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Salem's Lot 1979 and Salem's Lot 2024
Happy Halloween everybody! Julie's working late and the boy doesn't have school tomorrow so he's heading to one of those crazy f...
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(2007) * First of all let me say that as far as I could tell there are absolutely no dead teenagers in this entire film. Every year just ...
8 comments:
looks like someone needs to hop in a delorean and post this yesterday.
Whoops, you're right! Jerk
You calendar Nazi...
More importantly, where's my damn hoverboard?
Hoverboard's not until 2015. Yesterday is the arbitrary date that Doc Brown punches in to teach Marty (and the audience) how to understand the (pictured) Delorean readout.
By the way, Zemeckis' handling of the readout in all three movies is incredibly good directing. The first time you see it is with a sudden cut to the readout absolutely filling the screen just as the entire thing lights up (accompanied by a deep-bass sound effect) -- I get a chill right then whenever I see the movie. With every single time jump Zemeckis cuts to an even more magnified pan across the "DESTINATION" time (intercut with the digital speedometer approaching "88.0") just as the first sparks begin to fly off the stainless steel hood. Awesome.
Also, during that first shot of the readout filling the screen (in the Twin Pines parking lot -- which will be the Lone Pine parking lot by the end of the movie) all three dates (destination, present, last) are the same (October 26 1985) for the only time in the whole trilogy.
I always resented Marty's moment of extreme stupidness upon arriving in 1955 the first time: he ends up on that sunlit road (the same road), looks around, and says, "It's got to be a dream!" Like, dude, weren't you listening to a word Doc said...and didn't you see the entire laborious demonstration (sending the machine forward one minute with the dog in it, comparing stopwatches etc.) which used up an enormous chunk of valuable movie time making absolutely sure that even the slowest audience members got the idea?
As long as I'm being ridiculously didactic, the "30 year" gap isn't quite arbitrary: after typing in yesterday and then "December 25 0001" ("...or witness the birth of Christ!"), Doc Brown enters the fateful 1955 date because that's exactly when he invented the flux capacitor. Not only does this bit of exposition help Marty convince Doc-of-the-past of his own legitimacy as a time traveler, but it brings Marty to the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance in order to alter his parents' timeline. The fact that both these events (flux capacitor; dance) happen at the same time, tying the fates of both main characters together, is probably the most egregious total coincidence in a movie (and a trilogy) that's filled with coincidences. But it's so well-done that you just don't notice.
I felt a shudder in the the time/space continuum yesterday. That must be what it was.
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