Movie Review: Primer (2004)

Aaron(Shane Carruth) and Abe(David Sullivan) have an invention.  They don't know what it is or what it does, but they know they have something.  They find out they have a time machine that makes it possible to go back a short time in the past.  The two have issues with how to use the time that they now have.

Primer is the type of movie that puts your brain into think mode.  I'm actually going to watch it again just so that I can help myself piece together the amount of times the two friends use the time machine.

The camera shots are really weird in this movie.  The opening scene is a shot from the ceiling angled down with a light in in the upper portion of the screen and the garage door in the background.  The next scene in the kitchen/dining area has the camera on the counter top, with the edge of the counter top showing.  There were other shots that just had too much showing of people's backs or other objects in the foreground that weren't vital for the scene.  By no means, am I an expert as far as directing goes, but there were so many scenes that were visually bothersome and it took away from the movie-watching experience.

Movie Review: I'll Follow You Down (2013)

I admit it. I loved The Sixth Sense. I loved that adorable little scamp, Haley Joel, as he muddled through his little life scared shitless of all the ghosts he could see. And though HJ has a TON of work on his resume, I’ve only seen him in 2 movies. Maybe my subconscious could see that he was basically a one-trick pony. 

I’ll Follow You Down is about Gabe, a scientist, with a loving wife, Marika, and an adoring son, Erol. Gabe heads out to Princeton for a conference but doesn’t return after the planned three days. Marika enlists the help of her father, Sal (another scientist), to find Gabe. Sal hacks into Gabe’s computer, investigates a secret research room filled with crates labeled “A. Einstein”, and discovers Gabe’s wallet and phone tucked away in a desk.

Not a good sign.

12 years later, Gabe is still gone. Erol is a young man studying theoretical physics in college and Marika is a fucking wreck. She’s never been able to ‘get over’ Gabe’s disappearance and barely makes it through each day. Sal, in all this time, has been studying Gabe’s notes and discovers something shocking: Gabe was working on time travel and may have actually succeeded in traveling back to 1946.

But what happened to him? Why didn’t he make it back home? After joining his grandfather in cracking the time travel code, Erol realizes he must follow his father back to 1946 and set the time line right. You see, since his father’s disappearance, everyone affected by it has been living in an altered time line. And it’s not all candy canes and Skittles-shitting unicorns.

Movie Review: Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

Getting older sucks. It's not fun at all. You have marriages, divorces, kids, jobs that you hate, traffic and money problems. Somewhere in your thirties, you tend to look back at all of the bad decisions and missed opportunities in your life. Sometimes you just want to recapture the good times. When three friends who have grown apart try to do this, they realize that you just can't. At least, not without a hot tub and an illegal Russian energy drink.

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Nick (Craig Robinson) and Adam (John Cusack) rush to the hospital to find their asshole friend Lou (Rob Corddry), who accidentally almost killed himself. They try to perk him up by taking him to a ski resort they used to visit in high school. They bring Adam's basement dwelling nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), who just fights with Lou constantly. The resort is a dump, and nowhere near the place they had all of their great times. In spite of their disappointment, they decide to get loaded and hang out in the hot tub. An accidental spill of a Russian energy drink shorts the mechanism, and the group is transported to a pivotal day in 1986.