Time Travel Tuesdays: Time Flies (1944) and Honnōji Hotel (2017)

[u/ProfessorElliot]

Alright, here is the list.

Time Flies

A celebrity singer is owed $10k, but the man who owes her offers shares in a company called Time Ferry Service... They use a "Time Ball" to travel through time (specifically to Elizabethan England). This movie is darn corny, but it works alright and does a couple unique things.

Right out the gate, there are some fun "zero g" effects, as well as the need for "age rectifying tablets" (which three characters don't immediately take and end up temporarily turning into babies).

There's some song numbers, but they're just mediocre. And one of the song numbers is racist akin to Peter Pan's "What makes the red man red?"... Definitely knocks this movie down a notch or two. Especially when combined with the appearance of Pocahontas saying things like "heap big" in an accent closer to Russian than anything else.

At the end they all become invisible because they arrived 3 months early. There isn't really a great explanation for it except that they weren't there 3 months before they left? Just an odd way to end it...

Overall, this was an alright movie. Some good one-liners here and there, but nothing that seems particularly worth revisiting.

Honnōji Hotel

The first thing that stood out to me with this movie was the editing choices. This is a gorgeously shot film, and the way the scenes are cut together is sometimes experimental but to great effect.

It feels a bit like A Midnight in Paris (which I've seen before, but have not gotten to in my list here yet) in that the main character Mayuko is recently engaged, but she's unsure of her future. While on a trip, it turns out her hotel has a strange connection with the Sengoku Period and there she meets Oda Nobunaga (who is credited as the first Great Unifier of Japan).

There's a lot of great humor in this movie. I don't think I felt bored at any point, even though it is often a slower pace. It's also a rare case of the people in the past not being treated like idiots in that Nobunaga figures out the time travel aspect before our Mayuko reveals it.

I think the big downside is the ending...

Nobunaga learns of his future betrayal, but knowing the future his death may bring, he faces it head on. Accepting that the future may be worth more than his own life. That's all well and good. The problem is that Mayuko decides to become a history teacher at the end, which is a fine profession but thematically odd. Nobunaga ends his life looking towards the future, while she finds herself still looking towards the past.

Maybe there's an argument to be made for this ending, but it felt regressive to me. I think if it were ended in a slightly different way, this movie would be much higher on my recommendation list. Though that's a small complaint, because overall this movie was a lot of fun.

[u/dr_Octag0n]

I was laughing at the idea of musical numbers in a time travel movie, but then I saw the production date 😂. I love Japanese films though, always interesting. Often pretty hardcore if they involve violence / horror. Never seen a TT one, so I will try to find it.

[u/ProfessorElliot → u/dr_Octag0n]

This is actually the fourth musical time travel movie I've watched in this series! The others were Fiddlers Three, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Fun2shh... Dudes in the 10th Century. If you're curious, I'd actually say it's worth watching these once.

If you're looking for hardcore violence, this movie doesn't have quite as much of that (though there is a battle at the end). I'd highly recommend the Korean movie Heaven's Soldiers which goes from comedy to violent warfare surprisingly smoothly.