Upstream Color - sci-fi to look forward to?

faetal on 14/12/2012 at 17:00

So it's about two novice ornithologists who like each other a lot.

Count me in.

Scots Taffer on 17/12/2012 at 02:37

On the strength of that trailer - pass.

God, I hope he doesn't have to insert himself into every movie.

Aerothorn on 15/3/2013 at 17:14

Has anyone else seen this yet? I was blown away. It's worth noting that I didn't watch any of the trailers - I need to check those out now - but whatever expectations I had were defied. Like Primer, I would go so far as to call the film innovative, which is hard for such a matured medium.

Edit: watched the linked trailer. It's worth noting that Carruth did all of these things himself, but he's intentionally avoiding revealing anything spoilerish, so suffice it to say they don't paint a full picture.

Briareos H on 15/3/2013 at 17:23

Did you see it at a festival or is there another way to watch it?

Aerothorn on 24/3/2013 at 20:19

Quote Posted by Briareos H

Did you see it at a festival or is there another way to watch it?

Shane Carruth is touring the US showing it, leading up to its general release in early April, when it will also be available for download. (http://erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor) for details.

Briareos H on 15/5/2013 at 21:53

The film was really great. I watched it two times in a row so as to feel I had made sense of everything I could think of before going to the internet reviews and countless explanations/interpretations.

What's most amazing to me is how grounded in reality Carruth's film is, intricate and complex but leading to a rational explanation without requiring too many stretches of the imagination. But because of how demanding and involve it is, it has an intrisic oniric and alien feel, slowly and delightfully revealing itself.
It's also a well-written and well-played love story with excellent directing and photography.

Renault on 16/5/2013 at 01:45

Would it completely ruin the effect of the movie to ask what it's about?

Morte on 16/5/2013 at 05:27

I don't think so. It's not like it's a very plot driven movie.

The basic premise: There's these a special flower, and the worms that feed and grow in its soil have mind-altering properties. Make tea out of them, and you can achieve a kind of emphatetic bond with the other drinkers. Ingest it whole, and it leaves you in an incredibly vulnerable, extremely suggestible state. There's a thief who makes use of this to rob people blind. The movie is about one of his victims putting her wrecked life back together.

I thought it was superb, btw.

demagogue on 16/5/2013 at 06:55

I think it's much more radical than the way Morte put it ... not to say he was wrong.

This is my thinking, which you don't want to read until after you see it. [spoiler]I was trying to decide if the consciousness was still in the original bodies or if it got completely disembodied into the worm-pig-others-complex and the "human bodies" and "world" were only "their" projections, running on some quantum/psychic connection between the worm-brain & what was left from the ruins of their decimated minds. I mean by the end we know the real bodies are still around & part of it (it actually wasn't clear to me until the very end when they made contact). But the disembodied projection part was still part of it too IMO.

And as it went on I realized it maybe didn't make a difference. It was both IMO, slipping in and out of real embodiment & shared projections. In that sense, and because I studied cogsci & philosophy of mind, I saw a lot of it as a rumination on the nature of consciousness itself. It took me a while to figure out (I believe) that the rancher was effectively a voyeur doing the whole thing to stay in touch with & screw with their lives. It's also possible that he was the "inventor" and original psychic connection in the daisy chain, which would explain why killing him would apparently "break the spell" across the board.[/spoiler]

Morte on 16/5/2013 at 08:59

Sure, there's a lot more going on in there, particularly concerning empathy and identity, I was just giving the setup.

At it's core though, at least the way I read it, it's about overcoming trauma.

BTW, you can buy it here (http://erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor) in (likely) case there's no theatre showings near you. And you're not in the UK or Aussieland.