Review: Upstream Color (2013)

The movie is a rape drug the size of a volleyball.

Carruth takes a different approach to his Primer followup, taking all of that heady sci-fi exposition and going outside-in, primarily through the characters' actions, match-cutting and dream logic transportation. Like his last film (a mere nine years prior), every second is important so you better be paying attention. Unlike his last film, Upstream Color is void of questionable technical decisions. This is still a micro-budget production but there is no parallel equivalent of setting an important dialogue scene in the middle of a goddamned fountain.

A sonofabitch of first act shows us the bizarre life cycle of a hallucinogenic organism and how you can use it to destroy a woman's life. Much of the film afterwards is a near-montage of two characters, still in a strange daze, trying to rebuild. On a faster track with more viscera, this is a horror flick, a painting of an impersonal universe that doesn't care what you've built, what you've lost, or how much you suffer.

The result of all this is an intensely emotional experience, one that arouses your sympathy for human beings and also pigs. It stands against Primer in that regard, a movie you had to really fight through to get any bottom-up sentiment out of, but does lose on any top-down surprises. Watching the slow rise and fall of a confusing relationship is a necessary part of the movie and the direction it heads, while emotionally satisfying, is not so much logically.

Dip me in medicine and watch me smoke.

Review: Primer (2004)

I'll admit that I have two weakness. The first: Chocodiles. Those things are fucking delicious. The second: Time travel. (If you were going to say my second weakness was "connecting ideas" then you're an asshole).

Time travel as a subject (or a subsubgenre) has the power to elevate any material from boring to not-quite-as-boring, from romantic comedies to, uh, other things. Not to say there haven't been bad time travel films; there are at least a couple. Time travel has, however, yielded more benefits than detriments. It began a more mature era of Harry Potter films, the best action film ever made, an okay-by-me Van Damme film, a Terry Gilliam film that *gasp* made a profit, at least one good Supernatural episode with TWO DEAN WINCHESTERS, and in fiction, Steve Aylett's best book and the return of the good Palahniuk novel.

But until I saw Primer, I hadn't really seen ANY grounded science in the mix. Being a largely theorhetical/impossible concept, it was more of a speculative excuse for the average man to wield power, or fix his life, or have wacky time-related deaths-by-paradox. Primer is an injection of adrenaline in a long-atrophied muscle.

After a dark sign of things to come in the form of a gruff voice over coming in on the receiving end of a telephone line, Primer showers us all in a technobabble bath, one that doesn't actually stop until the movie ends. Nearest I can tell, most of the technobabble in the first 15 minutes is useless to the time travel element and functions only to establish that the two main characters and their friends test things in their garage and are attemtping to create something innovative and most importantly, profitable.

In what is perhaps unique to time travel films, there is nothing obviously wrong about the main characters' lives. They have well-paying jobs, one of them has a wife and a house, and they enjoy a steady social life outside of work. Once they stumble across the time travel formula, there's no real incentive to meddle with the continuum outside of 'Let's see what happens.'

At the risk of ruining the plot (the film is only 77 minutes long so any specific detail is dangerously close to spoling the entire thing), I will just say that 'Ho man do they ever see.' Er, 'What happens, that is.' Even Primer's trailer has to resort to being incredibly misleading in order to sidestep ruination.

Being totally in the dark to the film's nuances is part of the experience, or in my case, continuing experience. The issues in sound design and acting quality, largely due to the budget, are unfortunate but not totally damaging. I love it. Carruth has created a complex story that refuses to hold my hand or promise an easy solution. Good.