Time Machine

There may come a time in the future when science or even advanced AI creates a way that humans can time travel to another year or century. It might seem improbable now but look at all the technological innovations that we never thought possible and are now a reality. At the same time, movie lovers already know they can vicariously visit people and places in the past thanks to the miracle of motion pictures. Just as recently as 2018, Peter Jackson produced and directed They Shall Not Grow Old, a stunning collection of archival footage from World War I which he had restored and colorized from black to white to give the documentary an immediacy and impact that brought the soldiers on screen to life (before they met their untimely deaths on the battlefield). If you want to go back even further to the turn of the century, you can experience life in the U.K. (mostly northern England with a few stops in Ireland) in Electric Edwardians: The Lost Cinema of Mitchell & Kenyon (2005), an amazing treasure trove of footage from 1901 and beyond that was considered lost for years until its discovery in 1994.

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Blackpool is Calling

1995 was an exceptionally strong year for film releases, not just in the U.S. but around the world. To give you some idea of the diversity and range, consider the following movies, some of them Oscar winners or nominees: Pulp Fiction, Ed Wood, The Madness of King George, La Haine, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Hoop Dreams, Queen Margot, Speed, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Lion King, Three Colors: Red, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lost City of Children, and Forrest Gump. An eclectic list to be sure but one of my favorite movies somehow got lost and overlooked in the mix – Peter Chelsom’s Funny Bones, which is mostly set in Blackpool, England, a popular tourist resort originally built as a vacation destination for working class families during the late 1800s.

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