Time for Ashton Kutcher to get serious
But playing with time has consequences
By Todd Leopold
CNN
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Ashton Kutcher in "The Butterfly Effect."
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"Eye on Entertainment" talks about the weekend's happenings on CNN's "Live Today" between 10 a.m. and noon EST Thursday.
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(CNN) -- One of my favorite Ray Bradbury short stories is "A Sound of Thunder," about a group of hunters going back in time to bag a dinosaur and finding that, because of a small mistake in the trip to prehistory, everything has subtly -- but drastically -- changed upon the return to the present.
"A Sound of Thunder" has been made into a movie, due in April, with Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley. (It extends the plot of Bradbury's story a bit.) It's by no means the first time-travel movie -- the genre is practically a Hollywood mainstay.
At least three movies have been made of "The Time Machine," the H.G. Wells' novel about a Victorian traveler who heads deep into the future. Nicholas Meyer gave a twist to Wells' plot with the wonderful "Time After Time," putting the author himself (Malcolm McDowell) in pursuit of Jack the Ripper in 1979 San Francisco.
"Star Trek" has made a time-travel movie (thanks to Meyer), Michael Nesmith produced a time-travel movie, "Back to the Future" spawned a series of witty time-travel movies, and Arnold Schwarzenegger made the 800-pound gorillas of time-travel movies -- the "Terminator" series, which keeps changing the future to suit its box-office present.
The problem with most time-travel movies, however, is that they ignore the very detail that made Bradbury's story so entrancing -- that even the slightest change in the past can have ripple effects well into the future.
(They also generally ignore time-travel paradoxes: If you go back in time and kill your grandparents, will you cease to exist? And will you meet yourself at every nanosecond you've lived, leading to a multiplicity of yous? Of course, pursuing those ideas leads down a deep rabbit hole, as David Gerrold's book "The Man Who Folded Himself" proved.)
Now there's a new time-travel movie, "The Butterfly Effect," starring Ashton Kutcher. In it, Kutcher discovers he can go back and change the past -- but his changes always have unintended consequences.
Eye on Entertainment casts one eye on the clock.
Eye-opener
"The Butterfly Effect" draws its title from the concept that the movement of a butterfly's wings can change climatic patterns thousands of miles away.
Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, who has been subject to blackouts since childhood. Encouraged by his therapist, he's kept a journal of his life. One day, when reading through the journal, he finds himself back in the past -- and consciously aware of where he is.
His longtime love and his friends have had lives that haven't turned out the way they'd hoped. Treborn starts to manipulate events in his childhood and adolescence to make the future brighter -- but even with his success, something is always changed unexpectedly.
For Kutcher, the role marks a departure from the goofy, "That '70s Show"-type guy he's been playing. The movie has been compared to "Donnie Darko," another movie about a troubled man with visionary capabilities, but not always favorably.
Will audiences buy a darker Kutcher, or will the movie be banished to the bargain bin at Blockbuster's? Unfortunately, nobody's invented a time machine yet to find out.
"The Butterfly Effect" premiered this month at Sundance Film Festival and opens nationwide Friday.
On screen
• From its title, "Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!" sounds like it might be a nice spoof on one of those late '50s-early '60s Sandra Dee or Debbie Reynolds movies, the kind satirized so well in "Bye Bye Birdie." But the movie, which stars Kate Bosworth, Topher Grace and Josh Duhamel, is resolutely set in the present ... or is it? Maybe they could use a time machine. Opens Friday.
• "Mindhunters" stars Val Kilmer in a "Ten Little Indians" set within an FBI profiler group. Someone in the group is picking off his or her colleagues, one by one. OK, it's January, a month of bad movies, so what do you expect? "The Godfather"? "Mindhunters" opens Friday.
On the tube
• Fortunately, there are some good movies out there -- and many of them are nominated for Golden Globes, the movie and TV awards given out by the mysterious Hollywood Foreign Press Association. "Cold Mountain," with eight nominations, is one of the favorites. 8 p.m. ET Sunday, NBC. (The red carpet arrivals show is at 7 p.m.)
• First "Traffic" was a miniseries. Then it was a movie. Now it's a miniseries again -- and it's earning good reviews once more. Apparently it's hard to go wrong following characters involved in the drug trafficking trade. Begins 9 p.m. ET Monday on the USA Network.
• Ozzy, Sharon and the brood are back for another season of "The Osbournes," 10:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, MTV.
Paging readers
• Joe Eszterhas' last book, "American Rhapsody," earned reams of press for his sometimes scatological take on the Clinton presidency and impeachment. Eszterhas is better known as the dissolute screenwriter of "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls," but once upon a time he was a crack newspaper and Rolling Stone writer -- and he can still scribble up a storm. In his new book, "Hollywood Animal" (Knopf), he writes about his whole life. Due Tuesday.
