Upstream Color

An Oddly Moving Experience: A Poetic Film Experiment You Will Either Love Or Hate
Hypnotic, fascinating, and frustrating, "Upstream Color" is a bold (if not entirely comprehensible) new experience from auteur Shane Carruth. Carruth made a huge splash in the indie film world with his first film "Primer," which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. "Primer" has become a bona fide cult classic and a love-it or hate-it proposition. It's an experimental sci-fi effort that wrestles with big ideas and proves that you don't need a huge budget to produce an ambitious mind-bender. It isn't perfect, by any means, but it is a film that challenges conventional movie fare. Much the same can be said about "Upstream Color," I suppose. There is something far more ethereal, however, more haunting. This is not particularly about story and narrative, it is about creating visual poetry. As such, this will surely be a polarizing film.

From my perspective, the first thirty minutes of this ninety minute movie are absolutely spellbinding. Not to give too much away, but...

Not Like Anything You've Seen
UC is amazing, brilliant, confusing, lovely to look at and I bought it without having even seen it because Shane Carruth made PRIMER and that makes anything else he comes up with worth a look. I was not let down. This movie attempts to enlarge what movies can be. Instead of being trapped by a constant (and boring) demand for plot and more plot---this film offers ideas and feelings that you can go away with and think about later on your own. In short, unlike 99% of movies out there, this film stays with you. And any filmmaker brave enough to put pigs in his film as a serious element deserves a lot of praise. God knows what he will make next but I'll be there waiting to see it.

Gorgeous, Haunting, Confounding
"How are you enjoying South By Southwest?"
"It's great. I've seen some great films."
"What's the best thing you've seen?"
"Upstream Color."
"Oh. What's that about?"
"..."

I try to tell them that it can't really be explained. I could tell them that the discernible plot centers on a woman taken advantage of by a thief using a hypnotic plant as his weapon of choice, but that barely encapsulates a quarter of the half of the film I actually did understand. And I know most of us hate math.

What I can say with clarity and certainty is that if you enjoyed Primer, you should almost positively love this movie. If you haven't seen Primer, go watch it now and share your experience with the world. If you like the work of Gondry, Kaufman, Malick, Herzog, Cronenberg, Lynch, or Aronofsky then I'd be surprised if you didn't love this one.

At the end of my screening a man stood up and said, "Loved the film, but I'll be out in the lobby if anyone...

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