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Pre-Script: For a while now I have been meaning to start documenting my current obsessions. You know, things that I am suddenly fascinated by, usually for a short period of time. I do believe that I've mentioned this subject on here before, but I never did much about it.)
Like many people these days I am blessed (and cursed) with a mind that is drawn to the new and I am able to keep my attention firmly fixed on that thing... right up til the point when it starts to become boring, then I discard it.
I love being obsessed about things. That is to say, I am obsessed about being obsessed. I am OCD for OCD. And I have been for some time now. The whole idea of documenting my current fixation, whatever it might be, I have been intending to write them down for about 2 or 3 years now. It's never happened though. Not until now. Had I started writing down this list when it first occurred to me, well, it would be a damn long list by now. Momentary fixations come and go in my life with a regularity that is worrying to say the least. Something is brought to my attention, I am intrigued by it, I begin to study it and I look into it's background. Then I usually go ahead and buy a book or a DVD about it. And then, of course, the whole fad runs its course and I forget about it rapidly.
Momentary obsession is something that also hate. It's great being completely immersed in a new subject, but usually there isn't much to it (or it becomes to complicated) and so it gets thrown to the wayside. Any list that I would write here would be a list of things that I no longer care about. Give me a month on any given subject and I can usually become very bored of it, very quickly. This says a lot about the way that I think. I think.
Enough rambling, here's what I am currently obsessing about.
TIME TRAVEL MOVIESGot to love a bit of sci-fi every now and them. I have been in love with this whole movie genre every since I saw
Back To The Future as a kid. I saw it at the cinema on it's original run. Great film. Also,
Bill & Ted,
The Terminator,
Star Trek (the one with the whales)... the list goes on.
One film that stands out in my mind, when it comes to the whole time travel genre, is a movie called
Time Cop, starring Jean Claude Van Damme. That's it, right there, your cliche, poorly constructed, time travel movie plot line.

There are 2 different premises when you boil a time travel flick down. Two variants on the theme, if you will. It can all be summed up as a simple enough sounding question:
If you could somehow go back in time, would you be able to change the past? This is a matter of some debate amongst "time travel movie buffs". I personally like the storyline where it all happens in one long thread, so you can't change anything because it's already happened. The 5th season of LOST is a great example of the whole "
What Happened Happened" scenario. But I also enjoy the Back To The Future concept, when Marty goes back and changes shit around... when he gets back "home" everything is different, for the better.
It's strange to me that you can ask someone if they believe in God, they don't know. You can ask them what their political beliefs are, they don't know. Ask them about how best to combat social decay, climate change, the global economic meltdown... they don't know. But ask them if you can change the past via time travel - A SUBJECT THAT IS TOTALLY SPECULATIVE AND IMPOSSIBLE - and they have a theory about it, thanks to all of the movies they have watched.
Of course, time travel movies are nothing more than a sub-genre of fantasy films (and novels), so really it is kinda pointless to even begin to speculate about the mechanics of the whole time travel movie concept. But it makes a half-decent story, if it's written well enough, don't you think? After all, it's hardly ever about the theory behind it, it's almost always about the story. Give us a fun story and you're always going to be onto a winner with a time travel flick. Take note, Hollywood!
And that's my obsession of the week.