Upstream Color (2013)

Let's be realistic.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Shane Carruth is a writer and director I truly respect. I watched Primer and was inspired instantly. It was a low-budget, independent- minded micro-production about time travel and the consequences of such power. While the film did have some technical shortcomings, these could easily be overlooked because of a small budget, and an engaging script. However, Carruth's follow-up "Upstream Color" is nothing short of a self-important, delusional, masturbatory, film that encompasses the worst stereotypes of your typical film school "genius". An incoherent and uninteresting story is coupled with extraordinarily bad dialogue and ill-acting. Carruth, again in the lead role, seems to believe himself to be a better performer than he actually is. The dialogue is choppy and alien, the performances are understated but not emotionally potent, and the cinematography resembles that of a Gatorade commercial. Carruth is promising and talented, and hopefully he can come back from this misstep with his next project "The Modern Ocean". However, trying to win back my optimism after this film is going to be an upstream battle.

This film is a classic example of a film truly without a narrative. There are many pieces and ideas many of them thought provoking and interesting but as a whole the film falls flat. Which is a shame because I wanted so much to really enjoy this film. the look, the cinematography the acting, all the individual parts are so well put together but the in the end I felt almost as cold and manipulated as the characters in the film. Shane Carruth is a genius pretty much handling everything in film including the score (which is also amazing) but the over all story and journey in which we took from start to finish left me feeling as though I was watching ideas and concepts not a narrative film. Some people I know love these type of mind benders where you can interpret every one of these elements on their on and project how they feel about them. But for me as audience member I want to be taken on a ride in which the film maker tells me something about themselves as well. Overall still a very interesting film I was just hoping for something that would have been a classic sci-fi film and feel that one day Shane Carruth will deliver that to the world just not this time.

I seem to be in the distinct minority who feel that the first third of the movie is weakest. What follows would not be much less abstruse if the whole criminal body-snatcher caper element weren't there. If you're gonna make an existential film, just go for it. After all, Upstream Color doesn't tread any ground that Godard and Fellini didn't shatter a half-century ago.By the time Amy Seimetz has short hair, the film is captivating with its imagery and soundscape. Really, I could rewind to any random point and be thoroughly entertained. Coherent narratives are for sissies.I wish I could've seen this on a full-size theater screen with a great sound system. Even on a home theater system, though, the sound design of this movie is awesome. Who knows, maybe the movie will make sense after a few more viewings..

I'm not averse to complicated films but I didn't understand this. It dealt with drugs (a hallucinogenic worm inserted in the bloodstream). A woman seems to be brainwashed under this spell. She meets a man, not sure if this was planned or random. He is also lost but it's unclear if he's also had the worm. There is a man who looks like a geography teacher behind all this. He's also a pig farmer and some kind of sound engineer. Somehow the lives of the man and woman (Chris and Jeff) are linked to what's happening to the pigs. They figure this out using random memory fragments. They find the farm and Chris murders the pig farmer and finds his scientific research files. At the end Chris and Jeff and others who have had the worm (all linked by the book 'Walden' for some reason) come to the farm, find the pig linked to them, set them free, paint the walls... cuddle the pigs. One of the more annoying things in this pretensions film were voice overs in scenes when the characters were taking, voice overs of their own speech. There were some nice scenes on a train which were reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine, in fact this film made me want to watch that one again. Really not worth the time.