Adventures in Streaming: Canadian time travel films worth streaming

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in a scene from Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Courtesy Vice Media

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The 1960 film The Time Machine (streaming for free on YouTube), based on the 1895 H.G. Wells novel, may have served as an introduction to time travel as a pivotal plot device in cinema, spawning a whole sub-genre in science fiction/fantasy films.

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Seen today, the film is a bit corny, to be sure, with star Rod Taylor playing the anomalous two-fisted scientist hero. His titular invention sees him plunged into a future world where the supposedly advanced human population of Eloi (blond, beautiful Aryans frolicking in a pastoral seeming-Utopia) are occasionally plundered by a deviating race of subterranean hairy, glowing-eyed Morlocks, Wells’ extrapolation of Victorian-era class warfare. (Eat the rich, indeed.)

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At the film’s end (spoiler alert), Taylor manages to transport back to his present day to tell his tale, only to return to the future where, we suppose, he will save the Eloi from their terminal complacency.

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Utilizing time travel to save humanity would become a recurring theme in other time travel movies, notably The Avengers: Endgame and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

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But on the other side of that coin is low-stakes time travel, in which temporal tourists are primarily interested in some kind of personal gratification. This year, two Canadian-made films explore that sub-sub-genre.

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Time travel doesn’t get much more trivial than it is in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (streaming on Crave) a whacked-out extrapolation of the cult TV series (streaming on Disney+). Like the series, the movie is so Hogtown-specific, it may have Canadians from the rest of the country rolling their eyes at the sheer Toronto indulgence of it all.

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That would be a shame: The film is an absolute hoot, following a pair of musicians Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol whose lifelong ambition is to play a gig at the fabled Queen Street venue The Rivoli (not coincidentally, the birthplace of The Kids in the Hall).

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Schemer Matt contrives a publicity ploy to parachute into the SkyDome (a.k.a. Rogers Centre) via the CN Tower, a literally dizzying misadventure that damn near works, except for that inconvenient retractable roof. Plan B involves a scheme to masquerade as time travellers, a ploy that ends up succeeding (thanks to a discontinued soft drink) taking the pair into a future where McCarrol becomes a celebrated pop star once Johnson is out of the picture.

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As in the series, the movie alternates between scripted comedy and improvisational bits filmed on the streets of Toronto — mainly Queen Street.

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You don’t have to be Torontonian to appreciate it, but it helps. Not many movies could land a Jian Ghomeshi joke.

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Even the movie’s time-travel MacGuffin is uniquely Canadian. Orbitz is a real soft drink featuring little balls of gelatin floating in every bottle, a perfect ingredient for the film given that it too was a Canadian failure story, ignominiously discontinued in 1999 after poor sales and a factory breakdown.

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Shot in Winnipeg in 2024, writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (streaming on Disney+) is an unlikely mélange of romance and gangland intrigue with a time-travel element that throws everything for a time loop.