Paul Levinson
Bio
Novels The Silk Code & The Plot To Save Socrates; LPs Twice Upon A Rhyme & Welcome Up; nonfiction The Soft Edge & Digital McLuhan, translated into 15 languages. Best-known short story: The Chronology Protection Case; Prof, Fordham Univ.
Stories (696/0)
Review of 'Alistair1918'
Alistair1918 from 2016 is charming, special, altogether superb little feature movie (on Amazon Prime) with a frame on time travel you don't find very often if at all. The Alistair in the title is a British soldier on the Western front in 1918, who gets blown into a wormhole and ends up in present-day Los Angeles. There's no action at all in France. It's all in LA, where Alistair is befriended by a wannabe documentary film maker — Poppy (played by director Annie K. McVey) — who works with her estranged and skeptical husband, a dedicated young cameraman, and eventually a French scientist (Sophie, played by Amy Motta who appeared on Mad Men) who understands time travel, in an effort to get Alistair back to 1918 and his beloved wife.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Counterpart 1.4'
A really superb episode 1.4 of Counterpart last night—my favorite so far—in which the two Howards switch sides. Again, the acting of J. K. Simmons is Emmy-worthy. Here the kind Howard from our world has to play the tough Howard from the other side, and vice versa, and both do it just right. This series is a pleasure to see just because of Simmons' acting.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Absentia'
I binged Absentia the past few days—it was on AXN in 2017 and is now on Amazon Prime. It starts out with a scenario we've seen before (FBI agent Emily Byrne, played Castle's Stana Katic, shows up after presumably being held hostage for six years, and declared dead), but soon takes off in vivid and less conventional ways. Her husband Nick Durand (well played by Patrick Heusinger), also an FBI agent, has happily remarried, and the two are raising the son Durand had with Emily. Like The OA, The Missing (season two), Thirteen, and other reappearance stories, Emily's return continues or sets off a new series of terrible crimes.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Criminal
Review of 'ARQ'
Hey, I recently watched ARQ—more than a year after it was first released on Netflix—a time-loop Groundhog Day meets I don't know, Terminator movie, about a couple in a facility near the end of the world in some desperate battle, obliged to relive a few hours over and over again, because every time they're killed by masked then unmasked intruders, they wake up in the same bed, together, with memories (usually) of what happened to them in the earlier loops. This is because the guy is the programmer of a machine that can (presumably) run forever because it keeps regenerating its energy, by thrusting itself and those in its vicinity a little bit back into the past.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The Man from the Future'
This one's from Brazil, in Portuguese, from 2011, by way of Netflix in 2016, and I recently watched it as part of my time-travel movie and TV extravaganza. The Man from the Future - O Homem do Futuro in Portuguese - stars Wagner Moura as an accidental time-traveling scientist who finds himself some twenty years in his past — in 1991 — and in a position to change the course of his personal history, and get the girl (played by Alinne Moraes) he's loved all of these years, but lost for some reason at that crucial moment in 1991.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
'Altered Carbon'
Critics who've said that Altered Carbon, the 10-part series I just binged on Netflix (based on the 2002 novel by Richard K. Morgan, which I haven't read) is not as good as Bladerunner, which it strives to be, are myopic — or to put it bluntly, completely wrong. That's because Altered Carbon is at least as good if not better than the two Bladerunner movies (certainly the second), which it not only exceeds in scope and variety, but plain-out doesn't resemble in crucial ways.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Chronological Order'
Chronological Order, the 2010 feature-length movie I recently saw on Amazon Prime, certainly deserves an award, which would be for the most unlikely time-travel device I've ever come across on page or screen. That would be a door that our protagonist, a guy by the name of Guy, finds floating in the ocean. He and we soon learn that when he stands it up and walks through it, he walks a little or longer into the past.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'An Angel for May'
An Angel for May just showed up on Amazon Prime. I just saw it, and think of it as a YA (young adult) Outlander. Significantly—or not—the Melvin Burgess novel on which the 2002 movie is based was published in 1992, or just a year after Diana Gabaldon published her first Outlander novel. I have no idea if Burgess read and was inspired by Outlander, but the two stories have a lot common. Time travel in An Angel for May happens when the hero, young Tom, walks through a broken stone facade of an old building. Both stories have a foot in the Second World War—the point of departure for Claire in Outlander, the terminus for Tom. Both are UK-based. And both are, in significant part, about the time traveler trying to change history.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
'The Discovery'
The Discovery (2017, Netflix) is a strange, edgy, powerfully soft-spoken movie about a scientific attempt to find, map, and understand the afterlife. As such, it bears some resemblance to Kiefer Sutherland's 1990 Flatliners (coincidentally remade in 2017, but I haven't yet seen it). The Discovery sports Robert Redford in a quite central role, with Jason Segel, Rooney Mara (House of Cards), Jesse Plemons (Friday Night Lights), and Riley Keough (first season of The Girlfriend Experience) in leading and strong supporting roles.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The Time We're In'
Stopping time is a highly effective but not often used technique in the time-travel genre, rich in possibilities for mischief as well as the most profound changes in human life. Nicholson Baker's masterpiece, The Fermata, is an example mostly of the mischief variety—erotic mischief, to be more exact—in which the hero stops time to undress women (see my brief review here). Likely because Baker is not seen as a science fiction writer, The Fermata is not usually considered to be science fiction or time travel, though Neil Gaiman and Robert Zemeckis are reportedly working on a screenplay.
By Paul Levinson6 years ago in Futurism