Z/Web

An interesting concept and I loved the low, low budget approach. It was reminiscent of Pi in that regard. It actually made everything seem more real. The premise is science fiction: a group of amateur inventors have created some sort of strange device in their garage. It doesn’t do exactly what they expected; there are some anomalous results. Further analysis reveals they’ve created a sort of time machine, and soon they are using it to gain an advantage in the stock market. They must be very careful about time paradoxes, however, or they’ll run into copies of themselves, and therein lies the story’s key plot twist. Soon the film gets extremely confusing as you can’t tell who is who, what happened, or the “real” sequence of events as time is all messed up. The director does an amazing job for such a complicated concept, but I must admit it’s a challenge to follow. Some might argue that’s good — we need more films that make us think — but others, and I tend to fall into this crowd, want films that actually make sense at the end of the day. This film works a little better than Donnie Darko in that regard, which is impressive as it’s far more complicated and has a fraction of the budget (it was made for about $7,000). It didn’t completely work for me, but a lot of that was not so much the director’s intention but a consequence of the non-existent budget. For instance, though there are many scenes involving doubles, we never actually see any of the duplicates in the same shot. In several scenes that would have made things clearer but I suspect the director didn’t have the budget to do that effect. Another thing that bothered me is that the film has a monotone feel: it’s basically the main two characters talking and arguing for the entire film. We go from scene to scene but it’s the same two characters talking. Most of what they’re talking about we don’t understand: it’s either scientific gibberish or talk about people and situations we haven’t followed yet. The result is that the film feels repetitive, claustrophobic, and boring. While it’s not enough to destroy the film, it does hurt it: I’d love to see a bigger budget (bigger, not big) remake of this with a few special effects to explain the story better, action scenes to introduce some variety to the shots, and a director actually able to do what he really wanted but couldn’t afford. What’s he’s created is a real gem, but it’s unfortunately the kind of obscure thing that very few people would find interesting. Most people would find the story incomprehensible (it’s not, just complex, ambiguous, and technical) and the movie-making static. Unlike El Mariachi where you couldn’t really tell it was low budget, this is a film where the low budget must be part of the criticism since a lot of what’s impressive about it is the fact that something so ambitious was done for so little. If you were told this film cost $10 million to make you’d be wondering who ran off with the other $9.9 mil. You’d be upset by many scenes that obviously needed special effects or clearer filmmaking. But knowing it was done for nothing makes the film better, since we’re aware that many of the film’s limitations are really limitations of budget and not necessarily the director’s intention. The bottom line is that this is a fascinating film, one worth seeing several times (it’s practically required).

Today I got a call that the seller in Oregon had finally signed all the paperwork and so I had to go sign my version of that. While I was talking with the mortgage lady it came up there were a couple questions from the underwriter, so I had to do some further explanations of my business. Of course right as I tried to email that to her my wireless Internet stopped working: it’s been doing that off and on lately and driving me nuts! Of course it would do it right when I had a critical need, and instead of only being off for a few seconds, it wouldn’t come back up. I finally gave up and hooked up a wire. I need reliability right now. This is insane.

Anyway, I headed downtown to Santa Cruz to sign the paper and then the mortgage lady said that she’d gotten an email from the underwriter and they wanted one of my financial documents on my “company letterhead.” Since time was critical, I actually used the mortgage lady’s laptop and grabbed my logo off my webpage and pasted it into Excel and created a nice summary page of the numbers. The previous document had all my calculations and was quite confusing. This way I only included the conclusions, not how I got there.

After arriving home, there was a message from the mortgage lady that now they wanted another document on company letterhead, just like the other one, so I whipped it out and emailed it to her. Hopefully this fulfills everything. Supposedly we’re near to “drawing docs,” whatever that means. I guess that happens just before closing.

Another decision we’ll have to make soon is to decide if it’d be better to close here in California instead of up in Oregon. We originally were thinking up there, but now we’re thinking it might be better to do it here. Up there the schedule would be tight; here we’d have more flexibility.