Messing with time, messing with your mind

From Carrie Rickey's Flickgrrl

http://go.philly.com/flickgrrl

Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are one sexy couple in The Time Traveler's Wife, the film based on Audrey Niffenegger's popular novel about the guy (Bana) whose genetic anomaly causes him to slip in and out of time.

But am I the only one who gets brain cramp during time-travel movies such as this, where the past is dependent upon a future that is dependent upon the past?

As Roger Ebert noted earlier this year of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek - where alternative universes intersected, enabling the Old Spock and the Young to be in the same Möbius-strip timespace - these movies are more fiction than science.

It didn't bother me so much in Star Trek, but when I start thinking whether it's possible for a character to be in and out of time at the same time, it takes me out of the movie. (Except for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Hermione wears a necklace that is sort of a reverse hour glass, enabling her to go back a few hours.)

Still, from The Time Machine to Time Bandits, I've always been a sucker for time-travel stories (including, as I admitted sheepishly in another post, the much-maligned but preposterously entertaining The Lake House and Kate & Leopold).

In time-travel films, I much prefer the wormhole explanation to most others. Very much like Contact, and also a little-known film called Happy Accidents (with Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio), and Alain Resnais' underrated Je t'aime, Je t'aime. Also Terry Gilliam's The Twelve Monkeys and the movie that inspired it, Chris Marker's La Jetée. And of course, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Terminator and Peggy Sue Got Married.

Your favorites?

From Peter Dobrin's Arts Watch

http://go.philly.com/artswatch

Pure science has had to justify itself somewhat at the Franklin Institute in recent years. When the museum's addition, the Futures Center, opened in the 1990s, attendance jumped, but only briefly. Since then, the Franklin has turned to traveling shows to boost visitorship. Some are only marginally related to science.

And so it's been instructive to see how well the current show, "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy," is doing - and more than a little satisfying to Franklin watchers who think pure science can bring in decent numbers when a show is smartly conceived and promoted (as this one was).

In fact, Galileo is up at the same time as a Star Trek show, and Galileo is doing better. CEO/president Dennis Wint told me yesterday it's been seen by 100,000 visitors.

"It's exceeded our goals," said Wint. "This was a new venture for us, having a historical exhibition with a lot of important scientific instruments but not what our typical visitor expects with a hands-on special exhibition. The media in particular has been very good in telling the story."

Both shows close in September. Then, in October, "Body Worlds" moves back in.