It's Valentine's Day, and time to watch some romantic movies, right? I tried two new ones, small-scale films featuring mostly actors previously unknown to me. They're both on Amazon Prime, no extra charge.
I Want You Back is the one I didn't finish watching. Woman who's been dumped by her boyfriend meets man who's been dumped by his girlfriend, agree that they desperately want their old partners back, and share their misery. That they might be better off with each other does not occur to them, at least at this point. Each had been dumped essentially for perceived immaturity, and they proceed to prove the validity of this charge by hatching a plan for each to interfere in the other's ex's love life. So she volunteers to help with a middle-school musical (his ex and her new beau are the teachers running it), which is so not her; and he joins the gym where her ex works, which is so not him (he's basically a remake of young Billy Crystal). And it just started getting exquisitely embarrassing, and promising to get worse, which a glance at the Wikipedia plot summary confirmed it does, so I stopped there. Thumbs down.
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, on the other hand, is a tiny near-perfect movie, though it's not a cuddly romantic one. It's a time-loop story, which if that makes it SF, classes this film with other near-perfect low-key time-travel movies like See You Yesterday and Safety Not Guaranteed. In this one, the teenage boy who's experiencing the same day over and over is startled out of the cool-dude tenor of his way when he meets a girl of his age who's also living the day over - which he can tell when she does different things on successive runs. That makes this a little less like Groundhog Day, a movie referenced several times here - it also helps if you know Time Bandits - and a little more in the direction of Palm Springs or Before I Fall, which aren't referenced.
After initial hesitation, the two bond like castaways, and start a project to map the "tiny perfect things" that happen in their town that day, like the little girl who nails a skateboard jump that foils the skate rats, or the cops stopping traffic to let a turtle cross the road. But are they going to start a romance? At first he's not sure, and she's against it because - he can tell - there's something going on in her life that she's not telling him. The way it all works out in the end struck me as quite original storytelling for a time-loop story, and was charming and satisfying. Thumbs definitely up.
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