Movie Time!
I watched Volver today, sans subtitles. I’m still recovering from the headlong cascade of Spanish but I think I liked the movie (visually speaking, it was certainly stunning). I may have even understood it, no mean feat given that Penelope Cruz speaks at the approximate speed of a Stuka dive bomber.
I also watched Primer, which-despite the fact that it’s in English-I understood even less than Volver. It’s a time travel story with half a dozen intertwining timelines, and if that isn’t enough Primer compounds the problem by being almost entirely in unemotional technical jargon-but it’s strangely compelling nonetheless.
I’m especially impressed because I don’t usually like stories about time. I don’t mean time travel stories per se-a lot of time travel stories are basically historical travelogues-but stories that revolve around time-travel paradoxes, confused timelines, prophecies, or anything else that leads to meditations on the True Nature of Time. These stories inevitably have a favored metaphor-time is a line or a circle or a rainbow colored daisy with spikes-except these pat metaphors always fall apart, because time isn’t any of those things any more than light is a wave or a particle.
Primer shuns any such philosophical explanation, which is probably why it’s so compelling and so frustrating. It’s impossible to watch without wondering why the time machine works and what that means about the universe. The questions are unanswerable, and Primer doesn’t even try; but as a viewer it’s almost impossible not to take the bait and attempt to explain the inexplicable.
Primer has a forum dedicated to it, which is still going four years after the movie was released. The movie raises too many tantalizing issues not to analyze, and too impervious to analysis to ever stop being tantalizing.
***
On a lighter note: treehouses! (via minervasolo). When I grow up, I want to live in a tree house. With a cat and a weeping willow tree and raspberry bushes. Preferably overlooking a stream. A stream with duckies!
Why, yes. I really am five years old at heart.
I also watched Primer, which-despite the fact that it’s in English-I understood even less than Volver. It’s a time travel story with half a dozen intertwining timelines, and if that isn’t enough Primer compounds the problem by being almost entirely in unemotional technical jargon-but it’s strangely compelling nonetheless.
I’m especially impressed because I don’t usually like stories about time. I don’t mean time travel stories per se-a lot of time travel stories are basically historical travelogues-but stories that revolve around time-travel paradoxes, confused timelines, prophecies, or anything else that leads to meditations on the True Nature of Time. These stories inevitably have a favored metaphor-time is a line or a circle or a rainbow colored daisy with spikes-except these pat metaphors always fall apart, because time isn’t any of those things any more than light is a wave or a particle.
Primer shuns any such philosophical explanation, which is probably why it’s so compelling and so frustrating. It’s impossible to watch without wondering why the time machine works and what that means about the universe. The questions are unanswerable, and Primer doesn’t even try; but as a viewer it’s almost impossible not to take the bait and attempt to explain the inexplicable.
Primer has a forum dedicated to it, which is still going four years after the movie was released. The movie raises too many tantalizing issues not to analyze, and too impervious to analysis to ever stop being tantalizing.
***
On a lighter note: treehouses! (via minervasolo). When I grow up, I want to live in a tree house. With a cat and a weeping willow tree and raspberry bushes. Preferably overlooking a stream. A stream with duckies!
Why, yes. I really am five years old at heart.