One Word Movie

Primer

I almost didn't go and see this movie, because it was on at the ICA. I used to go to the ICA quite a lot when I was young, pretentious, and full of crap. Because it seemed to be a requirement for films that were shown there to be, yes, pretentious, and yes, full of crap. And that was on a good night. I saw the worst film of my life in ICA 2, Wayne Wang's Life is Cheap but Toilet-Paper is Expensive. Truly, greaseproof for the soul.

But, for a fiver, you get to see Chris Marker's La Jetée (the film that inspired Twelve Monkeys), you get to see Primer, and you get to see some really awful modern art, too. I can't ignore value like that.

It's a pleasure to see La Jetée on the big screen. For me it's all about building towards the moving image, and then stepping away from it. So in purely plot terms, it's a bit of a failure, really. But a brave and interesting failure. And still a good film.

Primer, on the other hand, is the El Mariachi of time travel movies, shot on DV by a load of engineers for $7,000. I was amazed that they'd managed to spend that much. You should see it now, because they're going to remake it and almost certainly turn it into shit. There aren't any special effects, and the time machine looks like the one out of Calvin and Hobbes. And the engineers in the film, well, they look like real engineers, because they are real engineers. Not like the fake scientists in that shit Paul Verhoeven film about an invisible Kevin Bacon, for instance. There are no beautiful scientist women in this film to appeal to the FHM readers, when the science bits start to hurt the dear old brain, either. For fuck's sake. I have warned you. When they remake it, it'll almost certainly have Denise Richards getting her tits out in it. Ladbrokes have that as 6/4 on, which seems like a value proposition.

Because of all this, and because it nails the nerd-dialogue, the movie feels real. And it conveys very well the sense that what is happening is the leading edge of an almightly fuck-up. David Lynch would make films like this if he wasn't a lazy bastard, oh yeah. See, Mulholland Drive (shit) covers the same territory as this movie, but in that film Lynch gets all confused, so he makes sure the movie makes no sense at all, and voila, everyone hails him as a visionary genius.

Whereas this film does have things going on it. Things which get explained at some points using diagrams. And a reference to modular design. You're left to figure out the questions yourself, and you need to be paying attention. Definitely no time for snogging. And it will spin you out. This film is good, and I might have to go and see it again.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 2:13 PM