I saw the suckiest movie this weekend and what makes it worse is that almost everyone in the known indie-watching universe loved it and Grand Jury-awarded it. So why did I hate Primer so much? For one thing the acting was miserably bad. Sure, the film was made for $7,000, so maybe I should cut it some slack in the cast department. But it was oh so painfully obvious that the writer/director wanted to build tension and get a time-machine-inventors-in-the-garage-type reality through stammered, overlapping conversation. That kind of gimmick needs some Glengarry Glen Ross-type talent, baby. Watching these two amateurs hamhand it drove me mad, I tell you. Mad. I wanted to throttle the blonde lead.
I started fast-forwarding through the DVD, doing my own kind of time travel, hoping that it got better later. Nope. And here I read all these people are excitedly enjoying repeated viewings of it to figure out what's really happening.
I would hazard a guess that my brain is just not wired to go along for the string theory ride, but I dug Pi, which was full of low-budget jinkity*-ness and maddening math mambo'ing. It smacks of the Emperor's New Chemistry Set to me.
*A term I learned in a Nightline(?!) interview with Beck (evidently the newsmagazineshow is trying to age down the demographic, yo.) It's hard to imagine a human being being cooler than the Beckster. Jinkity is his word for something that's just slightly off. Perfect in its imperfection. Unlike Primer.
No comments:
Post a Comment