Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Primer - 2004

This is, what we call in the movie-watching biz, a hard flick. Not because of gore, or poor dialogue, rotten acting, or anything bad in the movie at all. Its hard because the concepts are hard to hang on to. I knew this going in, as many of the reviews state that the movie's good, but really hard to follow. It being a time travel movie (actually, more of a "what would engineers do if they invented a time machine"), there can be some hairy concepts. And this one gets pretty convoluted. In fact, after watching the movie, listing to the BOTH commentaries, I THINK I know what actually happened in the end, but I'm not absolutely sure.

That said, its a cool movie, in a very cerebrel sort of way. This is NOT an action movie, and it looks a little odd (it was shot on Super 16), but it held my attention for the entire 77 minutes. The shot on Super 16 is a little weird. The director says that they pretty much did everything in one take, and used everything, because of the low budget. And I will grant you that $7000 is definitely micro-budget. The movie looks GREAT for a $7K flick. However, it sure would have been easier (and cheaper, I bet, in the long run) to get a digital camera. Even a prosumer camera that costs around $1000 would cost less than blowing up a flick from 16mm to 35mm. So I don't see how they saved any money that way. And, you could then do some multiple takes and coverage shots.

The disc is good too. There are subtitles, two commentaries, and clean audio in the commentaries (in fact, there are times when the audio for the commentaries is cleaner than the rerecorded audio for the movie). Overall, this was a good night of mentally challenging entertainment.

Three beers out of five