Leaving aside the avant-garde, there've been plenty of movies that re-orient how we think about narrative. Here are seven of my favorites from our waning decade:
Scene from Donnie Darko where we are first introduced to Frank.
Directed by Richard Kelly. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, Jena Malone, Noah Wyle and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
"Donnie Darko" (2001)All of Richard Kelly's films have the starting assumption that you've read as much Stephen Hawking as he has and can fill in the narrative gaps accordingly. The original version of "Donnie Darko" is pretty incomprehensible, David Lynch in the suburbs, but sucked you in stylistically even if you couldn't put together the pieces.
Either it's something you can piece together with a decent knowledge of dumbed-down quantum physics (something Kelly forced me to investigate) or it's something else: science as a way of filling in the emotional/plot gaps. Forget the Hot Topic t-shirts; that's as radical as it gets."Primer" (2004)
Shane Carruth's bold opening salvo (his only film to date) is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a movie shot for $7,000, the same budget, inflation-unadjusted, as Robert Rodriguez's 1993 "El Mariachi," but used for way more aesthetically impressive results. It's about Texan engineers inventing a time-travel machine that works -- so successfully, in fact, that the movie, without giving a hint of what it's doing, simply adopts the branching timelines and alternate universes opened up once the engineers step inside "The Box".
According to this timeline, there may be as many as nine branching universes knocking around in there. What "Primer" does best, though, is suck you in stylistically, then leave you to sort out the scientific (logical, but nearly impenetrable) mess. You don't need to understand what's happening to love it, just to know that it works. Black box magic indeed". Source: www.ifc.com
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