Archives
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Getting away from
it all...
Come
back with us now to those thrilling, irrelevant days of yesteryear...
DIVERSIONS. Sometimes the news is so uniformly bad that all we want to do is find an escape in popular entertainment, preferably from a time long before the tempestuous issues that plague us today. That's why we'd like to take a moment to recommend a truly great movie from the past. Fittingly enough, it's called The Time Machine, and it was made way back in the 1950s, before we experienced some of the societal ills that make now such a drag.
The Time Machine is about a mature and perhaps wise man -- played by Rod Taylor -- who travels far into the future, where he discovers that many thousands of years after Victorian Britain, humanity has stumbled into a frightful pickle. An idyllic-looking landscape is populated by gorgeous, well-fed people called the eloi.
The
Eloi
They spend their days splashing about in pure streams, eating sumptuous fruits, chatting like magpies, and doing whatever else comes naturally. But the hero from the past is shocked to learn that these beautiful innocents are being preyed upon by monsters.
A
Morlock.
These monsters, known as morlocks, live in the dark, underground, and they surface only for the purpose of grabbing a bunch of eloi, who are -- in the final analysis -- dinner. Rod is even more shocked to discover that the eloi put up no resistance of any kind when the morlocks drag them underground to kill and eat them.
No resistance.
Rod spends most of the rest of the movie trying to rescue the eloi from their gruesome fate, as well as teach them how to resist and fight for their lives. Eventually, some of them do stop acting like automatons, and Rod decides to live there in the future with them and shack up with the prettiest girl there.
Of course it could never happen like this, but it's a great picture, and we're pretty sure you'll find it a welcome distraction from the network news and 24/7 cable news channels.
Just trying to help.
