Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him. … Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”

– Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”

I rented the DVD of “Premonition” because it sounded like an interesting premise, but when I started watching it I couldn’t help feeling like it was — as Yogi Berra said — “déjà vu all over again.” But then, that can be a good thing.

You have to sympathize with the goodly souls who try to make movies seem weird and suspenseful. Ever since “The Sixth Sense” everyone’s been mad for a movie with a twist. But how can you sneak up on an audience that is mentally covering every possibility, second-guessing even the most serpentine plot twists? There aren’t that many different ways to put together a tale of suspense — how in the world do you surprise viewers with what they’ve seen over and over again? I’m not sure who was the first slyboots to figure it out, but it’s simple once you tumble to it — you mess with time. If your premise includes making time stand still, go backwards or do flip-flops, you could make one of the drawbacks of movies seem like a plus. If you exploited the fact that people knew (or thought they knew) what was going to happen, you could turn their expectations to your advantage.

For extra credit, if you took it a step further and dismantled the chronology, you could really play with people’s heads. Just make it so that the end of the story comes first, the middle near the end, the beginning coming in here and there, and even the most advanced second-guesser won’t have a clue what’s going on.

So, just for fun, here are the five movies I thought of that messed with time. They get progressively more tortuous with the chronology as well, with the last two being ones you have to close all the curtains, turn off the phone and pay total attention to. I thought they were all worth watching, backwards or forwards.

1. Groundhog Day (1993) — Of course. I assume everyone’s seen it by now, but if you haven’t, the basic question is: if you lived the same day over and over and over, what would you do? The moral of the story is really very profound and doesn’t have the forced feel of being a moral. Chronology: Piece of cake. In spite of the day-after-day idea, it’s pretty easy to see the build-up of events.
2. Déjà Vu (2006) — Denzel Washington is a cop that starts to find clues to a tragedy that indicate someone knew what was going to happen. More interesting, the clues seem to indicate that that person was him. Chronology: A little difficult, but nothing you can’t parse out if you try. And usually you’re a step ahead of the characters, which makes you feel like a smarty. I love that.
3. Premonition (2007) — Sandra Bullock is told her husband died in a car crash. Then the next morning, he’s alive and it didn’t happen. Then he’s dead. Then he’s not. How do you stop something terrible from happening? How do you live with yourself if you stop even wanting to try? Chronology: Bit of a work-out. It’s worth watching the special feature on the DVD called “Making Order out of Chaos” that just puts the events back into chronological order. It gives you a different appreciation of why things happened the way they did.
4. Memento (2000) — How would you get by if you’re one of those rare sufferers of a disease that affects your memory, making short-term memories impossible? You’d probably leave yourself a lot of notes and say the same things to people over and over. Now, just to make things more interesting, what if you were that person and you were trying to find out who murdered your wife? Chronology: Intense. I loved this movie, but don’t try to multi-task while you’re watching it or you’ll lose the way and never make it. (BTW, I’ll mention that it’s a gritty movie, but not graphic. And, because things like this make me nervous, I’ll also mention that a rape that is referred to from the beginning is never shown.)
5. Primer (2004) — If any movie was ever going to make you believe that someone could build a time machine, this would be it. If anyone was going to do a really good job of showing how much it would mess up your life to have one, this would be it again. It’s not a comedy, by the way. It takes itself seriously and manages to make you do the same. Great film for science geeks. Chronology: Just flippin’ insane. It starts off like a normal thing, just to lull you into a sense of false security. But if anyone can explain the last hour of it to me, I’d be most grateful.

There are others of this type, I’m sure. But these are just the ones that came to mind. Besides, it’s late now, and I’m out of time. Or am I??? (insert Dramatic Hamster music)