I recently grabbed Primer off of Pay-Per-View (incidentally, DirecTivo + PPV = no more trips to the video store, as you can record your movie choice and watch it later, all for $3.99, which might be double a rental but there really are no late fees -- as I can testify because I've had Ray downloaded since ferrevah and still haven't watched it).
Interesting little movie, I believe it just came out on DVD. See if you can get your hands on it. It's a sci-fi time travel reality play in a very ordinary current day setting. It is somewhat-to-fairly confusing. And it's pretty watchable, for a movie that cost seven Gs to make.
20 June 2005
Film Reco
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5 comments:
saw it at the cinematheque not too long ago, was good. my brother thought there was some kind of biblical name symbolism thing going on, though i have my doubts. thought of this movie when looking at recent slashdot post on time travel:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4097258.stm
Definitely came up with the biblical deal as well, although I haven't broken it down. The three names I remember are Abe (Abraham), Aaron, and Rachel.
The dude who triple-threated it is definitely somewhat religious.
I have to admit, I cheated and looked some stuff (spoiler) up online to get the full story, in lieu of re-viewing.
so i guess after reading that interview, any doubts i had have been dispelled; i had assumed that the names were just a matter of cultural context.
I also had thought that there was some intentional ambiguity in the story, given that you can't always tell which timeline a particular character is from (despite hints like facial hair, earpiece, and general affect). He seems to indicate in that interview that it should be possible to assemble a completely well-defined narrative.
For me it was notable that while I certainly didn't have a firm grasp of what was going on, I did have a feel for it and the movie was totally still watchable. And interesting.
Check out my spoiler above if you wanna see someone's best guess at a firm timeline(s).
For your next exercise: compare and contrast with Donnie Darko.
BTW, the slashdot article you posted puts me in mind of this Salon article. I think taking the quantum mechanics probabilities concept into the Back to the Future scenarios needlessly complicates it and creates all kinds of situations that are hard to understand and not well understood.
By me, at least.
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