There was a point at which I thought MR was going to to the tragic inevitability thing and not suck. And then it kept going for another hour.

Connie Willis does time travel splendidly. I hope she goes back to that 'verse again.

I still think MR did do the tragic inevitability thing.

I think that if Tom Cruise had been smart enough to lock himself in a closet at the 20-minute mark, the whole movie would have ended a lot sooner.

Then again, what can you expect from a movie where the whole premise is that yes, people (police) can change the prophecied future, but people (murderers) can't.

Murderers have no magic in their hearts. But police do (they test for it when folks apply to be cops).

Liev. Hugh. The wardrobe. The poop-scoop scene. Using the remote control on the shock collar. Mr. Fancy-pants

I liked Liev Schreider's character but the romance was such a limp-noodle affair that it put me to sleep. Hugh's coat was v. shiny, as I recall.

Someone else in the Ryan role--someone with a real edge instead of a girlish pretention to one--might have improved the flick. Ah well.

My favorite time-travel universe is in Connie Willis's books.

Gah. Doomsday Book just about killed me. To Say Nothing of the Dog was delightful, but it didn't stay with me as long as Doomsday Book.

Then again, what can you expect from a movie where the whole premise is that yes, people (police) can change the prophecied future, but people (murderers) can't.

that's the premise that the film demolishes - that's what Tom thinks at the start before he's framed.

I think I like time travel better on TV (Quantum leap, Charmed) than in movies. The Butterfly Effect is fun if you watch it with low expectations.

(I think time travel is like vampires or aliens -- you just have to go with it if you're watching a movie/TV show with that as a component, because it's not really possible to make it logical.)

And as a mostly non-comics person, Beverly, I know where you're coming from. The first time I read Preludes & Nocturnes (vol. 1 of the Sandman), I spent most of the book just being turned off by the art. But I foundf I really appreciated Gaiman's use of language, so I kept going with the series, and by the time I had finished the second volume I really appreciated the way the art and text were integrated. I'm not sure what, if any, comics I'll read when I finish The Sandman, but I have two volumes to go before I have to decide.

I just found out that my little brother thought that Anchorman was horrible, and he was actually ashamed to have seen it. What happened to the kid who used to watch Billy Madison with me, and quote Old School and its counterparts ad nauseum? Sniff. The kid's grown up. The student has surpassed the master. Wipes tear.

that's the premise that the film demolishes - that's what Tom thinks at the start before he's framed.

Right. The problem is, if I can figure that out in 20 minutes, how can jurisprudence, law enforcement and a panoply of nattily-suited people take months/years to figure it out? Do IQs drop sharply in the near future?

I mean, surely they've got Alan Dershowitz's head in a jar somewhere, yammering at them about the concept of reasonable doubt.

I liked Minority Report. I'd have loved it if they went for the tragic inevitability angle (someone here had mentioned a possibility that the too-happy-an-ending could be interpreted as Anderton's hallucination/dream post-halo-ing, which I liked), but as it stood, it still had some beautiful visuals and neat ideas. I liked what they did with Colin Farrell's character, and Samantha Morton, as usual, astonished me speechless. I was genuinely moved in the scene where Agatha imagined Sean's futures, her face rapturous, her image backlit into a kind of incandescent suffering sainthood. It sort of went downhill from there, but I'm still glad to have had that scene as well as that terrific scene in the mall.