![]() ![]() The movie manages to tiptoe its way up to being truly uncomfortable but then pulls back in a way that has the audience and its characters all breathing a sigh of relief. Yet the movie is just trying to have fun with the time-travel paradoxes its story line inevitably sets up, most successfully in the discomforting flirtation between Marty and his future mother, Lorraine, played by Lea Thompson. Like you, Justin, I have always been a little uncomfortable with how much “Back to the Future” demands us to overlook - the bit of business about Marty McFly traveling back in time to inspire Chuck Berry who would in turn inspire the future Marty has always particularly bothered me as an unnecessary filigree. ![]() So “Back to the Future,” a movie that’s nothing if not insistently likable, feels in its own way unique to the list. MARK OLSEN: It is true that a lot more than just four years separates “Do The Right Thing” from “Back to the Future.” But there is something exciting about them both being considered as part of our Summer Movie Showdown, as I know for myself I think of summer movies as a kind of narrowly focused action spectacle more in line with the movie “BttF” defeated this week, James Cameron’s 1991 “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Loud, effects-driven, relentlessly paced and perhaps even a touch misanthropic, as if driven to the edge by the heat, summer movies can be curiously cold and unlovable, as much as we love them. With its extended flashback to the ’50s from the vantage of the ’80s, “Back to the Future” taps into the very ethos of the Reagan presidency, or part of it anyway: a spirit of pioneering technological advancement married to a wellspring of nostalgia for ostensibly simpler times. President Reagan was famously a huge fan, and not just because we see one of his films - “Cattle Queen of Montana,” the 1954 Western in which he starred opposite Barbara Stanwyck - being advertised on a 1955 Hill Valley theater marquee. The movie is, for better and sometimes for worse, a rich, fascinating document of the era that produced it. That precision is the source of the movie’s pleasure as well as its limitations: It’s such a niftily executed parlor trick that you can almost (almost!) let some of the story’s creepier subtexts about race, sexual assault and almost-but-thankfully-not-quite-incest pass by unremarked. ![]() It strikes me, as it always has, as a delirious narrative contraption first and foremost - a clever puzzle whose every twist and payoff has been engineered with clockwork precision. Watching Marty McFly hop into the DeLorean this week for the umpteenth time or so, I was reminded of all the reasons why this movie remains so beloved by its fans, even if I can’t personally count myself among them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. This week, you and I are turning back the clock further and taking on Robert Zemeckis’ “Back to the Future” (1985), a giddily entertaining Reagan-era nostalgia machine that is pretty much the opposite of searing, and which turns the very notion of timeliness on its head. Just last week, our colleague Glenn Whipp and I were busy extolling Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” a movie whose searing truths felt timely in 1989 and feel timelier than ever now. JUSTIN CHANG: Quite a whiplash-inducing thing, Mark, this Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown. Times film writers Justin Chang and Mark Olsen sat down to discuss the enduring popularity of Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel adventure-comedy, and the ways in which time has - and hasn’t - been kind to it. ![]() The #UltimateSummerMovie Showdown is under way, and voters have chosen “Back to the Future” (1985) as their winner for Week 10, dedicated to movies first released in theaters from July 3-9 (between 19). ![]()
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