“Then there were days, good days, when by anyone’s judgment they would have to be considered clever.”

The Distinguished Professors get serious with their time travel with 2004’s Primer, an intense independent cinematic experience involving 20-something engineers in suburban Texas entering and leaving a storage facility at various times. Topics discussed include the $7000 budget, dilation, the lack of Steven Johnson’s “red flashing arrows,” what makes an art house or indie movie “good,” the 40-year-old expiration date for engineers(?!), Power Rangers’ repackaging of old episodes as a time travel season, bottle episodes, the advantages and drawbacks of naturalistic sound in a movie, the deliberate mysteriousness of Granger, the problem of the murkiness of the initial project, Abe is the smart and careful time-traveler, Shane Carruth’s control over the movie as writer/ director/ composer, the failsafe machine, the shocking arrivals of violence at various points, our admissions that we cheated in watching review videos, realistic limits on meeting your past self, contrast with the time travel in Avengers: Endgame, the indeterminate punched-ness of Joseph Platts and speculation about when Aaron goes bad, more speculation about when they discover that changes can occur, Abe once more wins Clink’s seal of time traveler approval, more defecation on Whedon and the role of ego in directors, kit-bashed time machines, saying hello to Ma Clink, and plans for the future.

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Music credits:

"Laser Groove" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/