TWICE UPON A TIME (1998) ** Molly Ringwald is about to be proposed to by her somewhat boring and psychologically isolated perenniel grad student boyfriend. She wonders why she ever dumped her high school sweetheart, a Cy Young Award winner who just threw a no-hitter in the World Series (and who's about to take a trophy wife, pity the poor bastard who marries that). Baseball buffs will, of course, immediately recognize that there has never been a Cy Young Award winner who threw a no-hitter in the Series, and so even the most dense will immediately recognize this as fantasy (there are precious few convincing aspects of the parallell dimension, though the phrase "baseball legend Fidel Castro" gives off a whiff of poetic truth). Fantasy that references Albert Einstein's confusing work though, and so perhaps true fantasy. Of course, in no time at all Molly is throwin into a parallell dimension where she struggles with the realizations that her other life wasn't so bad, in most of the most predictable manners possible. The boyfriend (now her husband) pitches for the Zeppelins there, and may bolt for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ok, so it's all horribly smarmy, and smart enough to know the difference. The scenes between Molly and her mother (Ellen Crawford) are sappy, manipulative, and very moving. Isn't it even more impressive when you see them coming and they get you anyway? The scenes between Molly and Robert Ringwald (her father in this, "real" dimension) are also telling, and I still can't figure out how Thom Eberhardt set it up so that I'd know that Robert was an esoteric insider from the first brief cut away from him. There's not enough validation for good people who can't help wondering if the bright lights emanating from the cathode tube might be flickering from someplace better. This is some.
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