Hey folks, Harry here with the latest from Memento Man who saw a pair of science fiction films today. 1 that cost $7000.00 to make and one that cost 10s of millions of dollars to make. Yet only a half star divides them. Sigh... don't ya love Film Festivals! They level the playing field!
Hi Harry,
Spent a large part of the day trying to get into THE MACHINIST by wait-list line, but was unsuccessful. That film's got some good buzz around town. However, I did see:
PRIMER (***)
This is a film of labyrinths within labyrinths. As somebody in the audience said during the Q&A today, "Thank you for making a film that makes its audience think." Most of the rest of the Q&A was devoted to people trying to ask writer/director/actor Shane Carruth to help them figure out what the film was even about. Everyone concluded that they needed to see the film at least one more time to even get a handle on what was happening.
[SPOILER WARNING]
The main premise is that a group of young men build a machine that is able to replicate a fungus with almost impossible speed. But then two of them decide to build two bigger machines and climb inside themselves. After crawling out, we see copies of these same people leaving the storage unit. Or are we watching the copies? Or are we watching copies of copies at different places in time? This is a film with so many openings and possibilities, that even its creator, Shane Carruth, admitted that there were things even he wasn't sure about.
[END OF SPOILERS]
Shane Carruth explained that he made the film for about $7000 which is truly remarkable. PRIMER has a grainy film stock with over/underlighting that makes the style reminiscent of PI (although PRIMER is in color) at the same time that its overabundance of technical dialogue also brings PI to mind. However, PRIMER is even more challenging than PI. It's so complicated, in fact, that many people were leaving the theater still not understanding what happened. It was fun to take the bus and hear people talking with their friends trying to make connections and figure the film out. Such conversations are relatively rare these days.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (*** & 1/2)
Darker, harsher, and less complicated than I was expecting, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT nevertheless still packs a punch. I'm still trying to figure out why this film was at Sundance, particularly when it's going to be released nationally in four days. It must be its tight structure combined with its beautiful cinematography. Writers/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber are the ones who deserve much of the praise here.
By now almost everyone knows the plot: Ashton Kutcher (who still mostly is playing Ashton) is Evan Treborn, a protagonist who realizes that by concentrating on pages of his journals written when he was younger that he can go back and reshape the past, often with terrifying consequences.
The D.P. is to be commended for the way that different scenes were colored and lit which quickly inform the audience of the feel and texture of a particular reality. Be ready, however, for a few moments of fairly troubling imagery combined with often bombastic sound design. As with the allusion of its title, when BUTTERFLY flaps its wings, it can feel like a typhoon is approaching.
Here's a shout out to GQSpeed! Fletch out, brother!
Until next time, this is Memento Man, trying to stay warm!
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