Go back in time with this marvelous film.
Summers when you’re a kid are full of boundless possibilities. I remember one summer when I was six or so, me and some friends dug up the front yard of my parents’ house looking for Leprechauns. Another summer, we tried to build the world’s coolest BMX dirt track. Another summer it was a village of treehouses a la Endor. None of these things, of course, ever came to full fruition, but that wasn’t necessarily the point. Summers when you’re a kid are for a different kind of education than you get the rest of the year, they’re a time for the imagination to learn itself, its limits and reaches.
In part I and most of my generation feel this way about summer because of the movies aimed at us when we were kids, movies like Goonies, Stand By Me, The Monster Squad, Explorers, and other such examples in which the plots revolved around an intrepid group of kids up against impossible odds that they somehow overcame, usually in relation to the power of their friendship. These movies taught us that, yes, kids could do anything, but more important, kids could do things adults never could because of kids’ ability to believe in anything, especially that which reason would have them disbelieve.
This is the general atmosphere that exists around writer-director Aidan Largey’s Time & Again, a short film from Ireland about a pair of 13-year-old boys, one of whom is building a potential time machine to escape not just the era, but trouble at home. Invoking a definite Spielbergian vibe, Time & Again is heartfelt, spirited, eloquent, and grounded in its execution of the fantastic mingling with reality. It’s a story that’s as timeless (pun intended) as it is rooted in nostalgia, and that makes it, quite frankly, a sheer and utter delight to watch. I humbly yet firmly demand more work from Largey as soon as possible.
Related Topics: Short Films
