Primer/ Gunner Palace

Reviewing 2 very different movies today...

1. is Primer ... This is one of the most interesting debuts I have ever seen ... It does not have the clearest narrative ... **** ... It is a movie about time travel, discovery and causality ...

Here is a short discussion ...

I really enjoy this movie ... yes its confusing, yes some of the sound and camerawork isn't perfect .. but its really interestign and involves engineers tinkering that find something they don't expect ...

It would be very interesting if they could go farther back then they thought they could ... Basically in my mind things got weird and when they tried to fix it things got weirder ...
.. i think seeing the subtitles helps too ...

I really enjoy this film and it was the second time I saw it ... ***1/2 ...

I would be very curious to see what else Shane Carruth does with more then $7,000 .....

Here is a plot explanation of the movie .. I will put the website in spoiler tags ...

http://www.francisshanahan.com/detail.aspx?cid=375

This movie is very interesting, very thought provoking, and intriguing ... the narrative is not completely clear but very very interesting .. .would love comments ...


The other film I am reviewing right now is TOTALLY different. Its Gunner Palace, a documentary about a unit that was stationed in Uday Hussein's old pleasure palace in a hostile neighborhood called Adamihya, which the US doesn't control well ... It has around 300 troops stationed and basically acting like cops trying to find insurgents in post-"war" Iraq.

This movie deals with the fact that most soldiers are very young and that in Iraq, the main armed conflict and taking of Baghdad is/was much, much easier then winning the peace. I do hope Iraq finds stability, but there were many errors made in Gulf War II... Chief among them was the immediate dissolution of the army and police and not protecting Baghdad's cultural treasures.

Its an interesting film, and i enjoyed it. There is one really interesting cat out of Colorado that plays a great guitar and some good freestyle rappers.

This movie took me a few tries to get into .... ***

that it for now.

E. Charles Quinn