Tired of trips to crowded theaters full of noisy kids and overpriced food? Had your fill of vapid reality shows on TV? Wondering what to stock your Netflix queue with? Every week, “It Came From the Video Store” will point you in the direction of a movie that is worth seeing and should be available in a video store near you.
This weekend, The Time Traveler’s Wife will be released in theaters — finally filling that “young pretty people in a time travel romance movie”-shaped hole in our hearts that has been empty since The Lake House. But what about those dumpy, middle-aged moviegoers? Not everybody looks like Eric Bana or Rachel McAdams. Where will the rest of America find the time paradox-infused film that we can relate to? Well, if you are willing to venture outside the comfort zone that is Hollywood mainstream and read some subtitles, you can pick up a copy of the 2007 Spanish film Timecrimes.
In the movie by writer/director Nacho Vigalondo, Karra Elejaldre plays Hector, a pudgy, lazy man who finds himself a reluctant time traveler after stumbling upon a scientist’s experiment. Similar to the 2004 Dallas-shot film Primer, Timecrimes forsakes the big-budget special effects-infused trappings present in most time travel movies and instead tells a story that is at times both mundane and straightforward — but never boring.
Proving once again that binoculars bring nothing but trouble, Hector ventures off into the woods behind his home after spying a naked woman traipsing through the trees. Instead of falling into the plot of a porno, Hector is instead attacked by a mysterious masked man brandishing a pair of scissors. His ill-advised choice to find sanctuary inside of a time machine leads Hector into a continuously more complicated journey through destiny and pre-determination.
Timecrimes is not an elaborate film. Utilizing a sparse cast of believable actors and a tight plot, the film methodically unravels a story that manages to be both predictable and surprising as all get out. Elejaldre is your parent’s time-traveling hero — a man who needs his afternoon naps and has to stop and catch his breath while being pursued by a murderous assailant. And just like your parents often need the plots of intricate time travel movies explained out for them, Elejandre’s Hector never quite grasps the concept of time travel — making the perfect excuse for in-film exposition that even your computer illiterate mother could understand.
So, if you don’t feel like venturing out to the movie theaters this weekend to catch a showing of Bana and McAdams doing young, pretty things set against the backdrop of the time-space continuum, you should instead visit the video store and rent Timecrimes, a time travel movie that provides ample reasons why you should never follow naked women into the woods.
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When not doing young, pretty things against the backdrop of the time-space continuum, Robert Saucedo is an occasional freelance writer whose work appears regularly in the Bryan/College Station Eagle and scrawled in Sharpie in bathroom stalls across America. Visit him on the web at http://www.robsaucedo.com.