What is that movie?

April 14, 2005 11:49 PM

I need help with the name of a movie. It came out quite recently, within the last year. It's an low-budget indie thing about two guys who have some sort of technology experiment in their garage. They create a (time?) machine or something...the title is just one word. Looks rather cerebral. Ebert did a positive review of it I read once but I can't find it on his site. Anyone know?
posted by zardoz to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Best answer: Primer!

pretty cool flick...very inventive, and really takes advantage of it's low budget to focus on ideas, rather than visual dazzle. it's very confusing, and difficult to follow, but worth a look at the very least.
posted by cathodeheart at 11:53 PM on April 14, 2005

Response by poster: Got it! thanks...
posted by zardoz at 11:57 PM on April 14, 2005

FYI, Google's movie search is really good for something like this. Primer is the only hit when you search for movie: indie garage time machine.
posted by Plutor at 6:45 AM on April 15, 2005

I enjoyed the heck out of this movie, saw it on a fluke when I had a few hours free. It's not a perfect movie by any means, but it's one of the better time travel movies made.

It also pretty amazing for a first movie and made pretty much by one guy without any studio help.
posted by beowulf573 at 6:54 AM on April 15, 2005

I saw this at the Toronto film festival. It's really good. It was so good that I ran out of the theater when the credits rolled, because I didn't want to hear the Q&A with director for fear that he might actually answer some stupid "what happened when..." questions.
posted by Capn at 8:06 AM on April 15, 2005

I saw it at the Mill Valley Film Festival. This was, by far, the best movie I saw at the festival. It comes out next Tuesday on DVD and I already have it pre-ordered. I stayed for the director's chat and I can say with some relief that he didn't get into the, "what happened when" questions. He started to explain some of the larger concepts, but ultimately stated that he didn't write this movie so that it would be analyzed down to the tiniest detail. It was clear that he wrote it this way, but he wanted to focus more on the relationship of the two main characters and how their invention affected their lives. Very impressive for a first time director and I am looking forward to the romance movie he said was his next one.
posted by xorowo at 8:27 AM on April 15, 2005

I just gotta get a shout out here. The movie was filmed largely in the apartment complex where I lived at the time (Post Addison Circle, in Addison, TX, a suburb of Dallas) and was also filmed on the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas, most notably in the engineering building, Founder's North (sort of the Chemistry and Geosciences building) and the bridge in between. Starring none other than Keith Bradshaw, a guy I used to work with. He's the one who made the "What do you do with engineers when..." joke. OK, so not exactly *starring* him, he's in it for about 10 seconds.

The awesomest part? I went to see it without knowing any of this. In the middle of it I was like "holy crap, that's my apartment! Holy crap, that's my old office! HOLY crap that's an old co-worker".
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:55 AM on April 15, 2005

one interesting fact about this movie: it was made for the paltry sum of $7000.
posted by crunchland at 10:56 AM on April 16, 2005

7k, but two years of post-production, and then 40k to convert it to 35mm. I netflixed it, watched it, then hurried and returned it so I wouldn't rewatch it obsessively and flowchart the sequencing, thus consuming hours of my precious lifeforce.
posted by craniac at 6:33 PM on April 23, 2005