I saw it at a preview a couple weeks ago (blog post with horrible photography, link to full review, well-labeled spoilers) and really liked it.  It plays the Brattle starting next week for Boston-area folks, and I recommend going in just as cold and ignorant as you can; a great deal of the fun is the discovery.

Hard to believe, but it has been 9 years since PRIMER (he spent several years developing TOPIARY, but it was never made). With the release of UPSTREAM COLOR, Director Shane Carruth has been making the rounds with interviews and Q&A's at screenings (he is releasing the film independently). He's said that it was NOT his intention for PRIMER to be known as an unfathomable 'puzzle' film with viewers trying to figure out what was happening.

So, what about Carruth's new film? It's perhaps even more puzzling than PRIMER! At least with PRIMER, SF fans understood the rules of the road when it comes to time travel stories. Here, Carruth creates a stew with memory loss, farm animal experimentation, Henry David Thoreau's Walden books, earthworms, telepathy, orchids, sound waves and romance - and more! Parts of it have echoes to the early films of David Cronenberg with a couple of direct quotes to THEY CAME FROM WITHIN and VIDEODROME. As with Cronenberg, Carruth seems destined to combat the notion that he is a cold, intellectual filmmaker with a taste for the offbeat.

As with PRIMER, Carruth seems to have discarded the first act entirely. He plunges you into what would normally be the second act. On one hand, this forces the viewer to be an active participant; On the other, it makes the lead actors into hollow vessels without much sympathy.

As confounding as UPSTREAM can be at times (and there were a handful of walkouts at the theater), Carruth is such a meticulous filmmaker that it is engrossing to watch and, ultimately, a rewarding experience. Amy Seimetz is very watchable as the lead who gets experimented on. Not only does Carruth produce, direct, write and compose the score - he is also the male lead (and does a credible professional job). This truly is a one-man band indie.

On paper, this may sound like good challenging Marathon fodder (PRIMER went over very well with the crowd), but, I think this one is just too confounding to go over nearly as well. Worth seeing on your own, however.

Perhaps next time out, Carruth will make a film with a simple linear three-act structure. Otherwise, he will be tagged as a confounding tinker toy abstactionist.

L.A. Connection wrote on Apr 26^th, 2013 at 2:04pm:


(a) I think as long as you don't worry about "where did all this stuff come from", Upstream Color is actually pretty straightforward (says the guy who missed a big chunk of Carruth's basic idea).  Granted, that's kind of a huge thing to ask the audience to not care about, but it really is kind of irrelevant to the story he's telling.

(b) I don't know that he really cares about being tagged as something.  A Topiary would have been a big expensive thing that had to sell to a mainstream audience, so maybe he'll try that again, but if he finds satisfaction making quality movies in his house, I'll take that and not wish he was something else.

L.A. Connection wrote on Apr 28^th, 2013 at 4:00pm:


THe two funniest things you said here are:  "flawed" and "interesting' to descibe Superman III.  Understatement "flawed" and overstatement "interesting" in one sentence.   

Quote:


Carruth is not alone in this irritating trend. Looking at IndieWire's review of the 2013 Tribeca film festival, there are more than a few films that take the nontraditional nonsensical approach to storytelling.


Maybe they need to watch this video from the guys who brought us "Mystery Science Theater 3000"...