primer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Slugging through the cold Monday morning, I took a moment to read the latest xkcd (a huge image through the link), and they've managed to boil some major cinematic experiences down into line charts. The latest installment of the web comic tackles Movie Narrative Charts; most specifically, the movie character interactions in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars (original trilogy), Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer.

The charts are actually a pretty intricate set of lines showing how each character progresses through the movie -- who they meet, and the main events and conflicts that take place. However, the big wow for me is in the overall look -- how that mass of lines evokes the same memories of confusion, or lack thereof, watching the films. There's the rolling but easy-to-follow storyline of Star Wars, the pure simplicity and ease of 12 Angry Men, and best of all -- the confusion of Lord of the Rings and Primer.

I could never get into the books, so watching Rings was an exercise in intrigued confusion -- trying to keep the characters straight, waiting for a slow moment to whisper a question, and trying to make sense of a thick storyline funneled into a film. And on the other end of the confusion spectrum, there's Primer -- the film that spins around and evokes stunned, hard-to-define confusion, the spiraling lines also mimicking a lot of the wide eyes of "what the f...?!" I saw after the film's screening at TIFF.

Sometimes it's terrible storytelling, sometimes it's confusion as an art form, and sometimes it's just the mind trying to deal with mass amounts of information. Xkcd managed to lay out some of the main moments of my cinematic confusion, but what are yours? What films leave you trying to follow and make sense of the narrative?

Terminator: Salvation hits theaters today and to commemorate that we're looking at films that veer into the fourth dimension (that's time for us non-technical folk). Time travel is a story device with all kind of possibilities built right in. If I could travel back to 2005 and locate Jennifer Aniston would I be able to convince her that making The Break-Up was a really bad idea? I can dream, can't I? Anyway, here are seven of my favorite time travel movies.

Back to the Future (1985)
Between constant reruns on basic cable and just being a pretty awesome flick is there anyone in this world who hasn't seen Back to the Future? Eccentric scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) while demonstrating his Delorean-mounted time machine sends Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) back to the 1950s. Marty's return to 1985 must be timed to the split second to coincide with a lightning bolt that will power the Delorean's Flux Capacitor, but in the meantime Marty disrupts the event that got his parents together thus threatening his very existence. Before he can return to his own time Marty needs to put his folks back on the path to marriage, put a bully in his place and invent the skateboard all set to the music of Huey Lewis and The News. This movie is just plain fun. The following year Lea Thompson who plays Marty's mom graduated from coming on to her own son to putting the moves on a cranky water fowl in Howard the Duck.

With Transformers coming to DVD next week, I was thinking about science fiction -- how it plays on-screen, how it works as a genre and, most importantly, how a big-number budget doesn't mean a high-quality film. But there are plenty of movies to check out if you want a few examples of how a lack of funds doesn't automatically translate to a lack of ideas. For this list, I wanted to concentrate on a more modern set of films - no '50s Ed Wood-style cheapies, nothing deliberately camp (with one exception), nothing that was more concerned with set design and irony than story and ideas (The American Astronaut, Forbidden Zone) and nothing that played more as horror than science fiction. I wasn't able to track down budget numbers for one of the films (The Quiet Earth), but the rest add up to a fairly modest $3 million -- total; even if you assume that The Quiet Earth cost a million dollars, you're still looking at seven amazing films for a very reasonable $4 million. Or, more bluntly, less than Michael Bay spent on slow-mo spray-on-sweat shots of Megan Fox and a urinating robot gag. And, finally, I'm sure there are some great low-budget sci-films I've missed or overlooked or just not seen ... and I'd love to hear about your picks in the comments selection below.

The Quiet Earth (1985)

Striking, unsettling and beautiful, this New Zealand indie takes the basic plot of the '50s end-of-the-world film The World, the Flesh and the Devil and puts a glowing, gorgeous spin on it -- more contemplative than tense, more philosophical than plot-driven. A scientist (Bruno Lawrence) who's been working on an experimental energy source finds that he's ... the last man on Earth. And while he does find two other people wandering the desolate world, he's still forced to try and find himself. Lawrence is impressive -- essentially carrying the first third of the movie -- and Geoff Murphy's direction is full of haunting images and fascinating ideas. Most importantly, The Quiet Earth doesn't come wrapped up with a bow -- you have to actually think about it, and it invites contemplation as firmly as it resists easy conclusions.


Primer (2004)

Made for a reported $7,000, Primer is that rarest of all science fiction films -- a low-budget brain-bender that both demands and rewards repeat viewings. Friends and fellow engineers Shane Carruth (also director, writer, editor, composer, etc, etc. ...) and David Sullivan are working on their own business in their off-hours, and one of their experiments results in a weird statistical anomaly they can't explain -- and, the more they explore it, leads the two to develop a bizarre sort of time machine. The machine is dangerous, it's risky, it's barely understood ... and it works. And pretty soon, you're watching the film as the characters live it -- is what's happening really what's happening now, or is someone else messing with the time stream? And is one of our characters that 'someone else'? Primer takes a simple, tired cliché and extrapolates that idea to every logical illogical conclusion with riveting, dizzying effect.

Ridley Scott, or Sir Ridley Scott depending on how you feel like addressing him, made a fairly provocative comment at the Venice Film Festival on August 30th. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the release of Blade Runner, in yet another director's cut, in anticipation of a 5 (five!) disc DVD release of the same this fall by Warner Brothers. (The previous link includes some reviews of the newest version at the Venice festival, including EW's Owen Gliberman's comment that Blade Runner is "the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental." Hey, Owen, what about this Fritz Lang classic, or this Russian masterpiece, or even this small-scale but extremely effective version of the Ursula K. Leguin novel ... eh, what's the use.) To get back to the original point about sweeping generalizations, Scott was in a no doubt expansive mood, and started to discuss the great films of sci-fi.

Here's how it went down, according to The Times of London on-line. In Scott's opinion, science fiction films are not just dead, they're "as dead as westerns...there's nothing original. We've seen it all before. Been there. Done that." Scott celebrates 2001: A Space Odyssey as the pinnacle of sci-fi and says that "over-reliance on special effects" and weak story lines are the culprit. Responses from the blogosphere came fast and furious; one correspondent, Donald Smith, pointed out that Shane Carruth's small-scale film Primer had been "low-key and highly intelligent" while being completely without high-tech bloat. What I haven't been seeing is someone making the point that Blade Runner is film noir dressed in a sci-fi costume, just like Scott's other famous sci-fi film Alien, is a monster movie set in outer space. When it comes to the essential matter of sci-fi -- what humans are, where we are going, and when will we cease to exist -- Scott is only slightly interested ... especially when compared to the Philip K. Dick novel upon which Blade Runner is based. Watching it, you have to recall Pauline Kael's comment that almost everyone in the film would flunk the Voight-Kampff empathy test that ferrets out skin-jobs. As the director of such a high-tech, low-emotion film, is Scott really in a position to nail shut the coffin of an entire genre?