Cinema Suicide

I don’t address modern cult movies here much because I often have a hard time recognizing them. The internet has broken down cultural barriers in such a way that a torrent of culty movies have moved in from all directions. Spotting the ones that will go down in history has become a difficult thing. This article at The Onion AV Club points out two movies that will go down years from now as movies that people keep coming back to. Donnie Darko, which I still think about regularly, but more importantly, Shane Carruth’s impenetrable time travel flick, Primer.

If you haven’t seen Primer, you probably should think about doing so. Be warned, though. When I say impenetrable, its plot is surrounded by a concrete shell that works the circular logic of time travel into a script swimming in real science jargon. Essentially, two garage-based inventors set out to build a superconductor and wind up building a time machine by accident. What follows are the dire consequences of rearranging the past in order to affect the future in their favor. Shot by an engineer with no filmmaking experience, for $7,000, Primer has quietly built a cult of intellectuals fascinated by it’s winding, hyper-comlicated story. There are websites, discussion boards and entire wikis around the web devoted to untangling its fascinating mystery.

This article at the Onion AV Club is quite a pitch about why you need to see this movie and why people are losing their minds over it. I don’t often link to these cats, but this is a fantastic article that puts into words why this movie is so outstanding better than I could ever hope to.