same year, parallel universes
12 titles
Six pairs of films released in the same year and set in the same stretch of time, each putting a comedy or satire beside a war film or something much darker.
In 1993, Dazed and Confused spends the last day of school in 1976 with a group of Texas teens. Heaven & Earth came out the same year and follows a Vietnamese village girl who survives a life of suffering during and after the Vietnam war.
In 1999, 10 Things I Hate About You adapts Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew at Padua High, where a new student has to find someone to date a senior so he can date her sister. In Fight Club, an insomniac and a soap salesman start an underground fight club as a new form of therapy.
In 2004, The Notebook has an old man read aloud from a notebook to a woman with Alzheimer's, the story of a lumber mill worker and a wealthy heiress who fall in love in the summer of 1940 and are separated by World War II. In Downfall, Hitler proclaims in April 1945 that Germany will still win and orders his generals to fight to the last man.
In 2001, Wet Hot American Summer is set on the last day before everyone leaves Camp Firewood in 1981, with a piece of Skylab hurtling toward earth and talking vegetable cans. Donnie Darko gives a troubled teenager visions of a large bunny rabbit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.
In 2019, Jojo Rabbit gives a lonely German boy an imaginary friend in Adolf Hitler. A Hidden Life is about an Austrian farmer who refuses to fight for the Nazis and is threatened with execution for it.
In 2023, Barbie sends a doll who has started having feelings she never had before out of Barbieland and into the real world. 20 Days in Mariupol follows a team of Ukrainian journalists from the Associated Press trapped in the besieged city, still trying to document the war.
