Blindspot 2012: Primer

Written and Directed by Shane Carruth (2004) Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

Primer is one of those grapevine movies, one of the few that had a lot of people talking about it after it premiered.  It is also a really smart science fiction film that approaches time travel in one of its more plausible scenarios, although I feel like most of the science went right over my head.  That creating a machine for time travel that the inventors might not even know what they’ve created seem fitting.

Abe (Sullivan) approaches his friend and business partner Aaron (Carruth) one day and explains that the machine they had been working on doesn’t error check.  This conclusion is drawn mostly by fungus, then by the fact that Abe has already built a machine for himself, and it is telling Aaron it exists from the future.

What Primer succeeds best in is building tension in a quiet, suburban manner.  The men aren’t trying to change history when they first travel with the machines, just to win money through the stock market.  Pretty soon, the notion of creating “doubles” and abusing the time streams is brought to an ethical quandary.  Notably, the fact that Abe and Aaron are consciously aware that they are destroying themselves through the machine.  Traveling back in time results in injuries that men discuss, but they slide over the fact that the man who goes into the box doesn’t exist at the end of the day.  Identities are drawn clearly as “doubles” rather than acknowledging the paradox of ending one’s own life to pursue time travel.  It poses an interesting double to a film like Moon where science effects the identity of the man experiencing it.

It’s worth another, more careful watch, if only to follow the engineer chatter that sets up the excellent third act.  I will admit that I had to look up a Wikipedia article for fully understand the time loop the characters create and to clear up some plot quibbles I had.  It doesn’t tie up perfectly, but it’s a movie that takes a popular topic for science fiction and turns it into an obscure dialogue into scientific ethics.

Beginners

Directed by Mike Mills (2010) Starring: Ewan McGregor, Melanie Laurent, Christopher Plummer

Beginners is a very zen movie, which is a little strange considering how sad it is.  It’s just a very relaxed sadness, what it means to feel so disconnected from life, but finding a way back to it.  Oliver (McGregor) describes his life after his father’s death, four years after his father comes out of the closet.  He adopts his dog Arthur and reflects on his childhood, the history of sadness, and falling in love with French actress Anna (Laurent).

It’s weird to call it a quiet film since the soundtrack is very present, but that’s what it feels like.  Most of the emotional tug is subtle, or quirky without being too saccharine.  While Oliver and Anna behave typically over-the-top, it becomes endearing as two damaged people find a viable connection.  For example, they meet at a Halloween party, where Oliver is dressed as Sigmund Freud, carrying around Arthur.  They manage to have a conversation, even though Anna has lost her voice.  And off we go.  Oliver talks to Arthur, pretending that he can hear the dog’s responses (subtitles help us see into his thoughts) and leaves graffiti of “historical consciousness” rather than simple tags.  Anna lives in hotels and empty apartments, doesn’t answer her father’s phone calls, but also thinks that she can hear Arthur talking to her.

The film is cut between straight narrative of 2003 with Oliver’s reflections on life in the 1950s, when his parents got married and how happiness and sadness was portrayed in media.  Static images hang against a black background, or else switch phrenetically as Oliver describes them.  When his father is diagnosed with lung cancer, a quarter appears, later broken up into two dimes and one nickel, then twenty-five pennies as if understanding the term “a quarter-sized lump” can just as easily be broken up the same way.

For awhile, I couldn’t see how Hal’s (Plummer) sexuality fit into the picture.  As a character he joins gay activist groups and passionately tells Oliver about Harvey Milk.  It didn’t seem appropriate to have homosexuality handled in such a political, rather than personal, manner, but it makes sense.  Hal was looking for the community he couldn’t have after forty-plus years of marriage.  He is always determined to have someone to the point where he is worried about Oliver winding up alone because he won’t settle.

It’s a well-made, off-center film that is worth a trip to the local theater.  While it’s sad, it’s also filled with infinite hope.

Night of the Living Dead

Directed by George A. Romero (1968)

Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Kyra Schon

Ah,  horror movie love.  It’s not something I’m terribly familiar with, to be honest.  I don’t really get the fans of Red Box Horror or the ladies who line up for midnight screenings of the Saw franchise.  But what I do get is a love of the Zombie Movie Genre, and the modern incarnation all begins with the grainy 35mm Pittsburgh epic.  My immediate reaction to Night of the Living Dead was movie-love, pure and simple.

Barbara (O’Dea) and her brother Johnny visit their father’s grave on the night when radiation from a satellite effects the recent dead, causing them to reanimate and crave human flesh.  When Johnny is killed, Barbara is able to escape to a farmhouse nearby, where she is joined by other survivors, including Ben (Jones).  Ben takes care of Barbara as he fends off the approaching corpses.  She has gone catatonic, only speaking occasionally as she follows Ben’s orders.

Ben is by far my favorite character.  Not only does he have a take-charge attitude, but he recognizes how the situation has messed up Barbara and approaches everything with a clear head.  In contrast, the five others in the house with them, especially Harry (Hardman) who is too stubborn and prejudiced to agree to Ben’s plans.

Meanwhile, our heroine is the opposite of these focused zombies and Ben.  She’s helpless, which riled up my feminist side, but as I understand it, they had altered the script to O’Dea’s performance.  In fact, it seems like Night of the Living Dead never had a set script, but instead moving along with a general plot and changing elements when necessary.  When put in that context, it seems like a different creative work.  Rather than some magnum opus, it can breathe and adjust itself as necessary, without losing much in terms of terror, and probably gaining more in subtext.  Honestly, it just seems so appropriate for the American Independent Horror to have such a thrown-together production.

As much as the characters are trapped in the farm house while the dead stumble outside, they’re not cut off from the world.  There’s a radio that Ben sets up, and eventually they get the television working.  The news gives some explanation towards why the dead are reanimated, related to radiation from a satellite, but the explanation is largely unnecessary.  It just gets thrown in as an easy explanation.  The news broadcast then shifts to the local situation, showing that it’s quite easy to kill the risen dead. Just aim for the head.

Not like that advice helps, when there are so many outside the farmhouse.  The attempt to escape ends horrifically, though it was caused by human error rather than the undead.  It was surprising to see how crafty the undead act and how determined they are to get to the humans.  For zombies, they’re pretty damn intelligent.

And it is damn scary, forty-three years later, in a gritty way that many have tried to replicate, but never quite match.

 

 

But I’m a Cheerleader

SUCH a 90s Satire, It’s not even Funny

directed by Jamie Babbit (1999)

Starring Natasha Lyonne and Clea Duvalle

But I’m a Cheerleader starts out with cheerleaders being… they’re naturally cheerleader selves.  And our good friend Megan, with her perfect cheerleader big hair and other sterotypical lifestyle of the average teen, not enjoying her make out session with her buff boyfriend (but I can understand this, because from what I could see of the scene, he couldn’t kiss).

This, however, plus other signs, leads her friends and parents to believe that she’s a lesbian and is shipped off to True Directions.  There she meets Graham, who opens her eyes to a new lifestyle.

I like this movie because it parodizes the Anti-Gay movement so well and their favorite war cry “It’s Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!”  Best seen through the crazy woman running True Directions, with her obviously fabulous  son and her determination to put men and women in their “proper” roles: Such as, women as housewives, men as… lumberjacks (not kidding, it does).

This movie is rated R for the obvious sexual orientation reasons, and I don’t really feel like going into them right now.  Masturbation, sex, kissing, etc etc.

The extremity of the movie is what makes it fun and hilarious.  I equally love when the Gay Troopers come in to take the kids to a field trip to the local gay bar.  It’s this gay couple who went there and then realized that they would rather just be true to themselves afterwards, so now they offer a different option to the new campers.  And that is where Megan and Graham have their first kiss, awww… (well, first kiss outside of Megan’s dreams.  And, let’s assume, Graham’s).

The settings really form part of the hilarity, since it starts in creepy suburbia clearly stolen from Edward Scissorhands and then moves to this pink and blue house with rooms decorate to the proper color of the sex that’s practicing in it.  Except for some green rooms, which represent something.  Something like greed or ignorance.  It’s the color of the boss-lady’s bedroom and the office where the campers meet with their parents.

The relationships developped between characters, or the ones that do, seem realistic enough for me.  If you consider being trapped on a farm with others of your sexual orientation for two months, the logical matching up would occur.  The relationship between Megan and Graham seems very well crafted, since it’s Megan’s first love so she’s all puppy-eyed and Graham is torn between Megan and her parents’ expectations or financial support. 

I do have problems with this movie, which is that half of the evidence presented as to why Megan is gay is rather baseless.  As I mentioned before, her boyfriend just can’t kiss.  Then it was because of a Melissa Etheridge poster in her room.  Things like that, added to staring at the other cheerleaders and not having pictures of boys in her locker at school.

So, to sum up: It’s a satire made in the 1990s.  The opening premise is really weak in order to launch this plot immediately and as expediently as possible.  Very entertaining to watch unless you’re squeamish about the sex stuff, which is understandable because, yeah, that stuff can be rather awkward to watch.