Project Almanac - A teenagers' time travel experience

This is a movie that I watched in cable tv while I was in a hotel in Bandung with my wife on 26 February 2016 (that trip will be reviewed in her blog "yennymakanmulu").

It's a film about time travel using "found footage camera" method (see below for clarity on this).

The film revolves around 5 high school students, i.e David Raskin-the genius, Christina Raskin-the sister, Jessie Pierce-the girlfriend, Quinn Goldberg & Adam Le-the best friends.

Story starts with a home video taken by Christina for David's application to MIT by making a model airplane flying "using" his hands. His best friends Quinn & Adam also helped during this video making. 

After waiting for many days, the response from MIT finally came. They have accepted David in MIT, but unfortunately only give partial scholarship. David's mother upon knowing this issue tried to mortgage their house, so David feel bad and try to do new projects to get more financing. While searching for inspiration in the attic of their house, he and Christina found an old video camera of their father Ben who passed away when he was a child due to car accident. When both of them watched the video of David's 7th birthday party, there was a glimpse of  David's grown up shadow on the window. David, Christina, Quinn and Adam are all confused how this could happen, so they searched through the basement of David's house where Ben put all his experiments (he is also inventor working for the US government) to look for clues. Here they found a particular experiment called "project almanac" which is a device created to do "time travel".

After looking for the stuff to create the device, they did a test run but it was unsuccessful as it requires bigger power. So later they stole the battery from Jessie's car which was parked at their neighbor's house during a party (Jessie is the girl in school that David is very interested in, but he did not dare to follow up). Using the battery, they did another test on the device and managed to send a toy car back for 1 minute. Jessie found out about this when she was checking out the basement and was there during this experiment. She then was asked to join with the rest of them for their time travels. 

They created their own rule of only doing time travel when there is 5 of them together. Because of the limitation of the device, they can only go back in time maximum 3 weeks. They started to perform various small time travels to "rectify" their high school problems, such as acing pop quiz for Quinn, fight off Christina's bullies and including winning a lottery for Adam where the money was distributed amongst them and David was able to give his portion to his mother to avoiding their house mortgaged. During these time travels, Jessie and David become closer.

Finally they went back to 3 weeks earlier where they went to a major rock concert. They had very wonderful time, but David hesitated to state his feeling to Jessie and regretted it. After that trip, they seemed to be growing apart and David could not accept it. So against his better judgement, he traveled back alone to that concert and stated his feeling to Jessie there and then and they finally could become a couple. However, this small trip resulted to different effects on their lives, and some are worse than before. David keep on getting back alone to rectify this situation but ending up making everything worse every time, including losing Jessie.

Ultimately, there will be consequences if you mess with nature.

Can David and Jessie relationship be mended? What will happen to the device? Can David save the world from turning to worse? The answer to all these can be seen if you watch the film till the end.

I actually had a good moment watching this movie. In fact I can also feel these 5 teenagers' excitement of doing time travel. Maybe I am biased as I always love time travel story, but this film somehow feels very simple and easy to understand. No complicated things like in "Inception" or even the last "Terminator" movie... :)

The found footage method is not making me nauseous and I can tolerate most of them enough to enjoy. It is a small budget movie, so do not expect big names in the film and there will not be big explosions, or heavy car chases. This is a simple time travel story. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Note:

Found footage is a film genre in which all or mostly the film is presented as if it were a discovered film or video recordings. We will see through the camera of the characters involved and usually there are comments from the character as well. Notable films are "Cloverfield", "Chronicle" and "Paranormal Activity" series. You can search for more detailed info in the internet.

DEADPOOL - A different kind of Marvel super hero

What better way to start my blog with the last movie I saw in the theater?

Well what can I say about this movie?

Hmm, I guess the tagline really suits it: "Bad Ass, Smart Ass, Great Ass". From those words, we can immediately know that the movie will show some "bad ass" action, "smart ass" remarks and funny jokes showing narcissistic side of the main character such as having "great ass".

Just like any other Marvel character adaption movies, it starts with the usual flipping comic book pages and continued with a freeze motion scenes and opening credits using background song "Angel of the Morning" performed by Juice Newton. Watch out for those "cute" introduction of the actors, producer, director and others.

Once the song finishes, we will see Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) in a cab doing some small silly things and finally have a chat with the driver. I believe the idea is to show Deadpool as a witty unusual super hero character including breaking the fourth wall. (See separate note below only if any one is interested in knowing what it is).

When the movie enters into its first action sequence, a hand to hand combat in a moving car with the close combat of gun shots from other chasing cars, we will see that this is REALLY not the usual Marvel super hero movies and the "R" rating is serious. I would never recommend this movie to under age kids, though nowadays you really cannot avoid it with such easy internet access and the cinema personnels just letting everybody including children in the theater regardless of the rating.

Using various flashback scenes, we will slowly see the history of how Wade Wilson, a former Special Ops personnel who became mercenary for hire later on becomes Deadpool. Wade Wilson found the woman of his love Vanessa Carlisle (Morena Baccarin) and when Wade was informed he has cancer beyond cure, he decided to leave her. But when he was offered by some agency the cure to his cancer by having an illegal operation, he accepted with the hope of returning to his girlfriend later. However, though he was cured, his appearance really changed and made Wade unable to face his girlfriend. During this illegal operation he would meet his nemesis Ajax aka Francis (Ed Skrein) and his team Angel Dust (Gina Carano) who practically made Wade into Deadpool.  

Due to the nature of Deadpool's sadistic way of doing things, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, 2 members of X-Men will try to convince Deadpool to resolve matters using X-Men way.

Deadpool will also be accompanied by his best friend Weasel and roommate Blind Al going through his days.

As the usual recipe for any action movie, the bad guy will soon force the good guy into having their final fight.

Will Deadpool be able to avenge Ajax? Will he be able to return to his girlfriend? Will he be able to become a superhero and join X-Men?

You just have to watch the movie till the end. Don't forget to really wait until the movie completely finish to see the scene after the closing credit.

There are a lot more funny, silly remarks by Deadpool, as well as various hard core action and later I found out some nudity (which in Indonesia the scenes were deleted). 

Those who love crazy action and funny conversations will certainly love Deadpool.

But those looking for family friendly superhero movie, will not find this entertaining.

I had great movie moment watching this film together with my wife (btw I bet you already read her blog "yennymakanmulu". If you haven't, then you could start now). A lot of laughs, a lot of excitement. The songs add nice element to it, especially the famous "careless whisper" song which you will hear more than once.

The only flaw if it can be called a flaw, is I personally feel the movie is a little bit too short and the ending fight scene is good but not spectacular.

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Note:

Breaking the fourth wall is a term used when character in a theater performance or sometimes in TV shows or movies directly interact with the audience. The fourth wall itself is like an imaginary wall for a theater where performance is done in a traditional three set box. For a clearer understanding of the fourth wall, it is a lot available in the internet.