Primer

Next stop on a week of crap was the movie Primer. It won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the girl at Blockbuster recommended it (which I should know by now is a red flag that I should immediately put it back and vacate the store). The plot sounded interesting - two engineers create a time machine, then go back in time and screw with each other's knowledge, but the movie turned out to be a mess. The first half is all science jumbo that is just boring to listen to. Then they finally get their machine working, and they go back several hours to make money in the stock market. Then the film just goes loopy and there's something about copies of themselves, and one of the guys may or may not have gone bad, and I'm not really sure what happened after that. I jumped on IMDB after that, and this is the actual quote from the review: "There's one thing I can guarantee all viewers who sit down to watch 'Primer' - you will be confused. At most, I probably understood about a quarter of this insanely convoluted film, the zero-budget debut of filmmaker Shane Carruth. However, despite the fact that it doesn't make a great deal of sense, it could be one of the best American films of the year." So you won't understand a thing that happens, but that's because the movie is brilliant, not stupid. Obviously if you don't like the movie there's a flaw with you, not the movie. This is the same The Emperor Has No Clothes feeling I got from I Heart Huckabees. For Huckabees, it was throw around the word metaphysical and the movie becomes brilliant, not unfunny and painful to sit through. For Primer, apparently since it's convoluted and incomprehensible, that makes it one of the best films of the year. The other draw of this film was that it was made for only $7000, even though it doesn't really look low budget. I should have learned my lesson about films with gimmicks after seeing Russian Ark.