UPSTREAM COLOR, a new film from Shane Carruth (Primer)

i thought maybe it was decorative faux gravitas

from the target collection

the "woman goes through a rape scenario and comes out the other side tougher, hunting for revenge and with a short haircut" trope

she didn't seem tougher to me, she seemed utterly lost and fragile? she had the gun before she was assaulted, and when she shot the pig farmer, it hardly seemed triumphant in any way at all.

okay, you're probably right there. substitute "victimized" for "tougher"

i liked her hostile outbursts

i came out of this not thinking much of it, but i keep coming back to it + dwelling on certain parts. my favorite thing about Primer was the rhythm of the dialogue as the guys were figuring things out, in this movie you only really get that in the sequence where the lady and the dude start piecing things together. but i liked it anyway. the stuff with the kidnapping and the operation really made my skin crawl... some of the emotional material didn't really resonate, i think carruth as an actor may have bitten off more than he could chew, but i still sorta want to root him on for trying. i hope his next movie doesnt take another 9 years to get made

some of the reviews talk about how cold and mechanistic it is, i wonder if that'd occur to as many people if the narrative of carruth being an engineer wasnt already supplied (well, having made Primer doesn't hurt either). the film made me think more of Soderbergh and maybe Roeg than Malick

really, a week after seeing this, maybe a day, I had no idea who the fuck "the Orchid Mother and Daughter" were. Remember when individual films didn't have to be deep, impenetrable studies?

No.

yes... those were dark days

h4a I think he's said in interviews that he's planning on making "The Modern Ocean" on a much-sooner-than-nine-years schedule.

my favorite thing about Primer was the rhythm of the dialogue as the guys were figuring things out, in this movie you only really get that in the sequence where the lady and the dude start piecing things together.

i have made a fan only kickstarter gift recut of this scene in which mark ruffalo & kirsten dunst begin the process of distributing the tapes to others, it is a striking climax that lends emotional punch to this otherwise monotonous student film

Remember when individual films didn't have to be deep, impenetrable studies?

― ballin' from Maine to Mexico (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, May 8, 2013 1:41 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

even years later, i still have no idea what you want from a film at all

A fight.

Men dressed for dinner

i have made a fan only kickstarter gift recut of this scene in which mark ruffalo & kirsten dunst begin the process of distributing the tapes to others, it is a striking climax that lends emotional punch to this otherwise monotonous student film

― daft on the causes of punk (schlump), Wednesday, May 8, 2013 2:55 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

idgi

i still have no idea what you want from a film at all

No one thing, dawg. I even like this film, sort of. I think the increasing contentment of filmmakers in making stuff comprehensible almost entirely to themselves is a bit insular tho.

pigs, Thoreau, Emerson etc:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/the-thoreau-poison.html

it's funny the last three movies i've seen are this, to the wonder, and post tenebras lux--but i wouldn't really call it a trend?

there are more, i think.

i do agree re: this film, primer too, i kind of like them but i'm kind of like ehhhh im not sure at the same time

i came out of this not thinking much of it, but i keep coming back to it + dwelling on certain parts.

agree with this

Holy Motors, The Master ...

recent Gus Van Sant to a degree

This felt more accessible to me than Primer, but less accessible than the other movies cited as points of comparison. (Haven't seen the Reygadas or the new Malick yet.)

watched this the other day i enjoyed this quite a bit, found myself thinking about it a lot

i definitely found myself more captivated by the ecosystem / lifecycle itself, and less about the main characters' relationship or even about them, since they seemed to lack any sort of agency at all -- like i could not understand or connect with them as characters because they didn't have any choices to make, they were just compelled by various forces they barely understood. i'm not sure whether it's meant to express a a sense of determinism but it felt a bit hollow

but that said, i did appreciate how the lifecycle of this parasitic creature was expressed through characters who were themselves engaged in parasitic relationships / behaviors -- the material theft, the orchid harvesting (poaching?), the sampler's exploitive voyeurism

"Showing Hollywood the way: how 'Upstream Color' hit iTunes without leaving theaters - Simultaneous digital release is what many big studios are pining for, and Shane Carruth just beat them to it"

many, many movies have done that before this one

yeah that's been in the works for a decade, basically theaters (=nat'l association of theater owners, NATO) have so far prevented the big studios from heading down that route, plus they still feel like they need the huge publicity still attending a theatrical premiere/initial release to "sell" the film through the subsequent release windows. upstream color was never going to get that kind of rollout anyway.

one of the dynamics of blockbuster filmmaking IIRC

btw i generally approve of personal mythopoetics in film.

i don't think that's what the opportunistic minor talent van sant is up to-- he just seems to cop various art-film moves and applies them to sensational topics (he's not the only one to do this, but he's the most successful probably). i like his mainstream work a little better than his artier stuff, although the new one w/ matt damon looks atrocious (did anyone see that?)

pt anderson is a more complex case. i think the most radical thing he's doing lately is to upend expectations of character development. but he also really likes indulging actors and i think that explains his perverse dramaturgy. i liked the master better than any of his previous films btw.

If movies are dreams, and if dreams represent disguised wishes, then Hollywood movies, created by many hands under high economic pressure, disguise the wishes of something like the hive mind of capitalism. The symbols and myths in a box-office hit contain fantasies that many people want to believe, or that their socioeconomic superiors want them to believe. An interpreter may enjoy exposing a hit movie’s fantasy, but he would usually be wrong to mistake what he finds there for an artist’s vision of the world.

i don't like this. this is nicely stated, but it's a version of a base assumption of academic and "elitist" critics. that blockbuster films, or perhaps "Hollywood movies," can be profitably read as symptoms of larger forces, dispensing with notions of intentionality or directorial vision. whereas art/indie/foreign/"other" films can be read precisely as communications from their makers, somehow outside the same social forces that have left scrutable traces on their Hollywood opposite numbers. like a lot of assumptions there's a bit of truth in there. but it's also a (surprise!) elitist and condescending notion. it diminishes (or fails to acknowledges) the virtues of craft, convention, genre. in this context auteurism functions as an escape hatch for appointed mainstream directors whose films can be interpreted along art-film lines.

it also assumes a capital-R Romantic notion of the "artist's vision" which implies a pretty drastic misunderstanding of popular art.

but i digress.

tho otherwise that article is brilliant

There's an undercurrent of tech-sector "disruption" (sorry!) in the tone of that article too.

Promised Land was the worst GVS since Good Will Hunting.

i just want to read amateurist on movies all the time

On Netflix Canada (and possibly US) now.

Still working through my scorching crush (dormant for awhile, now reactivated) on S. Carruth. Lord have mercy, I do appreciate an incredibly neurotic control-freak nerd. Movie's p cool too; more on that later, maybe.

also this movie is not "teal and orange," as someone said upthread

it is BLUE AND YELLOW

otm

This sucked.

the quiet pathos of sitting in the middle of a pig farm playing a MIDI controller not attached to anything

one thousand grad students locked in a room banging away at one thousand unplugged midi controllers

I liked this, but Jordan is very on point

ha, i liked it too!

The whole Foley/Sound Design angle was poorly executed.

agreed, but at the same time the sounds and textures were a big part of my enjoyment of the movie. carruth clearly has a passion for field recording & sound design.

I really liked the field recordings too! This movie keeps getting better the more I think about it. There should be an Upstream Color filter you can apply to any boring genre movie to turn it into spirit pig/worm surgery/field recording masterpiece.