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

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.

hiding their secret horrifying worm experience

okay, now that someone's said it...

what made it look like a honda commercial?

i've only seen the preview and the sort of fussy long-lens subdued color thing def. has something in common with slick ads but maybe that's not what you folks meant?

I think they meant that it started Pomplamoose

irrelevant question: does anyone know where this was shot? some parts of the city scenes looked like Austin but others definitely did not. Maybe Dallas? Do they have trains now??

Based on the scenes with the trains, it's definitely Dallas.

I was looking so hard I noticed that the background of almost every city scene was intentionally out of focus.

So much of it is out of focus and has an insanely shallow depth of field, bokeh ain't that cool, I found it wearing after a while.

Yeah that's part of what bothered me about the visual look. For all it's flair it wasn't terribly interesting to look at

mostly Dallas locations, apparently

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/20130418-with-upstream-color-and-to-the-wonder-texas-filmmakers-deliver-experimental-love-stories-that-stand-as-examples-of-pure-cinema.ece

per that article, i know im malick-stan but not sure those comparisons are doing carruth any favors--at least in terms of his visuals. i think that will definitely be an area in which it will be fun to watch him develop as he makes more films. he definitely seems to have a fully formed aesthetic in most other respects already.

yeah, as I noted upthread, the constant barrage of shaky-cam close-up shots and short depth-of-field made me nauseous. really claustrophobic too... this would be a terrible movie to watch on acid.

I wonder if the shallow dof is a way of masking budgetary constraints wrt locations/sets

Probably. Obv it was intentional, tho I'm not sure if the choice helped Carrutth's directorial vision or not. I found it tedious after a while, and felt the same way about the film as a whole :\

the soft focus look is sometimes a way of making a cheap production look less cheap and more "stylish"

but sometimes you can see right through that and the effect is cloying

for a counterargument see the 1st 2/3 of roy andersson's love story which is all shallow focus long lens stuff and boy is it amazing

I wonder if the shallow dof is a way of masking budgetary constraints wrt locations/sets

― ヘイシグ・ブローズ (MaresNest), Tuesday, April 30, 2013 12:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry just saw this. answer is "yes" i think

for a counterargument see the 1st 2/3 of roy andersson's love story which is all shallow focus long lens stuff and boy is it amazing

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, May 1, 2013 4:46 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

otm

also filmmakers like lucrecia martel use it super well

there has been a real shallow DOF explosion with the advent of DSLR cinema cuz finally you could get that look with a cheap camera and it made your video look way more film-like

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

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, April 27, 2013 1:18 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ lol

my capsule reviews of this movie are "tim henman should stick to tennis" & "is this the indie matrix". thought this was pretty bad? morbs otm on its reach for profundity; i thought it might cohere well enough to work as some sort of allegory for the ills of antibiotic overuse or something, but it was just kind of uninterestingly diffuse, i think, & suffered additionally for being so in light of recent, more successful broad films like post tenebras lux, the new malick, &c - when this careened into the guy's work history or tepid subway conversation i didn't really feel anything was gained. i can't specifically locate a source well enough to call it cliched, but was a movie ever as likely to feature swimming pool sequences, or strip-lit photocopying montages? wearied post-nolan use of ~charged talismans~. it was so student. the mechanically administered twinkling wonder of the synth score was kinda oppressive, too.

pigs, starlings & haircuts excellent throughout though.

did i say everybody in it looked like a tennis player, i meant to, this was a very tennisy cast

I can't totally disagree with any of that after one viewing; but I do think Carruth is a talent and look forward to more from him. And perhaps in the future this will open up for me.

Kinda prefer to take this as an allegory about addiction for now...

i haven't seen primer, & have it set aside to catch somenight soon. but to just ad-hom psychologise for a moment i kinda thought that this came from a sorta uninteresting place - it seemed sorta enamored with some pretty superficial elements of what it was trying to do, cf the mood of the score, the well maintained monotone of the first half, its affectless characters. this stuff is swimming pool montages to me, like it's pretty & appealing but its made optically & just accessorised with fixtures, with walden & terse relationship conflict (i thought the relationship stuff - with maybe maybe maybe the exception of their memory arguments - was uniformly p bad/unconvincing/sorta thoughtless). idk, i don't feel super charitable toward this anyhow.

ps i keep throwing gangsigns at you in different threads to see if you've seen the reygadas flick, ryan, cause i'm interested to hear your take. i will fund half your cinema ticket if you haven't caught it but go instead of reliving upstream color.

plan to see it very soon! Like tomorrow hopefully

some sort of allegory for the ills of antibiotic overuse or something

haha what

the guy is no good at relationships, it's true