Grand Tour: Disaster in Time

Disaster in Time_720p(480P)

source: Disaster in Time

Disaster in Time_720(480P)

This one is an older TV movie that I happened to find on Tape. And it bears watching even now-- because the story is what the movie is about. A man and his daughter own and run a local bed & Breakfast just outside of Town. The Father is still coping with the effects of losing his wife in an accident and just barely holding himself together. Meanwhile, his daughter, played well by then child actress (Ariana Richards) holds what left of the family together with spunk and common sense and none of the usual Hollywood penchant for saccharine Kinder-Uber-Cuteness. In come a troupe of strange travelers who insist on renting the house. And at this point, Life turns upside down. It seems the travelers are a troupe of Time-Travelling Tourists from the Future-- and the focus of this Tour in the past is to view Disasters. Now it dawns on the father that when these tourists only come before a catastrophe. Now he has to figure out how to save his town and his daughter. Or can he? He has Fore-warning-- but is Time Immutable? The story must come from a well written short story-- because any plot that involves Time Travel usually runs into confusion and directorial shortcuts unless well thought out. And the Fact that it's Sci-Fi comes purely from the fact of Time-Travel. But the beauty is that the Time-Travel Part just. . .Happens. The Travelers are there. That's it. The only hint you get is a soft otherworldly chime that is a beautiful story device. Oh-- and the Passport-- which was way cool. This one is a good family show with well placed tension. Slot this movie for a Mid Sunday Afternoon.

Ben Wilson (Jeff Daniels) is haunted by his wife Carolyn's freak accident. Carolyn's father Judge Caldwell still blames him for her death. He is renovating a country inn with his daughter Hillary (Ariana Richards). Before he's done, Madame Iovine comes to rent out the entire house for 3 nights avoiding the hotel in town. He gets suspicious of the group that she's leading. Mr. Quish is a late arrival covered with a layer of ash. The bus driver Oscar found them waiting in the middle of nowhere and they don't seem to have any cameras. Mr. Quish gets sideswiped by a car and the doctor finds a mysterious object in his head. Ben finds Quish's passport with stamps of disaster dates. Quish warns him to leave town with his family immediately. The judge uses his influence to take temporary custody of Hillary. That night, a meteor hits the town. It has a good sci-fi time travel idea. The style and the scale is closer to a good TV movie. The action and effects are not high standard. Jeff Daniels does a good job maintaining control of the screen. However I wish the other characters especially the time travelers are much more compelling. They could have been more interesting. This is generally a good movie but nothing spectacular.

I saw this soon after its original release and would love to see it come out on DVD for Region 2. It is a low-budget gem: well written, very well acted, with an interesting and surprising storyline. The film moves steadily without breaking into much of a sweat until the rapid build up to the revelation to the 'reason'. It is strangely engaging. I had something else to complete urgently but the 90 mins. seemed much more important. I'd love to see it again. If you get the chance, then do so as you'll enjoy it. A gem.

No one I know, outside my family of 4, has ever heard of this film; what a tremendous loss that is to science fiction, ideas, thoughtful and intelligent stories, and old-fashioned entertainment. The film is based on a fine old short-story, "Vintage Season," which, like the movie, is probably not reprinted in any current anthology. I am happy to have the tale in print, and happy to own a copy of this well made film created from it (I taped it 2 or 3 years ago from, I believe, HBO). Search this one out--perhaps it'll be on one of the premium cable channels again one day?--and enjoy clever, witty, and surprisingly memorable movie-making. You'll ponder the end of this one for weeks, guaranteed.

I wasn't too sure what was going to await me here. What a pleasant surprise! Jeff Daniels and Ariana Richards make up a team with lots of intensity as father and daughter. Suspense is gained without many special effects, what a relief in all this overkill of technology. Great little sci-fi/mystery spoof, very enjoyable, and the DVD looks just outstanding (just like almost everything done by Anchor Bay)

One of the joys I find in film, is the ability to see a movie the way I want instead of the way the market prefers. Because the market likes to sell discrete things, it sustains a metanarrative that you buy one experience at a time and they manage the interstitial connections among those experiences. It is why the celebrity machine is so well managed, as a controlled connection among discrete films. But I like to create my own experience, my own connectives. Among the benefits is the possibility of encountering a dreadful movie like this and seeing it with real relish. Yes, I know there is the "camp" game, and the related nostalgia amusements. But that depends on living in regrets. You can do better. I've been studying baseball, and where its appeal might be. It is a profoundly boring game. It has teams but that is only to organize what is a solitary competition. Each player is not there primarily to win the game, but to beat history. The competitive unit is a career, not a game. The narrative one finds in baseball is not in the packaged, sold unit, but in the connectives that fans can make. These can be as rich as the skill of the viewer over his experience in the game allows. It was a real insight, this, that baseball is a sport that allows creative, freeflowing personal narrative to be constructed — even passed down from father to son — outside the bounds of the marketplace. Its all about statistical connectives. A life in constructed narrative in film doesn't have the advantages that statistics provides for baseball. But it has something as good: overlap in genre and players. This film is a great setup for such an adventure. The plot has to do with observers from the future who can travel from (what amounts to) film to film, watching the explosive narrative unfold. They are not allowed to get involved because that would "change history." We, of course do the same thing, jumping from one time to another, one tragedy to another. In one of these times/films is a hapless Jeff Daniels, who lives in his own drama, carrying his own observer to his pain in the usual device of an alert, knowing daughter. She's the girl from "Jurassic Park" if you would rather play that game than mine. I'm off into genreland skipping from "Plan 9" through Riddick, Fugitive and Waterworld — a sort of tourism that follows Twohy as he visits one resort after another. Our new time traveller, Daniels, is known to me as the guy who jumped from here with his magical passport to "Pleasantville" and then back to "Dumb and Dumber." Once you find this portal among movies, you are free from the expectations of the market and can grow your own life in film. Its a "Purple Rose of Cairo" kind of thing. Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Jeff Daniels, whose place in cinema immortality has been sealed by his role in "Dumb and Dumber", with Jim Carey, was superb in his portrayal as Ben Wilson, a widower who must fight the forces that are about to destroy his world. These forces include a strange group of time travelers who came to his inn to witness the destruction of his world, a judge who considers him to be an unfit father, and last but not least, Ben Wilson must fight his own personal demons. The movie not only includes spectacular special effects, it also has an excellent storyline. The movie holds the viewers' attention from start to finish. And the story has a few twists and turns. Although this movie is a budget priced video, this movie is excellent and would not disappoint the sci-fi fan.