Another movie for the Time Machine thread crowd: Primer  

In what role did they cast Salma? :D

Seven thousand lousy dollars? That's about equal to what the studios probably pay for Tom Cruise's haircut, isn't it? Unbelievable.

Sure does sound interesting. I wonder if it will ever make it to DVD? I would sure like to see it.

Actually $7K was the budget for the food, coffee, and bagel budget for the planning meetings that were tasked with the conceptual design for Tom Cruise's haircut.

I don't find that an accurate comparison. Memento was twisty but coherent. Primer was an intriguing movie, but the last act was completely indecipherable. Not just because the concept was complex, but because the filmmakers don't provide enough narrative information for the audience to follow what's happening. All of that stuff about "reverse engineering the perfect moment" needed more set-up for the payoff to mean anything, which it just plain doesn't.

Memento also had characters whose names you could remember and who were more than just ciphers to move the plot points along. Primer doesn't.

I didn't dislike Primer, and for $7,000 it's a pretty ambitious achievement, but with some cleaner scripting it could have been something really great, as opposed to just an interesting experiment.

That sad part about it is that it's probably not just a joke. :D

Some of the best movies I've seen were made pretty cheap. I was watching Ed Wood the other night and they made a good point in the movie about why some people are able to make movies cheaper than others, they dont waste money away on caterers and nice shiny office buildings for all the execs. You gotta wonder, when a movie spends 100 million how much of that was directly spent on the film?

Johnny

Often the actors are grossly overpaid too. And that's as much our fault as anyone's. We (I mean collectively) will buy a movie ticket because a grossly overpaid actor is in the cast. That's mostly why their grossly overpaid.