Gwyn Cready's latest release, Every Time with a Highlander, comes out this month! To celebrate, Gwyn has put together her top 5 favorite time-travel movies to share.
Top Five Time Travel Romance
Movies, According to Gwyn Cready
Okay, brace yourself. This list
does not include Somewhere in Time.
Hurl your spitballs if you must, but it doesn’t make the top five time travel
romance movies—at least not my top
five. Now, let’s pick the fragments out of our hair from that bombshell and
move on to the qualities a good time travel romance movie must possess in my
world. First, time “travel” is a little too precise. I’m just as happy with a
movie that fiddles around with time. Second, one or both protagonists have to
undergo a transition in order to be worthy of love. Third, the protagonists
have to work to overcome what time has done to them, not just be battered
around by it. I want my protagonists to be fighters. And fourth, there has to
be love and lots of it.
5.
Time Traveler’s Wife (Robert
Schwentke, 2009.)
This movie probably shouldn’t have made this list for two reasons important
reasons. First, the movie is so-so, but the book is so, so great, the movie
gets to draft behind it into fifth place here. Second, the ending isn’t exactly
happy. To be fair, it’s not exactly unhappy either. But the story is one of the
finest examples of the power of love to overcome all obstacles, even the most
capricious involuntary time travel forced on Henry De Tamble, the friend,
lover, and eventual husband of Clare Abshire, that I have ever experienced.
Henry has been tossed into almost every part of his past and future life by a
tendency for time travel he can’t control. My favorite part is when Clare, who
has met his traveling self before though he doesn’t remember it, tricks him
into taking her virginity.
4.
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993.) Not your classic time travel
romance, for sure. The screenwriter plays with time, and, in this case, that’s
even better. Phil Connors is a Pittsburgh weatherman. His worst assignment ever
turns into a never-ending loop of small town inanity. But does Phil let that
get him down? Well, at first, yes. He seduces women, gets drunk, gets arrested,
and even dies trying to free himself from the hell he’s stuck in. But he always
wakes up at the start of the same awful day—and what’s worse, nothing he does
gets him any closer to his producer, the beautiful and smart Rita Hanson, who
hates her self-centered co-worker. It isn’t until Phil gives up trying to use
his special circumstances in selfish ways and instead commits himself to
becoming a better person, He learns to play the piano and speak French, and he
even saves lives. And for his hard work—Harold Ramis estimated that Phil lived
through enough Groundhog days to make up ten calendar years—Phil is finally
rewarded with Rita’s love. A better version of desire for a good woman making a
bad man worthy has never been written.
3.
About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013.) Another time Spirograph, and this
one hits all my time buttons. It’s funny, sweet, veers into heartbreaking, and
then just as quickly gives us the happy ending we’ve been waiting for. And it’s
populated with some of my favorite British Isle actors—Domhnall Gleason, Bill
Nighy, and Tom Hollander. Gangly, sweet Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleason) is an
attorney who is told by his father on his twenty-first birthday that all men in
their family line can time travel back in time to an earlier point in their
lives whenever they’d like. Tim uses his new-found talent to fix problems for
his friends and to set himself up with a beautiful American woman (Rachel
McAdams). Eventually, he discovers what his father did with his own time travel
abilities—pack a box of Kleenex. But in the end, Tim realizes that living life
as well as one can in each day one is given, rather than savoring it again by
living it over, is the best way to appreciate it.
2.
The Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi,
2011.) David Norris is meant for good things.
He’s running for the senate but falls in love with Elise, a beautiful,
vivacious dancer. The mysterious people who plot out our lives—the Adjustment
Bureau—can’t have David derailed from his intended career path. They move Elise
out of his reach. But David catches on to the game, and begins to try to
outmaneuver them in order to find her again. But when the men from the
Adjustment Bureau tell him Elise is meant for better things too—things she’ll
never achieve if she stays with David, he has to decide if love rules our lives
or fate.
1.
13 Going on 30 (Gary Winick, 2004.) A dark horse for #1, I’ll admit
it, but I can't pass up the story of 13-year-old Jenna Rink, played by Jennifer
Garner, who is transported into her future and discovers a great job and a
closet full of shoes isn't enough to make up for losing Matt, the boy who was
her best friend. The über-fun acted-out dance numbers from "Thriller"
and "Love is a Battlefield" made this 80s gal's squeal with delight.
I cry every time grown-up Jenna tracks down grown-up Matt, the one person she
knows she can trust with her story, and he says, “Jenna, we’re not friends
anymore.” The movie makes us ask ourselves, “What do we lose when we take the
people closest to us for granted?” Fortunately, the answer for Jenna is not
Matt, at least not forever. Happy sigh.
***
Series: Sirens
of the Scottish, #3
Author: Gwyn
Cready
Pubdate: August
2nd 2016
ISBN: 9781492601999
Third in the Sirens of the Scottish
Borderlands series from Gwyn Cready, the “master of time travel romance”
(Booklist)
She can work her magic on any man
In a quest to bring peace to her beloved Scottish borderlands,
fortune-teller and spy Undine Douglas agrees to marry a savage English colonel.
Desperate to delay the wedding long enough to undermine the army’s plans,
Undine casts a spell to summon help and unexpectedly finds herself under the
imperious gaze of the handsome and talented Michael Kent, twenty-first century
British theater director.
But in this production, he commands the action
Though he abandoned acting years ago, Michael will play whatever part
it takes to guard Undine’s safety—he’s used to managing London’s egocentric
actors and high-handed patrons, after all. But not even Shakespeare could have
foreseen the sparks that fly when the colonel’s plans force Undine and Michael
into the roles of their lifetimes.
Gwyn Cready is a writer of contemporary,
Scottish, and time travel romance. She’s been called “the master of time travel
romance” and is the winner of the RITA Award, the most prestigious award given
in romance writing. She has been profiled in Real Simple and USA Today, among
others. Before becoming a novelist, she spent 25 years in brand management. She
has two grown children and lives with her husband on a hill overlooking the
magical kingdom of Pittsburgh.
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What? No Somewhere in Time? I love your choices, though. Groundhog Day has become one of my favorite movies. I agree about the book vs. movie of The Time Traveler's Wife. Thanks for the list. I'll check a few I haven't seen/read out.
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