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

there's a lot of stuff in this film i'm not sure i "got" in the sense that I could explain it to someone but very much in the Lynchian sense where it makes logical sense within the body of the film and I don't really care about it cohering outside of the narrative setting of the film

yeah I never felt very compelled to figure out Primer but I was happy to vibe to it. Hope this is similar.

it's way more vibey than Primer. Primer definitely rewards untangling of its gimmick; this can be grokked on the first watch, and the puzzle-hunt details really are just details

Yeah, I didn't feel confused about anything here bar a couple of details.

a good non-spoiler tip i think is to just take everything completely literally

this movie was great -- i saw it last weekend but didn't realize there was a thread. cronenberg-via-malick is appropriate, i really liked it. i think after i saw it i had a lot of things to say about rituals and people's habits and worms and plants, but it's all gone now. that's probably for the best. i liked this movie a lot.

i should see this maybe? it's playing here, shockingly.

you should see this, almost definitely. it's at worst a little disorienting and silly, at best you'll love it.
nobody else vibed the philip k dick comparison?

so good

feel like the obliqueness of his ideas really keep ppl from talking about his filmmaking--the look of this, the editing, the sound editing were all insanely high quality.

it's funny, he's been pretty open in discussing this but the sampler character is still such a major monkeywrench to me. i think everything baffling about this film ties to that character in one way or another.

It's simple, the Sampler controls the people through their bonded pigs by playing them his environmental field recordings

I was really impressed w/ Carruth's score; don't remember taking note of the music (was there any?) in Primer.

there was music in primer but he's gotten better. i'd need to double check but i thought there was a bit toward the very end of this that was a lot like the music at the very end of primer

IFC is selling the score on vinyl

so I thought this was...something. really looking forward to seeing it again but this first viewing left me feeling rather aloof from it all. but maybe I was just tired.

I think part of my failure to engage was due to not really feeling the visual style of the film. even the shots with a bit more visual flair felt a little flat to me--but again that maybe ties back into feeling like the movie was at arm's length to me.

Also uh SPOILER but.....

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

Was there some indication that it came from a new litter from "her" pig, is that what you're saying? If so, I missed it. Just seemed like it was probably a random piglet from the time after the victims took over the farm.

I didn't notice any explicit connection but pondering that final image and the bit about pregnancy earlier it certainly "felt" like that. obviously that's a shot in the dark!

Also uh SPOILER but.....

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

― ryan, Friday, April 26, 2013 11:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so tired of people asking this question after films

well the first litter of piglets that her pig gave birth to were all drowned but that doesn't mean it couldn't be from a new litter.

saw this. look after your spirit pig.

also you must kill the one within who reduces all of Nature's vast system to mere...music *spits*

good advice xp

wasn't entirely sure about this. mostly looked and felt like a honda commercial, which detracted from the (interesting) ideas. dialogue, what there was of it, felt a bit cod at times. I think the most lucid observations were about human relationships - putting it closest to a romance, as said above

but I'm glad they finally killed the nefarious blue stuff cycle that was helping that dastardly thief. and I'm glad they killed whatever damaging cycle of personal emotion it stood for in metaphor.

the field recording bits were amazing. could have watched 2 hours of that very happily.

but...but he is REDUCING it, see, turning it to UGLY MUSIC with his HUMAN BOX

pfah

man where are you getting this MUSIC < NATURE, FOOLISH HUMAN stuff from? I didn't have that take-away at all.

dunno, trying to rationalise the purpose of the field-recording guy. a guy who records and stores the stuff of life in his giant pen/his music box, inert and expendable, and sometimes chucks it off a bridge. he perpetuates the cycle of striving that brings damage to the main characters. if only he could *embrace* his pig and his sounds. yo.

actually the music he did make with his downtuned scraping noises was really cool. wanted more of it.

maybe carruth was making a documentary about the local eccentric at the same time and ended up splicing the footage together idk

well one of the things Carruth discussed in one of the interviews I read with him (likely linked upthread somewhere) is that when Jeff and Kris kill the Sampler, it's basically an error, because he's not really the source of their trauma. Their actions end the parasite lifecycle, and free their spirit pigs, but it's not really a proper revenge, or whatever.

Also the Sampler and Jeff & Kris have some really similar behaviors as a result of the worm's influence. The share an apparent obsession with or hypersensitivity to sound, and you see all three characters do the thing where they graze their fingers over the things they pass (CDs/spirit pigs) trying to get some sense of them.

One of the unsolved puzzle-box parts of the movie for me is how Jeff and Kris are experiencing time during the middle part of the movie. They seem to have the conversation where Jeff admits to his fraud repeatedly, in different locations; there's a few other scenes where they seem to acknowledge that they are repeating a particular vignette that they went through before. Like in the cafe, Kris says something about "we save a few weeks doing this". Makes me think that the middle part of the movie shows us Kris and Jeff repeating the same patterns over and over, getting "further" through some sequence each time, but all cut together so the audience only travels once through the whole routine.

that bit was str8-up eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

"free their spirit pigs" -- new favorite phrase

Their actions end the parasite lifecycle, and free their spirit pigs

dammit, this isn't playing anywhere nearby. i feel i have missed out on a generation-defining experience.

he made a point of saying that none of the characters are really amoral except for "the thief" which seems weirdly reductionist? probably good not to assume the creator completely understands his own work.
I think i mentioned this upthread but he also said that the walden connection was totally by accident and happened once they started filming more or less. so there's a lot of happenstance, as in all art.

Saw this today also, did anybody get a lead on the actual connection between the Sampler and the Pig Farmer? And were the Pig Farmer guys actions actually bad, I got the impression he was somehow trying to improve the Sampled peeps quality of life slightly.

Were the sampled whooshes from the bass bins designed to attract the Sampled? Is that how Kris suddenly appeared or was it just her memories driving her along.

i feel i have missed out on a generation-defining experience.

don't.

yeah that's a strange reaction

an independent theater in chicago posted on FB that they were showing this over the weekend (apparently they'd been showing it for a few days but almost nobody came), and some guy responded, "When are you going to start showing regular movies?"

lol

Music B0x? That makes me "almost nobody" -- what a distinction!

wtf? how can the cinematic freeing of spirit pigs not be a generation-defining experience? sometimes i just don't understand you people...

Saw it this afternoon, finally. I liked that it seems to be a horror movie about modern notions of how human consciousness operates, but it was so profoundly sad (and more a little nauseating, due to camerawork + sound) I don't know if I could watch it again.

profoundly sad? really?

I thought so.

Music B0x? That makes me "almost nobody" -- what a distinction!

― and that sounds like a gong-concert (La Lechera), Sunday, April 28, 2013 8:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no. p4ti0

oh ok. i don't know that place -- i just looked it up and there it is. i've been to events at the portage, but not that one. will look into!

also yes -- this movie was so sad! people are sad, generally, and then the pigs and the river and the flowers? yikes. and so grisly.

mostly looked and felt like a honda commercial,

thought insurance commercial @ times, def

that's part of what i liked about it -- you know those commercials, where everyone is shuffling around, going about their business and then two people look at each other and someone starts talking about aging parents and life insurance? imagine if all of those people in those commercials are just under the spell of the spirit pig. mindlessly sending their checks where they're told, giving each other meaningful looks, making jokes about birds, and hiding their secret horrifying worm experience.

it makes those commercials a little more fun!

goddam it. oh how i hate you, movie theater.

xp you have a pretty rangey definition of “successful in film”

It doesn't ALWAYS hold true, but given this and several other recently documented cases, there's definitely reason to be, shall we say, hesitant about men whose art involves 'the brutal exploitation and torture of a woman', as Forks put it way upthread long before anyone suspected a thing about him. Waving those red flags where everyone can see 'em

xp Yeah, I stretched it for purposes of the joke, but otoh Primer is still pretty fucking good.