In Time: DVD review

If you’re the sort who starts sentences with “If time were money...”, you’ll probably like this movie. Time is money here – it’s the year 2161 and life stops at 25, unless you’re rich enough to buy more. Yes, time has becomes a currency of sorts, transferrable from one person to another. And yes, successful sci-fi thrillers have been made on flimsier premises (for instance: “This is a movie about corporate spies who steal business secrets by entering people’s dreams”).

Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) is a factory worker from Dayton, a working-class neighbourhood where people’s time keeps running out. Quite by chance, he’s gifted 116 years by a world-weary aristocrat who “times himself out”. Unfortunately, the cops, or “time-keepers”, assume that the suicide is murder and start hunting for Salas, who’s moved to the classier part of town. There he meets Philippe Weis (Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser), and relieves him of both his money and his daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried). Just when things couldn’t get stranger, the time-keepers turn up, Salas takes Sylvia hostage and soon they two are on the run, in a literal race against time.

The director is Andrew Niccol, whose debut film Gattaca was a more cogent sci-fi satire (he also wrote The Terminal and The Truman Show, both of which are variations on existing outside of time).

In Time is mildly gripping, and Timberlake can evidently carry a film by himself, but it also takes its ludicrous premise way too seriously. We’re repeatedly told that the rich keep time for themselves by raising the cost of living, and are expected to cheer when Salas and Sylvia become a Bonnie and Clyde-like couple, stealing time and giving it to those in need. We’d rather just watch them run from time-keeper Cillian Murphy, or play “Who’s the best-looking member of a cast that includes Amanda Seyfried, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde and Matt Bomer?”. The DVD includes a couple of deleted scenes, but we wouldn’t encourage you giving up hours of your life in exchange for this.

A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Delhi.

In which the blogger offends fans of Guide

I am not the biggest fan of Guide. I thought it might have been more interesting if they'd made Marco a more sympathetic character, instead of an ogre (an impotent one, to boot). I also feel the film loses the plot a little when Raju becomes jealous of Rosie's success; it doesn't seem very consistent with his essentially good-natured character of the first half. I'll admit there are some noteworthy moments in the movie, most of them connected to Waheeda Rehman dancing or Dev Anand's dialogue delivery. But for me (and it must be just me, because everyone else seems to think the world of this film), the only scenes in Guide I'd want to see again and again are the first nine minutes.

The film starts in flashback, with Raju being released from jail. After a brief flashback, and a interior monologue in which he concludes he can never go back to where he came from, we see him set out on the road. As the credits unfold and the sonorous voice of SD Burman sings "Wahaan Kaun hai Tera", we see rapidly cut scenes of him sleeping by the wayside, sweating, get soaked in the rain, freezing, working on a farm for money. There's a fantastic shot in which he's looking at coins strewn around his feet, which people have obviously thrown at him assuming he's a beggar. He won't pick them up though; he grabs his jhola and takes off running. It's no more than a few seconds, but it cues us in to the kind of character Raju is.

The Average Shot Length for this credits sequence can't be much more than 3 seconds. This is unusual if you consider that Vijay Anand, Guide's director, is known for his long, intricate takes. There's nothing that resembles the percussive style of these early scenes in the rest of the film's three hour running time. When I saw Guide recently, I did something many fans of Indian cinema will probably consider sacrilege. Instead of letting the movie sink in, I immediately went back and replayed the first nine minutes. Then I did it again. And again

Anatomy of a Scene: The 25th Hour

"It all came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening"

The best passage in the 2002 film The 25th Hour is nothing like you’d expect from its maker, combative Spike Lee. The series of short scenes that unfold after James Brogan puts his battered son Monty in the car are, in all likelihood, an alternative reality dreamed up by a father who cannot deal with the idea of his son going to prison. On the way to jail, James starts to talk about leaving town, driving out west. We’ll have one last whiskey, he says, and part ways forever. Monty will then change his name, get a job, settle down, have kids. He can never come back, or be who he was before, but he’ll have a life. As the old man speaks, images from Monty’s new life flash before us, teasing us with the possibility that all any jailbird needs is a dad willing to drive him out of town. Yet, I found myself moved to tears, and reduced to arguing, unconvincingly, with myself about how Monty does indeed escape and start a new life. What makes these scenes all the more touching is that you wouldn’t expect Brian Cox, a no-nonsense actor if ever there was one, to be selling you a can of hot baloney, and you don’t expect Spike Lee, whose career has always been about confrontation, to direct something that’s pure escapism.

Don't mind your language

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