the future. “But” before the gas is extinguished, Marty runs up claiming that he’s back from the future, this time with a telegram from the other Doc – the one stranded in 1885 at the end of the second movie – detailing where the damaged DeLorean can be found and how it can be repaired.

As far as Doc is concerned, the machine is to be used once more, to take Marty back to 1985. In fact, he goes to great strengths to insist that no one come to rescue him in 1885, where he is living a happy life as a blacksmith. However, when a tombstone is found showing that unless something is done, Doc will be shot in the back in less than a week, Marty is left with no choice but to start the DeLorean and once again head back into the past to rescue him.

Hinson is right when he says, “No one is expected to swallow these mazelike twists and double-back detours all in one gulp. The more you hang on to the pieces of the puzzle, though, the more pleasurable it is. When Marty crosses the plane of the fourth dimension and moves into the past, the picture becomes a kind of surrealistic western.” Hill Valley in 1885 is a vague Wild West colony with a saloon (which is in the same spot as the soda shop and its later living form) and a sheriff (James Tolkan) and a town bad guy who turns out to be “Mad Dog” Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), the ancient ancestor of the obnoxious Biff from the first two movies.

The filmmakers work entertaining variants on the clichés of the western genre. Some of the bits come wonderfully out of nowhere. Hinson said, “The best riffs, though, are at the expense of Clint Eastwood, whose name Marty takes to disguise his true identity from the members of his own McFly clan.” (There’s a hilarious scene where Marty gets to hold a tiny infant who is, in fact, his own great-grandfather.) Hinson goes on to say, “This brand of droll, kinetic humor is a Zemeckis and Gale trademark.” The jokes in this movie are a new high for pop originality. The jokes here are complexly constructed and perfectly-timed, like the Rube Goldberg gadget Doc makes to create a single ice cube (more exact than gold in the dusty Old West). The filmmakers are movie intelligent as well, and because they’re constantly playing around with time – and with our knowledge of what happened in the previous two movies – their one-liners almost always work on more than one level.

Effortlessly well-organized, the movie almost never lightens up. Because Marty has damaged the gas line on the DeLorean, spilling out all the gas and making it impossible for them to time-travel, Doc is forced to create a smart plan using a locomotive to push the car up to 85 MPH. Hinson is right when he says, “The film builds up a head of steam too, and the momentum is dizzying. The conclusion is basic in design, as classic as a silent movie heroine inching toward a buzz saw, but it's a masterfully executed bit of pure cinema.”

However, headlong diving for its own sake isn’t the filmmakers’ only concern. The picture isn’t nerve-wracking and distracted the way the last two were. It doesn’t plunge forward mindlessly. It once in a while pauses to let the characters to interact. There’s even a part, it looks like, for an emotional moment or two, for sweetness and romance.

As a result, this is the most human, the most character-based of the “Back to the Future” trilogy. Unlike before where Marty was the focus on the first movie and Biff for the second, the focus here is more on Doc. Hinson is right when he said, “As an actor, Lloyd is an extravagant eccentric, an American version of Ralph Richardson, but with just the slightest touch of acid damage. Spiritually, Lloyd is as close as a living person can come to being a cartoon, and in the past I've felt pushed back against a wall by his aggressively animated style. But here his playing seems more modulated, less strained; this time, he's left room on screen for the other actors.” Funny that Hinson should mention that since there was a "Back to the Future" cartoon series that I never saw but only heard of from Cinemassacre's review, especially since I wasn't around during the time the cartoon aired on TV.

It would have been unbelievable before for Doc to have fallen in love. It wasn’t inside the character’s range, or the movies’, really. Since he falls in love – and not only that, cuts an almost striking romantic figure – it’s a suggestion of how much the filmmakers have opened up their idea. His love interest here is Clara, played by Mary Steenburgen, who Hinson described as “a doelike schoolmarm, newly arrived in town.” Right from the start, it is love at first sight. The romance isn’t given much screen time, but the conversations they have about their love for Jules Verne gives the film a science fiction background the other ones didn’t, plus a promising innocence.

It’s nice to see Steenburgen get this kind of comedy showcase. Hinson said, “Her presence has a leavening effect; she gives the movie a touch of twitterpated elegance.” For the rest of the returning actors, everybody is better this time, including Fox. Hinson speculated, “By now, Fox must be entirely bored with the series' commonplace hero; there's not much in the writing for an actor to latch on to. But there's something about Fox's averageness that takes hold in this installment.” He’s such a simple kid, so normal and like every other city boy, that his lack of physique – especially when he fixes his Eastwood poncho and hat, and heads for his face-off on the main street – is itself heroic.

When Verne is suggested, you immediately nod. “Back to the Future III” has the openness of a classic fantasy. Hinson mentioned that, “It's a big, sprawling adventure, full of wonderments and rich surprises.” Not only is this bad transformed, it’s bad redeemed.

This movie is not as bad as everyone says it is, like “Ghostbusters 2” or “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” I understand that the movie could be the “black sheep” of the trilogy since it doesn’t have the same kind of connection the first two have, but it’s still nice, especially since the same jokes fall in, even though they may look like they are getting old. My only complaint is that I’m not very fond of Clara, but that’s not something to go crazy over. Still, I say watch this movie and give it a chance because you should just watch it and like it. I guess it has been liked more now than before, especially since it’s higher than the second one on Rotten Tomatoes. The best part about this movie is when Marty and Doc switch their famous catchphrases, which everyone will find hilarious.

Well, I hope everyone liked my review on the “Back to the Future” trilogy as I have making them. This is one of those trilogies that have stood the test of time and I love it to this very day. Stay tuned next week to see what I will end the month of August off with.

Back to the Future Part II

Welcome back everyone to my review on the epic “Back to the Future Trilogy,” where today we will be looking at “Back to the Future Part II,” released in 1989. This movie is an exercise in silliness, a tour into various versions of the past and future that is so mysterious that even the characters are constantly trying to explain it to each other. Roger Ebert even admitted, “I should have brought a big yellow legal pad to the screening, so I could take detailed notes just to keep the time-lines straight.” However, the movie is fun, mostly because it’s so crazy.

Any story that has time travel involves the possibility of ironies, which have provided science-fiction writers with plots for years. Let’s ask what would happen if you killed your grandfather? What do you say if you meet yourself? Ebert even said, “In one famous s-f story, a time traveler to the distant past steps on a single bug and wipes out all the life forms of the future.”

“Back to the Future Part II” is the story of how the protagonists of the first movie, Marty McFly and Doc Brown, try to control time without creating ironies, and how they accidentally create an entirely different future – one where Marty’s mother is actually married to his at fault enemy, Biff Tannen, reprised by Thomas F. Wilson. McFly and Brown are played again this time by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, the stars of the first movie, which was a box-office hit, and they not only made “Part II” but went ahead and filmed “Part III” at the same time. Actually, this movie closed with a coming-soon trailer for the third movie, which was released the next year. (Ebert said, “Trivia buffs may note that Russ Meyer is the only other filmmaker to end a movie with a trailer.”) The script talks on the set of this movie must have been entirely confusing, as director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale tried to find their way through the maze they had created. The movie starts in 1985. Marty has just return from his travel to 1955 when Doc Brown appears once again in his famous De Lorean. He’s breathless with importance and wants Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer, played by Elisabeth Shue, to join him on his time travel to this year, where absolutely everything has gone wrong and Marty is needed to save his own son from going to prison.

Ebert said, “The city of Hill Valley in the year 2015 looks like the cover of an old pulp magazine.” The town square we remember from the previous film has changed into ramps heading for the skies and jet-powered vehicles flying through the skies. The kids even have skateboards that operate on the same principle as hovercraft, which leads to one of the movie’s best special-effects moments when McFly tries to avoid Biff’s grandson, Griff’s, also played by Wilson, gang.

He more or less accomplishes his mission this year, but makes the mistake of buying a sports almanac that has all of the scores from the years 1950 to 2000 in it. The almanac and the De Lorean are stolen by Biff, who travels back in time to give the almanac to himself, so that he can place every winning bet and become a billionaire.

In the process, Hill Valley in 1985 turns into a purgatory ruled over by the evil billionaire who created this scheme, and so Marty and Doc travel back to 1955 to try and get the almanac back from Biff. If you are able to keep up with this entire plot, you are very intelligent. Ebert even said, “I won't even begin to try to explain the ways in which the various parents and children of the main characters get involved in the story, or what happens when McFly very nearly attends a high school dance on a double date with himself, or how Fox plays three roles, including his own daughter.”

What’s entertaining about “Back to the Future Part II” is the way Christopher Lloyd plays Doc, where he nervously tries to figure out what’s happening as he flies through time trying to fix everything back to the way it was. The mistake in Doc’s reasoning, obviously, is his guess that he knows which is the correct timeline that should be fixed. Ebert asks, “How does he know that the "real world" of the first movie was not itself an alternate time-line? It's a job for God.”

“Part II,” for all of its insanity, lacks the true power of the original. The story of the 1985 film has real heart to it: If Marty didn’t travel from 1985 to 1955 and organize for his parents to have their first date; he might not even be born. The time travel in that film involved his own emotional conflict with his parents as teenagers. “Part II,” on the other hand, is mostly just madness and eccentric jokes. However, it’s fun on that level.

In the end, if you liked the first one, then you will definitely like the second. It’s a very good movie, and another one of my favorites, despite the fact that it kind of does a revisit to the first movie, but in a way, that shows how connected it is. I can understand why people say the sequels keep stepping down, but I still feel all of them are very good, entertaining movies that are worth checking out because all of them are just as good and are worth checking out. This movie probably got some stuff right with how 2015 was going to look, but not everything is here. Maybe give it some time and everything portrayed in this movie might come out sooner than we think.

How is the third movie, you ask? I might have given a little foreshadowing, but you’ll just have to wait until next week to find out for yourselves.

Back to the Future

Happy 30^th Anniversary to one of the greatest trilogies ever made, the “Back to the Future Trilogy.” In celebration, I am going to review the trilogy over the next few weeks. No time to waste; let’s take a look at the first “Back to the Future” movie, released in 1985.

One of the things all teenagers believe is that their parents were never teenagers. Their parents were, possibly, children once. They are obviously adults now, but how could they have been teenagers, and yet not understand their own children? This visual is for teenagers by being one. However, “Back to the Future” is even more hopeful: It argues that you can travel to the past to when your parents were teenagers, and fix them right at the time when they needed help the most.

The movie starts in present time, with a teenager named Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox. Roger Ebert says, “His parents (let’s face it) are hopeless nerds.” Dad (the great Crispin Glover) tells old jokes and Mom (Lea Thompson) drinks vodka in the kitchen and dinner time is, how Ebert describes it, “like feeding time at the fun house.” Marty’s brother (Marc McClure) works at oddball jobs and his sister (Wendie Jo Sperder) has a fear of dating boys. What keeps Marty normal is being friends with the crazy Dr. Emmet “Doc” Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, an inventor with bright eyes and hair like, how Ebert describes it, “a fright wig.” Brown has a feeling that he has found out the secret of time travel, and one night in the local shopping mall’s parking lot, he shows his invention. In this long history of movies that are based around time travel, there has never been a time machine that is anything like Brown’s, which looks exactly like a customized De Lorean.

The car works, and then, after a series of surprises, Marty finds himself traveled back 30 years into the past, to the days when the shopping mall was a farmer’s field (Ebert mentions, “there's a nice gag when the farmer thinks the De Lorean, with its gull-wing doors, is a flying saucer”). Ebert mentions, “Marty wanders into town, still wearing his 1985 clothing, and the townsfolk look at his goose down jacket and ask him why he's wearing a life preserver.”

One of the running jokes in “Back to the Future” is the way the town has changed in 30 years (Ebert notes, “for example, the porno house of 1985 was playing a Ronald Reagan movie in 1955”). However, a lot of differences run more deeply than that, as Marty finds out when he sits down at a lunch counter next to his Dad – who is, obviously, a teenager himself. Ebert says in his review, “Because the movie has so much fun with the paradoxes and predicaments of a kid meeting his own parents, I won't discuss the plot in any detail. I won't even get into the horrifying moment when Marty discovers his mother "has the hots" for him.” It’s like the Florence Nightingale Effect, which Doc notes, or you could compare it to, like Fox did, the Oedipal Complex. The movie’s surprises are one of its great pleasures.

Ebert said, “"Back to the Future" was directed by Robert ("Romancing the Stone") Zemeckis, who shows not only a fine comic touch but also some of the lighthearted humanism of a Frank Capra.” Actually, the movie does look like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Wizard of Oz” more than other, conventional time-travel movies. It’s about a character that begins with one view of life and reality, and is allowed, through this De Lorean invention, to discover another. Steven Spielberg was the executive producer, and this is the second of that summer’s three Spielberg productions (the others being “The Goonies” and “Explorers”), and maybe it’s time to wonder if Spielberg is copying the great studio workers of the past, who were masters in matching the right director with the right project. This time, the match works with charm, brains and a lot of laughter.

People probably don’t know that Eric Stoltz was a temporary pick for the role of Marty around the time Fox was out filming “Teen Wolf,” but Fox was the original choice of Marty. He was just too busy with "Family Ties" at the time. Fox said in an interview, “Spielberg’s down the road doing great movies, and here I am playing a werewolf.” Fox was probably embarrassed to be playing a wolf. He was shooting out in the street in Pasadena, California, and there was another location crew, scouts, that were there. They were scouting on the streets for another film, and Fox had asked his A.D. what they were filming, and he said, “They are from Spielberg’s company, and they are scouting for this movie called ‘Back to the Future’.” About five weeks later, Fox goes down to Gary David Goldberg’s office, who was the producer on “Family Ties,” and Gary goes behind his desk, picks up an envelope, throws it down and says, “That’s a script of ‘Back to the Future’.” Fox went, “I know the script. They started shooting it like five weeks ago.” Gary responded, “They want to change the actor. Steven wants you to take it home, read it and, if you like it, start shooting next week.” With only a couple of months left of the show, Gary said Fox could make it work if he agreed to do both the show and the movie at the same time. Fox only got three hours of sleep around that time. He would get to work about 10AM, work on the show until about 5PM, then leave and go to Universal, and work there until about 4 or 5AM, then go back home. Fox was only 24 years old and had an amazing time. This was the highest grossing movie of 1985, and the second was “Teen Wolf.”

If you haven’t seen this movie, you are definitely missing out. You should not be reading this review and instead just go out and watch the movie. This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I love it. I “highly” recommend all of you to go out and find this movie because you should definitely give it a watch. Especially with great lines like, “Great Scott,” “This is heavy,” “1.21 GIGAWATTS,” “I’m George, George McFly. I am your density. I mean, I am your destiny,” “What are you looking at, butthead,” “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” and my personal favorite, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

How do the sequels hold up? Stay tuned next week to find out in my review on the “Back to the Future Trilogy.”