Time Travel

Have you ever watched a movie and the theme of the film brought you to the realization that living the life of one of the movie characters could be really useful?

I recently watched "Happy Accidents" starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Marisa Tomei. I found the movie to be a bit of an unpolished gem from the IFC world of entertainment and even though being an avid fan of D'Onofrio's work was the main reason for choosing this particular movie, I found myself enjoying Marisa Tomei's performance as well, even though I thought the two actors were a bit lacking in their "romantic chemistry". I also found that the theme of being able to time travel back to a time of your choosing, to be of a particular amusing theory.

For a brief summary of the movie to get where I am going with all this; Sam Deed, (D'Onofrio's character) travels back in time to meet and save a woman he fell in love with when he found her picture in an archival database.

Ruby (Tomei's character) being from the twentieth century, of course doesn't believe that Sam is really from the future. But being a sucker for the wounded puppy persona, she falls for his charming and innocent ways, idosyncrasies included. As the comedy and drama ensues, Ruby learns that Sam believes what he says is true and that he truly believes her to be his one and only love and even if she does think he is a bit crazy in the head, she decides to take the chance on him anyway.

Now, back to the integral theme of the movie, time travel. How cool would that be to have the ability to travel back in time to meet anyone you wanted to? Who would it be? Is there a particular person in our history that you would like to say hello to or perhaps an event that you would like to witness or change?

How about going back and meeting the Neanderthals and try to convince them to mend their ways so they won't go extinct. Perhaps then the Geico caveman commercials wouldn't seem so outlandish after all especially if someone simply changed the course of history for the now extinct cavemen?

Or how about going back to meet Nostradamus and telling him that he really needs to be a bit more descriptive in is prophecies so we in our time can figure out if he was really fortelling the future or if perhaps he had just been drinking too much mead the night before?

How about going back in time and convincing Edison not to invent the light bulb, or the Puritans from burning the people at the stake in Salem, or perhaps someone should go back in time and find out if the aliens really landed in ancient Egypt and built the pyramids?

Imagine if someone actually did all these things. We could be presently living in the dark, casting our little spells on other people and doing a little hyper-jumping around the galaxy with little green, or is it gray, beings from another galaxy?

The list could go on forever, like time itself, but if it were all an actuality instead of a wistful illusion of the mind, if Einstien's theory of bending time and space were real, at what point in time would you go back to change the history of our world?

Personally, just to test it out, I think I would try going back to the time just before my cat threw up his breakfast on the floor this morning so I could put him out the door so I wouldn't have to clean it up!

Shay White