Anyway. In Vermont, in 1991, a lone healthy bike-riding science teacher named Nick develops time travel and sells it immediately to a transparently evil corporation. While traveling through time trying to impress his wildly wholesome love interest Lisa, Nick discovers that GenCorp plans to use time travel to destroy civilization. Mr. Robertson, the lanky CEO of GenCorp, refuses to not destroy civilization, so a couple Mr. Robertsons and several Nicks and any number of Lisas chase each other through time back to the Revolutionary War. One Lisa ends up dead, and one Nick, and one Mr. Robertson, but it doesn't matter because with time travel there's always equally uninteresting spares to take their place.

Nick and Lisa win out, no thanks to a handful of very dumpy patriots who wander around a field nearby, and Nick returns to 1991 and destroys the secret of time travel. At the end he and Lisa meet up in the produce section and fall into the lettuce and just go at it in the most passionate, sweaty, grinding manner, it's some of the hottest - well no they don't, but the clear implication is they will wholesomely produce some children at some point. We're left with the hope that perhaps the new generation will be the one with no interest in time travel.

The nice people who made this movie found out we were doing it and were very excited. We even talked to the guy who played GenCorp underling Matthew Paul on the phone, and got a definite sense that the whole project was undertaken by a group of well-adjusted people. That is certainly not true of most of our movies, and they're to be commended. And truth be told - and remember, I'm only saying this in order to be polite - this really isn't a horrible film.

There being a corporate exec in the film, we had at least one ISO 9001 Certification joke. Banners proclaiming such certification have been springing up around this strange land, this Eden Prairie industrial park world that Best Brains calls home; we've been curious about what it actually is. Turns out Company A can pay a good deal of money to have another company certify that Company A in fact does what it says it does. That's ISO 9001 Certification. So there are ISO 9001 Certifiers running around out there, and that's exactly the sort of job I suspect is the real substance of the American Growth Machine. Don't get me started.

- Paul Chaplin