Bellflower (2011)
Bellflower starts with some random clips of events still to come in the movie, making it very clear that something distressing for the characters is coming later in the film. But then it gets straight into setting up the main premise of the film. Two very close male friends, Woodrow and Aiden, have long been excited about getting a fancy muscle car and flamethrower so that, if a Mad Max style end of the world as we know it scenario comes, they will be the ones in charge. There's at very least a kind of bromance between them, with Aiden flattering Woodrow by saying his eyes remind him of Lord Humungous from "Mad Max 2". That's the highest form of flattery for these two.
Anyway they go out and Aiden makes a fool of himself, turning out to be actually very good at socialising. Woodrow meanwhile very awkwardly begins a relationship with Milly. It's the most adorable believeable relationship I've seen on the big screen in quite a while and things only get better when their first date involves the two of them daring each other to have their meal in the sleaziest dive they can think of. Woodrow recommends somewhere a long drive away and Milly gets to see his car with whiskey on-tap on the dashboard on their way there.
At this stage whether we are talking about the two friends or this adorable couple, there's a sense that they need to grow up a bit. They've got this ridiculous childhood Mad Max fantasy and there's signs that Milly is getting on board with it too, but a fantasy about the end of the world clearly isn't going to work out in practice as well as they are planning it in theory.
And before you know it the timeline has skipped forward, the relationship is on the rocks and even worse stuff happens. And from that point on the character of Woodrow gets very self-involved and mopey. Then the film itself gets mopey too. We have a sequence in which one character is actually fantasising about how much worse things could still get with his ex-girlfriend and it gets seriously dark (especially considering that we never really saw how the relationship came to break down to the extent that it did).
By the end of the film it has taken a turn for the seriously misogynistic. Not saying what actually happens in the plot, towards the end of the movie we have some speech about how Woodrow is basically Lord Humungous and so he doesn't need to worry about "some bitch". So yeah, that ultra-sweet realistic relationship not only breaks down offscreen, not only breaks down violently and disgustingly in one character's bizarre self-destructive fantasties, but we're then told that it was never worth it in the first place right at the last minute.
It's sad that I so often find myself happier to give a good score to a film that is consistently naff all the way through than to a film which gives me plenty to love at the start and then ruins it all towards the end. There was so much to love. That initial relationship was set up brilliantly and the three main actors are all great. Tyler Dawson who plays Aiden and Jessie Wiseman who plays Milly have both been in very little so far (they've both got a couple of films on the way). Evan Glodell who plays Woodrow also wrote and directed and it's interesting to see that most of his work so far has been in cinematography.
Glodell doesn't actually do the cinematography in "Bellflower", but he clearly knew what he wanted. The film is quite beautiful, with bright yellows and oranges and a feeling that the images are often flooded with light, though not in a way that detracts from what is shown on screen. And it has to be said that when the two friends try out their flamethrower, it's very visually effective and wonderfully filmed.
So in spite of a great beginning, the second half of "Bellflower" is self-indulgent, navel-gaving, disgusting and misogynistic. A pretty movie with one of the sweetest relationships ever in the first half, but which loses its way so badly in the second half that it probably isn't worth your time.
E-
Primer (2004)
"Primer" paints a pretty accurate picture of what engineers creating a time machine would be like. Unfortunately that's because the people making it are more engineers than storytellers.
The movie has a reputation for having an extremely complicated plot. But that's to ignore that pretty much ALL time travel movies are complicated. The difference is that normally time travel is a device to tell a story. "Primer" is unusual in that examining the potential paradoxes of time travel is the main focus.
The initial opening scenes of the film are kind of boring, but to be fair that's somewhat missing the point. It's a very important aspect of the story that time travel isn't revealed with a flourish or fallen into by accident, but is rather a banal discovery which, when first invented, the inventors have no idea what they are even dealing with.
The story is that a group of engineers find that they are able to produce some kind of weird quantum field. They don't know if it can do anything important, but they are keen to try to make something new and different and it's initially a small personal project which they hope they can patent and sell.
However, they come to realise the real world implications. And from there they slowly start exploring the rammifications of time travel. No time cops, no robots from the future, no mafia body disposal. Just some people messing around with a time travel machine they have inadvertently created.
From this point forward the film is admittedly pretty neat. Everything proceeds systematically and the story around it is clear. It's only in the last 10 or so minutes that the film really goes weird and boy do things get confusing in that short period of time. The issue isn't so much that the film is confusing but rather that there is a sudden information dump, some events are happening pretty much entirely offscreen and it wasn't until reading the tv tropes page that I really understood what was going on in the final scene. (I suppose I should have guessed. A character is working on some enormous unnamed industrial project, so guess what they are building? I didn't take the fairly obvious leap.)
To be quite frank, the end of the film is mainly confusing because it doesn't involve the same quality of storytelling found earlier in the film. There's some mention of personal relationships towards the end of the movie, but outside of the two main characters, personal relationships have played so small a role in the film as to be practically unimportant. It's almost like the earlier scenes entirely forgot to mention "oh yeah, we know some other people too".
"Primer" is worth a watch and it's very clever and admittedly all the convoluted and poorly explained stuff at the end does line up with what has come before well, even if the presentation of that information is ridiculously rushed. For the unique take on the time travel premise alone, this deserves your attention.
B-