During a trip to New York last week, filmmaker James Bai gave me a screener of his film Puzzlehead and asked me to give him some feedback.

After viewing it twice and discussing my thoughts with him, he requested that I post my initial interpretation of the story on IMDb.com, as well as on this site.

There are lots of people that need to see this film, and the way to do that is to get it out there beyond the film festivals. As the distribution deal is being cut, fans of this inevitable cult classic are already talking about online. The buzz is getting louder.

This post is my own contribution to the film, submitting my own thoughts to its layer of the blogosphere. Below is a Copy/Paste of some of the feedback I sent to James in an email.

*** WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW ***

In the spirit of Primer and Pi, Puzzlehead’s bound to be an instant classic with the audience that loves these types of movies. You know a movie’s exceptional when you get to the end and the first thing you want to do is see it again. I watched it yesterday. Twice.

So where do I start?

=continued=

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
– Shakespeare, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’