After dinner, Urbaniak quickly jettisoned the idea of watching World Trade Center, as I had joked in an earlier e-mail that we might watch All the President’s Men, an Alcott-Urbaniak touchstone, a joke which Urbaniak took with deadly, deadly seriousness. Both of us love love love All the President’s Men, one of the key cultural events of our adolescences and still probably what I consider one of the greatest movies ever made, easily in the top five. It’s the kind of movie where, for either of us, if we’re channel-surfing at three in the morning and stumble upon it on AMC or something, we can’t stop watching it, and that’ll be it for the rest of the night. And, since it’s practically the anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, we figured what the hell.

Unfortunately, the DVD of All the President’s Men I have dates back to the dawn of the digital age, and it became quickly apparent that it was a crappy transfer of an unrestored print, dark and muddy. About ten minutes in, I mentioned that I would go to the DVD store and get a remastered copy of the movie, and Urbaniak leaped in and said that he’d much rather do that than continue watching it now — watching movies on a high-definition projector on a nine-foot screen has turned both of us into frightful DVD snobs.

With both World Trade Center and All the President’s Men scotched, Urbaniak said “Hey, what about that low-budget science-fiction movie you were raving about?” I had, indeed, raved about Primer in the past, modestly touting it as one of the most incredible movies ever made. I hadn’t watched it in a few years (I saw it once in the theater, and probably three or four times on DVD) and was also eager to see how it would look on my big system. As much as I had praised it to Urbaniak, he assured me that I had not hyped it enough. The movie is flat-out unbelievable — a sheer delight and a heart-stopping sci-fi thriller from beginning to end, albeit in ways utterly unexpected and unpredictable.

First, there’s the fact that it was shot for, they say, $7000. Now, anyone who’s ever made a movie will tell you that $7000 gets you exactly nothing. For $7000, everyone is working for free and you make the movie on weekends in your living room. By all rights, a $7000 movie should look like utter crap, have non-actors giving non-performances and a script by a writer so untalented he couldn’t get any money to shoot it. None of this happens with Primer — it looks great, the script is one of the best I’ve ever seen shot and the performances are uniformly excellent — but, I mean, really, really excellent.

As far as I can tell, Shane Carruth, who wrote and directed the movie (and stars in it, and edited it, and scored it, and designed its production and sound) is an ex-engineer of some sort who used what is, apparently, his extensive understanding of technical matters to concoct this story of a couple of guys who are working on some kind of project in their garage and who accidentally discover a new application for their invention. What Wikipedia doesn’t tell you is that the guy is a born filmmaker.

When I hear “low-budget independent first feature,” you know what I think of? I think of Clerks, a movie with a loose concept and a rough shooting style that requires the logorrheic charm of its writing and the attitude of its cast to hold an audience’s attention. That ain’t Primer. Primer has a brilliant concept, finely-crafted writing that, on every level, commands attention, exudes authority and confidence, filmmaking that crackles with tension and vivid, ultra-natural performances from actors and non-actors alike.

Scenes are written without the slightest consideration of “inviting the audience in,” and cut to the bone of comprehension. The movie is about a bunch of wonks deeply involved in their world of engineering, and their conversations are full of — almost consist entirely of — long strings of technical terms as they debate this or that application of various mechanical processes. This decision creates incredible tension in the early scenes as the viewer struggles to keep up with the story, and also serves the dramatic purposes of the narrative, which is, essentially, about a start-up technical enterprise that goes bad. The characters, in some scenes, might as well be speaking in a foreign language, and so the viewer is forced to follow the non-verbal cues of the scenes closely — who is angry with whom, who no longer trusts whom, who is hiding what from whom, who is doing what behind who’s back. 

This is not merely excellent genre writing, this is screenwriting of the highest order.  This should be the goal of every ambitious screenwriter — to present moments of detailed, impeccably observed, unadorned, uninflected human interaction, and the camera happens to be there in the room at the time.  It’s one of the hardest things to do, but Primer does it over and over again, in a narrative that relentlessly escalates into higher and higher realms of speculative fiction.

But that’s just for starters. On top of being a screenwriter of the first rank, Carruth also knows, somehow, right out of the box, where to put the camera, how to cut a scene together for maximum tension and surprise, how to place actors in the frame, how to coax subtle, lived-in performances from his cast, how to design and dress sets, how to effectively score a scene, and how to act. It all feels ridiculously “real,” which serves to make its fantastical narrative that much more creepy and suspenseful.

On the other hand, I’ve watched it four or five times now and am only now beginning to understand what the hell actually happens in it — this is a narrative so full of impressive twists and mind-bending concepts that it makes Mulholland Dr. look like Flipper. And it’s all presented in the most subtle, least melodramatic form possible — go for a handful of popcorn and you could easily miss one or two key plot points. Carruth insists that the information is all there in the movie for people to figure out, and since he’s obviously about ten times smarter than me I’m sure that’s true. The nice thing about Primer is that its scene-by-scene filmmaking is so enjoyable (and its running time so brief) that it easily invites — no, cheerfully demands — multiple viewings.

Over a dinner of General Tso’s chicken from Dragon Palace, Urbaniak regaled me with tales of his latest acting gigs. I pressed him for information regarding the tumescent plot-lines of The Venture Bros, but this line of inquiry, I’m afraid, my friends, is a conversational non-starter. It’s not that Urbaniak is not happy to blab about the most intimate secrets of the Ventureverse, it’s that he doesn’t remember a single thing about the scripts he records. He oftenrecords episodes out of order, and then only pays attention to the scenes he’s actually in, and even then has little idea of the actual shape of an episode. Or, as he puts it, when the show is broadcast he watches it as a first-time viewer. Regarding “ORB,” for instance, he recalls watching it and remembering “Oh yeah, there was some kind of Oscar Wilde thing in one of the episodes, I forgot.” It seems that Urbaniak knows less about the Ventureverse than I do (and I know less about it than, say, anyone at The Mantis-Eye Experiment). Which, now that I think of it, seems utterly appropriate for the actor playing Rusty.

Anyway, United 93 is a swell movie — if you don’t mind holding your breath for two hours. It is about as well-executed as a movie like this — a real-life social drama about highly-charged events of recent history — could be. The writing, shooting, editing and acting are all excellent, creating a suffocating, well-nigh unbearable sense of dread and horror.

I saw United 93 on its opening weekend at the Arclight in Hollywood. The screen was huge, the sound was enveloping, the gritty, naturalistic drama overwhelming. The crowd, while not huge, was large enough. As the movie began, I began to get a sinking feeling — I realized that I had bought a ticket for a ride I didn’t really want to be on. As the drama intensified and intensified, it got to the point where I felt physically ill and short of breath. The movie was too well-made and too compelling to walk out of, but around the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center I suddenly remembered that I didn’t have a good time that day, and wondered about the wisdom of buying a ticket to experience that fear, horror, uncertainty and dread again. Plus, the bulk of the audience in the theater came, apparently, to see those fucking Arabs get it — when the final confrontation occurs in the closing minutes of the movie, there were plenty of shouts of “Kill those bastards!” in the theater.

The ensuing years have given me a little distance on the movie. It is a marvel of execution and feels unbearably “real.”  (Paul Greengrass, in his shooting style, makes Costa-Gavras look like Stanley Kramer.)  It is, structurally, a sophisticated supsense thriller, almost a heist movie with an ensemble cast. Suspense thriller? I should say it’s essentially a non-stop, 111-minute supense sequence. There is not a single moment of breathing room, no letup of suspense, only a steadily-escalating dread and horror that ends in a chaotic exclamation point.

It has all the elements of a crime melodrama. There are the terrorists, who are trying to execute their crime of crashing the plane into the Capitol building, there are the “cops,” the various air-traffic-control folk we see throughout who are trying to “solve the case” in a thicket of conflicting information and bureaucratic snafus (Urbaniak said he expected, and wanted, Walter Matthau to show up and just, you know, deal with things), and there are the passengers, the vigilantes who, pushed to their limit, finally take the law into their own hands. Hell, it’s practically The Dark Knight in that regard.

The suspense of Act I is: oh no, will the terrorists hijack the plane before their cover is blown by the other planes hitting the World Trade Center? There is a runway delay before takeoff, there are the pre-hijacking jitters of the lead terrorist, uncertainty hangs in the air. Weirdly, it puts us into the terrorists’ shoes: we sit there, squirming, ready to scream “Hijack the goddamned plane already, you assholes!” anything to break the steadily-ratcheting tension. The suspense of Act II is: oh no, will the military figure out what’s going on and cut through its red tape before the plane reaches the Capitol? The suspense of Act III is: will the passengers figure out what’s going on, make their stand and save the day?

In the end, the criminals don’t pull of the big job, the vigilantes succeed only in stopping the criminals, and the detectives don’t know there’s even a case until everyone’s dead.  There’s a 21st-century lesson in there somewhere.

The filmmakers, with very few exceptions, avoid sentiment, but still, even though I know the ending when I start the movie, there is a moment mid-way through when I suddenly realize “oh shit — all these people are going to die,” and feel weird about even watching it any more. It’s the whole “how does this qualify as ‘entertainment'” question, the same one I have while watching Schindler’s List. When you watch a Holocaust drama, dammit, you want to see Nazi atrocities, and if those atrocities are elided or prettified, you feel short-changed — they didn’t give me full bang for my Holocaust-drama dollar. Similarly, in a 9/11 drama, dammit, you want to see those planes crash. What else would you be watching the movie for?

(It is indicative of, well, something, that when the second plane hit the WTC, the first thought in every American’s mind was not “oh the humanity” but “my God, it’s just like a movie.”)