Obscurity Hall of Fame: Primer

Hey, another new feature! I'm sure you're just as excited as I am. This one is a series of profiles of movies that I own, watch once a month, and quote in everyday speech, but nobody has ever seen unless I force them to at gunpoint.

I'm calling it the Obscurity Hall of Fame: personal classics of mine that barely made an impact on the pop-culture world. The first inductee is one of my favorite time-travel films (look forward to that list): Primer.

Primer is a relatively simple idea, and a universal theme: the accidental nature of invention, and the boundaries of trust. Two friends (David Sullivan and writer/director Shane Carruth) experiment with fiber optic cables (or something) in their free time, and find out they've created something that can transport objects backward in time.

They decide, naturally, to play the stock market a little to take advantage of their discovery. But of course, time travel is never simple, and mistakes and betrayals quickly send the movie spiraling into a hall-of-mirrors of duplicate main characters, odd side effects, and convoluted situations that require multiple viewings to logically understand.

It's a great film, and a great exploration of the theoretical questions that time travel would bring up (which, as my friends can tell you, I could talk about for hours on end. In fact, everyone should read Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, by Richard Gott, and then get back to me. Great book.). And it doesn't dumb any of the science-type-stuff or the complicated ending down, which is refreshing.

So it's an awesome film. That's one reason to see it. The other reason I love it is that it doubles as a crash course in cheap, independent film-making: it was shot on a $7,000 budget, and listening to the commentary by Shane Carruth, it's fascinating to hear how they had to beg, borrow, and improvise to get everything to come together.

They rented cameras, edited it on laptops, shot in Carruth's parents' house and his brother's apartment- his mother even provided the catering. They had so little money for film that there are no deleted scenes- you can even see Carruth's character saying 'cut' under his breath to end scenes, but they couldn't edit it out because it would cut the scene too short.

I don't know about other movie fans/critics/etc., but I always daydream about shooting a movie myself. And even though it's not a success that's likely to be replicated, knowing that some people in Dallas can put this together on seven grand and then win the grand jury prize at Sundance gives me hope.

EDIT: Obscurity be damned! You can watch this on Google video, right now! Do it!