A Primer to Primer

Mark Allen is a contributor to The New York Times and National Public Radio — and, of course, he maintains a blog that’s updated every now and … then. Today, Allen posts about what’s clearly one of his favorite movies: 2004’s Primer, the Sundance-award-winning debut from local filmmaker Shane Carruth. (It’s the film about which Roger Ebert wrote: “Primer is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review.”)

Allen, a former Dallasite who left here in 1991, was in town recently and decided to visit all the sites and sets in Primer — which he says he’s seen “twenty times and counting.” He’s posted stills from the film, along with snapshots of all the crucial locations — some of which he found listening very, very carefully to the DVD commentary track, so, no, he’s not obsessive at all. “Do you think I was thorough enough?” Allen wonders. Um, yeah? –Robert Wilonsky