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

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.

too bad there are no more video stores, that would make a good section name

'you got any spirit pig movies?'

'there's over there together with the worm surgery ones'

i want more movies like this

invent the filter!

In the last couple months I've seen Amy Seimetz in this, as a cartoonishly deadbeat mom on The Killing, and as a well-adjusted "quirky" romantic interest on Family Tree. Range!

i wish i were that enterprising!

xp

big fan of Primer but I wasn't that into this. started out very interesting with the worm harvesting and abduction bit but when it narrowed down to just the one couple it kind of lost me. I wanted to know more about the wider conspiracy. like, what was the pig farmer's relationship if any to the abductor / thief?

having the pig farmer also be some kind of ambient musician / sound artist made no sense to me.

the opening sequence seems to imply that there are applications for the worm powers other than fucking people over (like when the kids are drinking the juice and using it to mirror each other / do kung fu) but then that side of the story is just completely dropped. as a relationship movie I didn't think it was all that good.

caruth is actually playing a peripheral character; the relationship is between seimetz's character and the pigs.

or rather man's problematic relationship with food supply.

fell asleep watching this tbh

free your spirit pig

IMO, this is one of those almost Lynchian kinds of movies where the plot is *kind of* important but still takes a backseat to the overall experience of the visuals and sound. I think it really succeeds at just being a visceral movie. Almost the polar opposite of Primer, which is so much more cold, cerebral, and plot-driven (but not without its share of atmosphere and feel). So much of this movie just seems to be about touch and emotions, and about the breakdown of identity. I don't know if the crazy sci-fi worm-pig-orchid lifecycle conceit was the only path to that (Carruth seems to think it was), and it does create all kinds of weird, annoyingly unanswerable plot questions.

Anyway, Carruth is 2 for 2 now in my book, and I'm excited to see what he does next.

maybe the reason it feels more heavily concerned with plot and making sense to me is having watched pacific rim beforehand.

if i think about dmr's complaints (i had the same ones basically) they bother me but, if i dont, i find i actually quite liked this movie and it left a good impression on me. i guess some things are bit more feel-y?

i find it interesting that no one really likes/connects 2 the love story aspect. i was really into that, & the stuff kindof abt the impossibility of really connecting w/ someone, blending memories, how can u communicate your real self etc etc idk.....i think in some youtube q&a all of that is what mike silverblatt lached onto in a statement after a screening & it made me feel validated that he being such a perceptive reader dug that aspect too but maybe that just means im like him & really attuned 2 that stuff as a true bookish aspie shut-in type

I definitely liked some aspects of the movie ... I was impressed by how much story was told with no dialogue in the last 25 or so minutes and certain scenes like them digging up the yard looking for a high-pitched noise were pretty tense and effective. I think it was one of those movies were I really liked the setup but then felt let down by where they went with it (I'd put Looper in the same category).

they did go back to the conspiracy thing at the end, though. the sound recordings were meant to draw them back i thought.

A month or so after seeing this, I have to say that I don't have very clear memories of it. It hasn't stuck with me the way Primer did. I enjoyed it as an experience, but its overall effect was less enigmatic than just sort of hazy.

I enjoyed this but it lost me when it cut to the neighbours(?) - couple with ginger girl and beardy guy - and the pig guy being apparently omnipresent.
Primer was tauter than taut plot-wise, not an unnecessary shot afaict, but I'm not sure I could say the same about this and it couldn't really sustain that kind of mood for the whole time.
I don't really get how Jeff came into the movie, I thought he was watching her in a sinister way on the train but I guess not?

I saw it in the same cinema I saw Berberian Sound Studio and the focus on the sound recordings and their contexts reminded me of that a little.

what was the pig farmer's relationship if any to the abductor / thief?

pig farmer is jacob from LOST, abductor/thief/kids are his minions/acolytes.

I was psyched for this movie and left cold by it. It just seemed like a touchy feely Scanner Darkly. While I started out just zoning on the photography & editing, by the time they found a very dubiously placed orchid in a cold spring and started thinking about how unlikely that was, I knew I had disconnected with this movie altogether

I don't think there was any evidence of a connection between the pig farmer and the abductor/thief. If anything, the pig guy was kind of "rescuing" people by pulling out their worms.

"rescuing" people by pulling out their worms
lol

I lost track of how the girl got to the pig farm though

she followed her heart to her spirit pig

I feel mildly embarrassed now because it appears that I am the only one on this thread who couldn't make out what the hell was going on.
I think I made the mistake of watching it when I was hungover and thus not giving it enough attention. It looked beautiful though. I will need to watch it again before I come to a conclusive verdict.

The Thief, the Sampler, and the Orchid Mother and Daughter are all unknown to one another. They are connected by the worm but don't really know that or understand it.

When you capitalize it like that it looks like a Greenaway film title

This was terrible but cool that it was shot with a GH2