Primer (2004 Film) - Thoughts?

Hmmm, researching Upstream Color on Rottentomatoes makes it sound like it is exactly the kind of movie that I dig.

I realize some people in this thread hated it but these review excerpts/ratings make it sound right up my alley - I am not a fan of most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood these days though, I like more cerebral (or as some might say "pretentious" or "arty") films.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/upstream_color/

The most visually imaginative American film since David Lynch's Eraserhead.

A cerebral, mournful mystery that resonates like a tuning fork struck on a far-off star.

The miracle of Upstream Color is that a film so carefully and exquisitely composed can yield so many moments of open-ended cinematic rapture.

However you watch it, it's a movie that will mean more for you if you don't worry about what's happening minute-by-minute and, instead, just let your mind wander as its muted images and snippets of dreamy poetry flow.

Mystifyingly cryptic yet oddly hypnotic.


Gets an 84% critic rating and this description:

As technically brilliant as it is narratively abstract, Upstream Color represents experimental American cinema at its finest -- and reaffirms Shane Carruth as a talent to watch.

 

Upstream Color is terrific, and just as perplexing. Primer I also loved, but I'm still not sure I get it even after watching it five or six times. What I like about him, and what sets him apart from other film makers, is he comes from a science, rather than a film, background, and goes some way to explaining why his films are so complex and unique. I like the meeting of science and film, especially when the results end up like this. It would be interesting to see him work on a big budget science fiction film, but I'm not sure whether he's prepared to simplify his vision for a mass audience.

 

I hope his abandoned project A Topiary gets funding someday - that sounded kind of fascinating, and would've required a relatively large budget.

 

My wife and I saw it in the theater at the Chicago International Film Festival with the director. He talked about how he made it for so little - first, while it was shot on film, it was all done with "ends", the bits left on a roll of film from another production. So they had a pile of little snippits of unexposed film, and they planned out each shot based on the various end lengths. They would intensely rehearse each scene to hit that mark. That isone of the reasons for the calm, weary performances, that they had said those words over and over already.

It's what you do when film is expensive, and actors are cheap or free.

 

Watched it once, didn't really understand what was going on. Read a very thorough explanation on the internet, watched it again, understood much more. Will probably watch it again eventually after reading through again.

It is interesting and pretty fun though.

 

Primer is a lot of work. I watched it 3 or 4 times before it clicked. It doesn't help that the audio is so bad. Best to watch with subtitles turned on. I do not normally invest this much effort in a movie, but there was something about Primer that made me stick with it.

 

You're right--the biggest issue with the movie is that the writer-director can't really tell a narrative well. It has a neat idea.

 

own it and love it!

 

only when you are not in it...

 

I just watched it, and while I found it far more interesting than Upstream Color, it's still too oblique for its own good. One problem is unclear dialogue, an instance of which prompted me to turn the video back three times to hear what the pivotal word was. It's a good sign knowing I was invested enough by that point to bother, so I give the movie points for that. The fact that it's shot on film explains why it's grainy as all hell. A few uses of a Canon 5D mkIII for the night shots would have helped immensely in the clarity of those scenes.

The idea is what kept me going, once it started to kick in. That's the reason I watch most science fiction -- a compelling idea -- but things start to fall apart once the paradoxes begin appearing. I realize Carruth may want the viewer disoriented, but this was the wrong kind of disorientation. I agree he seems to have a problem with narrative, or at least with understanding how to deliver important information to the viewer effectively.

Having said all that, I'm curious to watch the movie again knowing more about what's actually going on. So while it needed tightening up, for $7K it's quite an achievement, and I hope Carruth learns from these first two films so the next one is better. I think the guy has potential.

 

I couldn't finish it - it was just a mess.

 

The audio is generally terrible. It's nearly impossible to watch without subtitles. And you really do need to watch it more than once to truly "get it". The mechanics of how time travel works in the context of this movie is critical to the plot. He doesn't feed it to you.

 

I got the general gist of it, but I'm sure it will become clearer upon second viewing. I don't subscribe to the idea that the viewer should have to do all of the work, though, and by that I mean subtitles, diagrams to understand the timelines, etc. He needn't have made the opening scenes so opaque if the rest of the narrative was going to be as dense. Meet your audience half way.

The question, now that I think about it, is: does Carruth want to communicate ideas, or does he want to make cinematic riddles that require such energy to solve that the impact of the ideas are diminished. Appropriately enough, I saw 2001 on the big screen again a couple of weeks ago, and it's equally possible to say that Kubrick created a riddle where the idea was secondary. The difference is that the ideas are indeed there in 2001, and they're communicated clearly, if subtly (the use of music is very important). And let's face it, 2001 just looks brilliant. Having read the summary of Carruth's unfilmed script A Topiary, I sense he's reaching for a similar effect as Kubrick did in 2001, but he hasn't the skills or resources to do so yet.

 

I don't disagree. He makes the viewer work too hard on Primer. I don't know if that was by design or just the fact that you have a first time writer, actor, and filmmaker working with a $7000 budget. The fact that anyone but is friends and family saw it is an achievement in an of itself. I did not care for it all the first time through. I watched it a 2nd time years later while on a flight. For some reason it got stuck in my head after the 2nd viewing and I was compelled to watch it yet again to figure out what was really going on. Primer has many, many flaws but it deals with time travel in very unique way. That is what I found fascinating about it.

Upstream Color is a completely different animal. Primer is so crammed full of dialog there hardly any space between the words. By contract, the last 3rd of Upstream has no dialog at all. At the end of Upstream I had no idea what I had just seen and couldn't decide if I hated it or not. Since I couldn't stop thinking about it, I decided it must have had something. I have since decided that I like it a great deal.

 

Thumbs up on both Primer and Upstream Color.

If you like to have a movie explain everything to you then neither of these is going to satisfy. If you're ok with ambiguity of interpretation and feeling ok with just tuning into the "vibe" of a film, then both of these films are very satisfying. They are to me anyway.

Carruth's new project is The Modern Ocean. Here's a recent interview:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/we...about-the-human-drama-behind-the-modern-ocean

 

I watched a lengthy run through of the script for A Topiary on Youtube. What a crazy and ambitious project. It's a shame that it will not be made. It might have been a terrible mess, but it might also have been brilliant. I would like to have had the chance to decide.