In other words, *art brut.* I get that approach - I mean, I mixed Birdemic 2. I collect Richard Dadd books. And I get "this is a movie made by someone who doesn't want to make movies." My discomfort with Primer and its fans, I think, comes from the fact that they don't treat him like Tarkovsky. They don't treat him like Ron Fricke. They treat him like Chris Nolan - "here is genius, let me show you."

As an objet d'art, it's fine. It's a cheap meditation on fate and causality. That's fine. But people try really hard to make it something it's not - they try to make it cinema. And that, I think, is what really bugs me - cinema isn't that tough to make. Time travel stories in particular are pretty basic - "I'm going to mess with the storyworld rules to illustrate a point, here, watch." But Primer is so in love with the contrivance of temporal manipulation that it befuddles the message. It also performs so much sleight of hand with the basics of its storyworld rules that you're left presuming it's too smart for you (fans) or that it's a disorganized mess (everyone else).

And finally, that's what I'm left with - Primer is an attempt to make a movie that fails as a movie so it's passed off as "outsider art." Compare and contrast with Richard Kelly - he made a feature for $100k that sucked so he licked his wounds, learned from his mistakes and rolled up enough money to make Donnie Darko. Compare and contrast with Darren Aronofski - he made Pi for $50k and sold it. Compare and contrast with Clerks or Slacker. Flawed films that were nonetheless entertaining and executed in a way that requires no apology. Yet Shane Carruth finished Primer and said "yep, I'm good."

Slacker cost $23k back when you had to shoot on film at a dollar a second. It is every bit as free of narrative convention as Primer is. But it's a movie and nobody disputes that.