Upstream Color: trailer

Primer is one of my favorite movies of all time. I cant wait to see what he does with this one!

YES! so excited for this.

I'll be there day one. Primer was too good not to see this.

new trailer

I dont think i'll be looking at anymore that come out. Want to go in as unspoiled as possible.

I really like how the trailer shows this a deliberate and planned movie. Great stuff.

Saw it. Liked it a lot. Felt like it was actually about something, whereas Primer, great as it is, is primarily an intellectual puzzle. My girlfriend was baffled by it, though she hasn't seen Primer and I may not have done an adequate job in warning her what we were in for. There's certainly a lot that is confusing in the first half of the movie, but it cohered pretty well later on, I thought.

I haven't seen Primer, so this was my first exposure to Shane Carruth's work. (Bought it off: http://erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor where it's available to everyone except brits or aussies, fyi)

It was pretty damn awesome. Beautiful, touching, and weirdly spiritual. (And I say that as someone who usually can barely contain a scoff at that last word.) Probably my favourite movie of the year, so far.

Oh man, this is playing in a theater near me at 9:30 tonight. I think I may just buy the Blu-ray/Download package, though, based on the reactions above. That's cool that they're releasing it that way. It sounds like a better movie to watch alone. I'll make a theater run for Gatsby and Iron Man 3.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Oh man, this is playing in a theater near me at 9:30 tonight. I think I may just buy the Blu-ray/Download package, though, based on the reactions above. That's cool that they're releasing it that way. It sounds like a better movie to watch alone. I'll make a theater run for Gatsby and Iron Man 3.

I guess it depends on what your home setup is.

Despite obviously being shot on a limited budget it's genuinely cinematic, and I'd have loved to be able to see it on a big screen.

Then again, seeing it at home will save you from being distracted from people walking out, which is pretty likely, given that a fair bit of the movie feels more like a poem than a conventional narrative.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Oh man, this is playing in a theater near me at 9:30 tonight. I think I may just buy the Blu-ray/Download package, though, based on the reactions above. That's cool that they're releasing it that way. It sounds like a better movie to watch alone. I'll make a theater run for Gatsby and Iron Man 3.

I guess it depends on what your home setup is.

Despite obviously being shot on a limited budget it's genuinely cinematic, and I'd have loved to be able to see it on a big screen.

Then again, seeing it at home will save you from being distracted from people walking out, which is also likely, given that a fair bit of the movie feels more like a poem than a conventional narrative.

I have a beautiful 51" Plasma I got this year, so it'll look great. I'll make popcorn. Since the download is DRM free, I can use JRiver to stream it from the PC in my room to my PS3.

Whoaaaaaa. That was really cool. It's going to require multiple viewings.

So, funny story, there was an issue with the audio during my initial viewing. My receiver is a bit older and had trouble decoding the MP4's 5.1 audio stream. So, I ended up running the audio out through HDMI into my TV and back to the receiver. For some reason, it cut some of the audio channels out even though it was showing 5.1. Anyways, most of the audio was there, but much of the dialogue was cut particularly in the latter half. I'm thinking that maybe the center channel wasn't actually there. So, I'd see people talking sometimes and there wouldn't be a vocal track. I definitely suspected that might be the case, so I wasn't particularly surprised when I watched the Blu-ray this evening. Surprisingly, I didn't miss a lot during that first viewing. It was actually kind of a cool way to experience the movie.

So, I'm fairly clear on everything now. I don't really have any questions, but I think I'll check out some analyses of the movie for fun. I'm sure I missed a few interesting tidbits. This movie is just really darn good. It's one of those movies that's going to stick with me a long time. So glad I grabbed the Blu-ray!

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Watched it twice now and still not sure i get it. Primer didnt seem this hard.

ranalin wrote:

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Watched it twice now and still not sure i get it. Primer didnt seem this hard.

Well, I don't think it's actually hard. It probably just didn't click with you. It's really an abstract romance with some social commentary sprinkled in. Also, if you con't really dig the music and cinematography, I think the acting and story might feel fairly meh. It's definitely a much different movie than Primer. I did read a fun analysis (New Yorker) after my second viewing. It mostly reinforced what I came away with after my viewings.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
ranalin wrote:

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Watched it twice now and still not sure i get it. Primer didnt seem this hard.

Well, I don't think it's actually hard. It probably just didn't click with you. It's really an abstract romance with some social commentary sprinkled in. Also, if you con't really dig the music and cinematography, I think the acting and story might feel fairly meh. It's definitely a much different movie than Primer. I did read a fun analysis (New Yorker) after my second viewing. It mostly reinforced what I came away with after my viewings.

I dig the music and the cinematography i just couldnt place the connection at the start of the 'Thief' and the worm with what happened later after having teh worm removed.

ranalin wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
ranalin wrote:

W
T
F

Watched it twice now and still not sure i get it. Primer didnt seem this hard.

Well, I don't think it's actually hard. It probably just didn't click with you. It's really an abstract romance with some social commentary sprinkled in. Also, if you con't really dig the music and cinematography, I think the acting and story might feel fairly meh. It's definitely a much different movie than Primer. I did read a fun analysis (New Yorker) after my second viewing. It mostly reinforced what I came away with after my viewings.

I dig the music and the cinematography i just couldnt place the connection at the start of the 'Thief' and the worm with what happened later after having teh worm removed.

Ah, I see. Scratch what I said, then. I was sort of just thinking that you might be reading too much into everything because of how far you can analyze primer.

Spoiler:

I just viewed it all as one big crazy-complex parasitic life cycle! Super gross. The couple ends up breaking the life cycle, though, in the end, which is the climax of the story. You end up seeing proof of this in the end when the hikers, The Thief, and the boys from the beginning don't get any parasites (purple stuff) from those plants.

Best movie I've seen in many years.

I have finally seen this. Loved it. I actually thought it was pretty straightforward, compared to Primer.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
Spoiler:

I just viewed it all as one big crazy-complex parasitic life cycle! Super gross. The couple ends up breaking the life cycle, though, in the end, which is the climax of the story. You end up seeing proof of this in the end when the hikers, The Thief, and the boys from the beginning don't get any parasites (purple stuff) from those plants.

Spoiler:

My view matches this. The three groups in the parasite's lifecycle aren't really aware of each other. They just do their bit and don't know or care what comes before or after. There's no one person to blame, because the system as a whole is what causes the pain. The distributed blame may even let the various antagonistic characters tell themselves that they're doing a good thing for people. It's the kind of arbitrarily and randomly cruel parasitic system that surrounds us every day--while also being vague enough that viewers don't over-associate it with a particular, narrow cause.

So, two things.

First, I'm now convinced that Shane Carruth is a troll. Both Primer and Upstream Color are intentionally baffling and don't show you anywhere near enough to be able to grok what the f***is going on. Both are hugely open to interpretation, and I can't help but feel that they're essentially clickbait for nerds on internet forums to speculate wildly about.

Secondly, here's my wild speculation about Upstream Color...

Spoiler:

My main premise is that the worms consume a person's soul. The Sampler (the guy on the pig farm, who is actually God), calls the worms to his farm with his ker-azy sampled sounds of the natural world, whereupon he extracts the worm, and therefore the soul, and installs it into a pig.

This explains why Jeff and Kris (the two main characters) are so emotionally flat and stilted throughout (not to mention suggestible during the process of having their soul consumed). They literally have no soul. That's why they're drawn to each other, because they recognize in the other what is missing in themselves.

Why does the Sampler want a farm full of souls in pigs? Because (assuming he's God), eternity has driven him mad. It's why he wanders around making weird noises of the world - he's gotten bored with his creation, and is now f*cking with it, manipulating and stretching it. As with the sounds he samples, he's manipulating and stretching out people, and uses the souls he keeps in the pigs to visit the poor soul-less individuals in an astral-projection kind of way, to check on his experiments.

So when the pigs get pregnant, they're giving birth to human souls. God can't be doing with this, as it interferes with his experiment, so he drowns them. Kris's vestigial connection to her soul allows her to sense both the pregnancy, as well as the slaughter of the piglets, and it's this connection that allows her and Jeff to follow God's astral projection back to the pig farm, whereupon they kill God.

The final scenes show them (in addition to the rest of the people that had their souls stolen) assuming caretaker roles over the remaining pigs, thus re-uniting them with their souls, and allowing them to be joyful and fulfilled again.

I'm proud to say that, like the movie, my BS explanation, in the words of my wife, doesn't make a lick of sense.

See, I disagree with part of that interpretation:

Spoiler:

A major theme of the film is of interconnected systems that are larger than any single component. The sampler/pig farmer appears to be the primary antagonist to the protagonists, but they only have access to part of the whole. The easy identification of the pig farmer as God misses the extent to which the pig farmer is himself an unwitting component in the cycle.
Unless you're going for a Nietzschean reading, I suppose.

However, this discussion clearly validates your primary thesis about it being clickbait for nerds.

We had more discussion about this here: http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1...

Gremlin wrote:

See, I disagree with part of that interpretation:

Spoiler:

A major theme of the film is of interconnected systems that are larger than any single component. The sampler/pig farmer appears to be the primary antagonist to the protagonists, but they only have access to part of the whole. The easy identification of the pig farmer as God misses the extent to which the pig farmer is himself an unwitting component in the cycle.
Unless you're going for a Nietzschean reading, I suppose.

And I disagree with your disagreement for one reason

Spoiler:

And it's when the pig farmer collects and drowns the piglets. In a particularly roundabout way (dropping them off a bridge in a sack) that makes no sense, except to keep the cycle going. The pig farmer is the one closing the loop, by not only extracting the worms from people and implanting them into pigs, but also by ensuring that the cycle starts again with the blue orchids via his killing of piglets.

Thing is, the pig farmer/God is on the only character in the movie who's motives are utterly inscrutable. Everyone else is behaving rationally. The pig farmer is ineffable.

Ergo, God.

And yeah, I was going to go down a Nietzschean rabbithole at first, but thought better of it.

P.S. I'm totally making all this up off the top of my head, and have very low confidence that any of it will hold up under scrutiny

Gremlin wrote:

However, this discussion clearly validates your primary thesis about it being clickbait for nerds.

Win!