It's still that golden time, the start of a new year, when all things are possible and we set our intentions to get everything done ever in the next 12 months. Period, no excuses, forward and upward.
But we invite you to unhand your 2014 calendar and look further into the future, especially if you're a film buff. You do know that 2019, 'round Los Angeles, will be all "Blade Runner" all the time, given that the dystopian classic is set in our fair city in that very year?
Prepare yourselves, replicants.
And 2015, specifically Oct. 21? That's the date Marty McFly zooms forward to, in 1989's "Back to the Future Part II."
Count on that film screening multiple times next year, but you catch all three sci-fi comedies at The Egyptian on Saturday, Jan. 4. Nope, you can't park your DeLorean out front, on Hollywood Boulevard, but please, who even parks a DeLorean these days? Roads are not needed in the future, to paraphrase Doc Brown, so best make sure your car hovers.
And while "Blade Runner" has very specific LA ties, "Back to the Future" does as well, even though it is set in the fictional Hill Valley. Yep, the clocktower and square are pure Universal Studios backlot, and several of the houses are in Pasadena and South Pas, but you totally know that the parking lot where Marty meets Doc Brown in the first film is Puente Hills Mall, right?
Totally.
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It's a fine way to start a year, wethinks, especially since the second film is set in 2015. There are few cinema pleasures that can equal watching a more vintage film set in the future, watching it around the very date it is set in, and then making comparisons to what really exists, technology-wise, to what the filmmakers wondered might exist.
Nerdy? Maybe, but we are talking about one of the great cinematic nerdy heroes here. Oh, Marty McFly would not have liked to have been called a nerd, perhaps, but he's a cool nerd, and one of the fictional forebearers of all modern cool nerds everywhere.
