UPSTREAM COLOR, a new film from Shane Carruth (Primer)

what is this even going to be "about"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U9KmAlrEXU

screenings/theatrical releases

Primer thread

Look forward to destroying my brain again!

this looks pretty great

I hate to admit it but the title reminds me of getting pissed on

I immediately regret posting that

complete soundtrack on SoundCloud.

Rewatched Primer recently. Still very good.

this is gonna be nuts

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/primer-shane-carruth/all/

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9109223/getting-drunk-upstream-color-director-shane-carruth

he's a really fascinating person.

they have run the preview for this at every show i've seen at IFC for about two months
i have seen it about fifteen or sixteen times and have it nearly memorized
it is still utterly unclear what the film is about

Primer just made me shrug.

i liked primer quite a bit and will see this
it's just that the preview is so intentionally vague

Primer was good for what it was. I don't get why this is so teal and orange. In the interviews I've read with him he talks a lot about wanting to make this his own way without interference from anyone, so why has he chosen to make it look like everything else?

apparently the movies is too!

primer doesn't get enough credit for really have a strong sense of place--that texas suburban sprawl washed out in oppressive light thing.

xpost--the movie is intentionally vague, that is.

i dunno if i got texas so much as strip mall but yeah, it's a thing

texas (or most of it) = strip mall.

I cannot think of a better no-budget movie than Primer in recent times, especially in the sort of sci-fi genre. Interested to hear of other examples and especially if they are more interesting than Primer. For me this movie delivers more than the way overrated Looper. Not that I didn't enjoy Looper cos I thought it was quite ace, but just not as good as the hype.

I think the vérité style and time travel is a major winner, more of a headfuck when it is done in a normal people chatting shite styley.

Edit
this = as in Primer not seen Upstream Color.

these profiles are fascinating but I keep having to slide past the descriptions (such as they are) of Upstream Color's plot because I really don't want to know.

Did like his snide encapsulation of many reactions as "I know what it's about, of course, but you won't."

This was great; my date was pissed that the whole thing turned on the brutal exploitation and torture of a woman so maybe avoid if that's gonna not set well with you.
It's basically a horror movie! Major Philip K. Dick influences, lotta body horror. It's not abstract and the story is not difficult to follow at all. Just a unique voice.
Carruth spoke after the showing and when someone asked him how much the movie cost, he said he'd rather not say. That Primer benefited from the legend but that he was more than a little tired of hearing how it was such a good movie for so cheap and he wants this one to stand on its own merits.

he was more than a little tired of hearing how it was such a good movie for so cheap and he wants this one to stand on its own merits

That is a strange thing to say. Especially when you take a decade out, the only frame of reference people have is his last film and they are being complementary! Can't wait for this movie it sounds ace! obv I don't mean the torture shit but I imagine it won't be crass, exploitative shit.

I didn't think it was; i think my date just reached maximum density on the "tortured woman must rebuild her shattered life" trope as a way to kick off a story.

apparently he's "nearly" done with his next film and this one won't have any super-real, fantastic plot devices. it's not a spoiler to say that, like Primer, Upstream Color rotates around some supernatural elements but only in the sense that Eraserhead does too

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn

He kinda went for the Hollywood ending huh. (JOKES)

I agree with forks, not super difficult to follow overall. But of course the profusion of details and the repeated events mean that there's probably plenty to decipher.

Basically a love letter to tape, I guess?

And the animation from Kris' old job had to be his test renders for A Topiary right? Any confirmation on that?

Please someone else post about this movie tonight before I start writing some 10000 word essay about my THEORIES

It is from a topiary, he confirmed that.

I think i can handle seeing this again.

Cerulean Credit Union tho

this sounds amazing, I have no idea when and how I am going to be able to view this but I sure hope it is sooner than later (not likely)

at the latest you can snag the digital download on May 7th.

this sounds amazing, I have no idea when and how I am going to be able to view this but I sure hope it is sooner than later (not likely)

I want to see it in the theater. There's a screening near me on May 10.

http://erbpfilm.com/film/upstreamcolor#screenings

http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2013/upstream-color

IZ DED

this is so teal and orange

the whole thing turned on the brutal exploitation and torture of a woman so maybe avoid if that's gonna not set well with you

:|

just bought tickets for the Sundance London screening. extremely excited. anyone else who's interested over here had better hurry up - two of the three days are sold out

Carruth appears to be having a moment.

hoo, this movie

reaching for the cosmic with Thoreau and piggies

I wasn't remotely bored, but I got nuthin otherwise

re body horror, more sci-fi to me, but "Cronenberg througha Malick strainer" zipped through my mind.

if either wanted to be baffling, that is.

I liked it a lot!

i dunno about this one

(i didnt really know about primer either)

kind of a bunch of "hogwash" if u ask me

i got "love story" much more strongly than "horror" or scifi from this

"tortured woman must rebuild her shattered life" trope as a way to kick off a story.

this is exactly how id say it also - sure it's disturbing on screen but its essentially a stand-in for any past trauma imo

i dont think i get the field sound recording scenes

there's a lot of stuff in this film i'm not sure i "got" in the sense that I could explain it to someone but very much in the Lynchian sense where it makes logical sense within the body of the film and I don't really care about it cohering outside of the narrative setting of the film

yeah I never felt very compelled to figure out Primer but I was happy to vibe to it. Hope this is similar.

it's way more vibey than Primer. Primer definitely rewards untangling of its gimmick; this can be grokked on the first watch, and the puzzle-hunt details really are just details

Yeah, I didn't feel confused about anything here bar a couple of details.

a good non-spoiler tip i think is to just take everything completely literally

this movie was great -- i saw it last weekend but didn't realize there was a thread. cronenberg-via-malick is appropriate, i really liked it. i think after i saw it i had a lot of things to say about rituals and people's habits and worms and plants, but it's all gone now. that's probably for the best. i liked this movie a lot.

i should see this maybe? it's playing here, shockingly.

you should see this, almost definitely. it's at worst a little disorienting and silly, at best you'll love it.
nobody else vibed the philip k dick comparison?

so good

feel like the obliqueness of his ideas really keep ppl from talking about his filmmaking--the look of this, the editing, the sound editing were all insanely high quality.

it's funny, he's been pretty open in discussing this but the sampler character is still such a major monkeywrench to me. i think everything baffling about this film ties to that character in one way or another.

It's simple, the Sampler controls the people through their bonded pigs by playing them his environmental field recordings

I was really impressed w/ Carruth's score; don't remember taking note of the music (was there any?) in Primer.

there was music in primer but he's gotten better. i'd need to double check but i thought there was a bit toward the very end of this that was a lot like the music at the very end of primer

IFC is selling the score on vinyl

so I thought this was...something. really looking forward to seeing it again but this first viewing left me feeling rather aloof from it all. but maybe I was just tired.

I think part of my failure to engage was due to not really feeling the visual style of the film. even the shots with a bit more visual flair felt a little flat to me--but again that maybe ties back into feeling like the movie was at arm's length to me.

Also uh SPOILER but.....

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

Was there some indication that it came from a new litter from "her" pig, is that what you're saying? If so, I missed it. Just seemed like it was probably a random piglet from the time after the victims took over the farm.

I didn't notice any explicit connection but pondering that final image and the bit about pregnancy earlier it certainly "felt" like that. obviously that's a shot in the dark!

Also uh SPOILER but.....

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

― ryan, Friday, April 26, 2013 11:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so tired of people asking this question after films

well the first litter of piglets that her pig gave birth to were all drowned but that doesn't mean it couldn't be from a new litter.

saw this. look after your spirit pig.

also you must kill the one within who reduces all of Nature's vast system to mere...music *spits*

good advice xp

wasn't entirely sure about this. mostly looked and felt like a honda commercial, which detracted from the (interesting) ideas. dialogue, what there was of it, felt a bit cod at times. I think the most lucid observations were about human relationships - putting it closest to a romance, as said above

but I'm glad they finally killed the nefarious blue stuff cycle that was helping that dastardly thief. and I'm glad they killed whatever damaging cycle of personal emotion it stood for in metaphor.

the field recording bits were amazing. could have watched 2 hours of that very happily.

but...but he is REDUCING it, see, turning it to UGLY MUSIC with his HUMAN BOX

pfah

man where are you getting this MUSIC < NATURE, FOOLISH HUMAN stuff from? I didn't have that take-away at all.

dunno, trying to rationalise the purpose of the field-recording guy. a guy who records and stores the stuff of life in his giant pen/his music box, inert and expendable, and sometimes chucks it off a bridge. he perpetuates the cycle of striving that brings damage to the main characters. if only he could *embrace* his pig and his sounds. yo.

actually the music he did make with his downtuned scraping noises was really cool. wanted more of it.

maybe carruth was making a documentary about the local eccentric at the same time and ended up splicing the footage together idk

well one of the things Carruth discussed in one of the interviews I read with him (likely linked upthread somewhere) is that when Jeff and Kris kill the Sampler, it's basically an error, because he's not really the source of their trauma. Their actions end the parasite lifecycle, and free their spirit pigs, but it's not really a proper revenge, or whatever.

Also the Sampler and Jeff & Kris have some really similar behaviors as a result of the worm's influence. The share an apparent obsession with or hypersensitivity to sound, and you see all three characters do the thing where they graze their fingers over the things they pass (CDs/spirit pigs) trying to get some sense of them.

One of the unsolved puzzle-box parts of the movie for me is how Jeff and Kris are experiencing time during the middle part of the movie. They seem to have the conversation where Jeff admits to his fraud repeatedly, in different locations; there's a few other scenes where they seem to acknowledge that they are repeating a particular vignette that they went through before. Like in the cafe, Kris says something about "we save a few weeks doing this". Makes me think that the middle part of the movie shows us Kris and Jeff repeating the same patterns over and over, getting "further" through some sequence each time, but all cut together so the audience only travels once through the whole routine.

that bit was str8-up eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

"free their spirit pigs" -- new favorite phrase

Their actions end the parasite lifecycle, and free their spirit pigs

dammit, this isn't playing anywhere nearby. i feel i have missed out on a generation-defining experience.

he made a point of saying that none of the characters are really amoral except for "the thief" which seems weirdly reductionist? probably good not to assume the creator completely understands his own work.
I think i mentioned this upthread but he also said that the walden connection was totally by accident and happened once they started filming more or less. so there's a lot of happenstance, as in all art.

Saw this today also, did anybody get a lead on the actual connection between the Sampler and the Pig Farmer? And were the Pig Farmer guys actions actually bad, I got the impression he was somehow trying to improve the Sampled peeps quality of life slightly.

Were the sampled whooshes from the bass bins designed to attract the Sampled? Is that how Kris suddenly appeared or was it just her memories driving her along.

i feel i have missed out on a generation-defining experience.

don't.

yeah that's a strange reaction

an independent theater in chicago posted on FB that they were showing this over the weekend (apparently they'd been showing it for a few days but almost nobody came), and some guy responded, "When are you going to start showing regular movies?"

lol

Music B0x? That makes me "almost nobody" -- what a distinction!

wtf? how can the cinematic freeing of spirit pigs not be a generation-defining experience? sometimes i just don't understand you people...

Saw it this afternoon, finally. I liked that it seems to be a horror movie about modern notions of how human consciousness operates, but it was so profoundly sad (and more a little nauseating, due to camerawork + sound) I don't know if I could watch it again.

profoundly sad? really?

I thought so.

Music B0x? That makes me "almost nobody" -- what a distinction!

― and that sounds like a gong-concert (La Lechera), Sunday, April 28, 2013 8:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no. p4ti0

oh ok. i don't know that place -- i just looked it up and there it is. i've been to events at the portage, but not that one. will look into!

also yes -- this movie was so sad! people are sad, generally, and then the pigs and the river and the flowers? yikes. and so grisly.

mostly looked and felt like a honda commercial,

thought insurance commercial @ times, def

that's part of what i liked about it -- you know those commercials, where everyone is shuffling around, going about their business and then two people look at each other and someone starts talking about aging parents and life insurance? imagine if all of those people in those commercials are just under the spell of the spirit pig. mindlessly sending their checks where they're told, giving each other meaningful looks, making jokes about birds, and hiding their secret horrifying worm experience.

it makes those commercials a little more fun!

goddam it. oh how i hate you, movie theater.

hiding their secret horrifying worm experience

okay, now that someone's said it...

what made it look like a honda commercial?

i've only seen the preview and the sort of fussy long-lens subdued color thing def. has something in common with slick ads but maybe that's not what you folks meant?

I think they meant that it started Pomplamoose

irrelevant question: does anyone know where this was shot? some parts of the city scenes looked like Austin but others definitely did not. Maybe Dallas? Do they have trains now??

Based on the scenes with the trains, it's definitely Dallas.

I was looking so hard I noticed that the background of almost every city scene was intentionally out of focus.

So much of it is out of focus and has an insanely shallow depth of field, bokeh ain't that cool, I found it wearing after a while.

Yeah that's part of what bothered me about the visual look. For all it's flair it wasn't terribly interesting to look at

mostly Dallas locations, apparently

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/20130418-with-upstream-color-and-to-the-wonder-texas-filmmakers-deliver-experimental-love-stories-that-stand-as-examples-of-pure-cinema.ece

per that article, i know im malick-stan but not sure those comparisons are doing carruth any favors--at least in terms of his visuals. i think that will definitely be an area in which it will be fun to watch him develop as he makes more films. he definitely seems to have a fully formed aesthetic in most other respects already.

yeah, as I noted upthread, the constant barrage of shaky-cam close-up shots and short depth-of-field made me nauseous. really claustrophobic too... this would be a terrible movie to watch on acid.

I wonder if the shallow dof is a way of masking budgetary constraints wrt locations/sets

Probably. Obv it was intentional, tho I'm not sure if the choice helped Carrutth's directorial vision or not. I found it tedious after a while, and felt the same way about the film as a whole :\

the soft focus look is sometimes a way of making a cheap production look less cheap and more "stylish"

but sometimes you can see right through that and the effect is cloying

for a counterargument see the 1st 2/3 of roy andersson's love story which is all shallow focus long lens stuff and boy is it amazing

I wonder if the shallow dof is a way of masking budgetary constraints wrt locations/sets

― ヘイシグ・ブローズ (MaresNest), Tuesday, April 30, 2013 12:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry just saw this. answer is "yes" i think

for a counterargument see the 1st 2/3 of roy andersson's love story which is all shallow focus long lens stuff and boy is it amazing

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, May 1, 2013 4:46 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

otm

also filmmakers like lucrecia martel use it super well

there has been a real shallow DOF explosion with the advent of DSLR cinema cuz finally you could get that look with a cheap camera and it made your video look way more film-like

that piglet at the end was her "baby" wasn't it?

― ryan, Friday, April 26, 2013 11:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so tired of people asking this question after films

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, April 27, 2013 1:18 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ lol

my capsule reviews of this movie are "tim henman should stick to tennis" & "is this the indie matrix". thought this was pretty bad? morbs otm on its reach for profundity; i thought it might cohere well enough to work as some sort of allegory for the ills of antibiotic overuse or something, but it was just kind of uninterestingly diffuse, i think, & suffered additionally for being so in light of recent, more successful broad films like post tenebras lux, the new malick, &c - when this careened into the guy's work history or tepid subway conversation i didn't really feel anything was gained. i can't specifically locate a source well enough to call it cliched, but was a movie ever as likely to feature swimming pool sequences, or strip-lit photocopying montages? wearied post-nolan use of ~charged talismans~. it was so student. the mechanically administered twinkling wonder of the synth score was kinda oppressive, too.

pigs, starlings & haircuts excellent throughout though.

did i say everybody in it looked like a tennis player, i meant to, this was a very tennisy cast

I can't totally disagree with any of that after one viewing; but I do think Carruth is a talent and look forward to more from him. And perhaps in the future this will open up for me.

Kinda prefer to take this as an allegory about addiction for now...

i haven't seen primer, & have it set aside to catch somenight soon. but to just ad-hom psychologise for a moment i kinda thought that this came from a sorta uninteresting place - it seemed sorta enamored with some pretty superficial elements of what it was trying to do, cf the mood of the score, the well maintained monotone of the first half, its affectless characters. this stuff is swimming pool montages to me, like it's pretty & appealing but its made optically & just accessorised with fixtures, with walden & terse relationship conflict (i thought the relationship stuff - with maybe maybe maybe the exception of their memory arguments - was uniformly p bad/unconvincing/sorta thoughtless). idk, i don't feel super charitable toward this anyhow.

ps i keep throwing gangsigns at you in different threads to see if you've seen the reygadas flick, ryan, cause i'm interested to hear your take. i will fund half your cinema ticket if you haven't caught it but go instead of reliving upstream color.

plan to see it very soon! Like tomorrow hopefully

some sort of allegory for the ills of antibiotic overuse or something

haha what

the guy is no good at relationships, it's true

schlump totally otm

the conversation around this film is mostly more enjoyable than the film itself

i believe that the parasite is an adaptation of nature evolved to dismantle humanity's techno-industrial complex thereby preventing the destruction of earth

I kept thinking of that fungus that infects ants and takes over their bodies. Or Invasion Of The Body Snatchers as told from the p.o.v. of the pod people - only they don't know they're pod people. Or that group of people who refer to themselves as Targeted Individuals - people who believe they're the victims of continued assault from government mind-control weapons.

Probably all of the above. Phase IV seems to be a huge influence on this too.

I dug it quite a bit, but will pass on seeing it again. Nobody is wrong in this thread.

No Ken Middleham, no cred!

Shane Carruth is things that make you go hmmm.

as exasperating as I found this, I did think the style and mood carried it. sufficiently.

(it will of course be overvalued by the clarity-averse culties)

Will be busy overvaluing Spring Breakers for awhile longer.

(Meaning, *I* will be busy ... not *they* will be busy.)

leggings, the "peter pan" look
"They could be STARlings"

now available for digital download direct from the man himself: http://erbpfilm.com/store

i had questions about her haircut too
and i agree, starlings are charming but the application was a shade twee for me.

well her post-worm haircut is different, right? i thought it was funny b/c she wasn't supposed to be the type of person who had that haircut.

she had long undistinguishable hair before, then she got it cut post-trauma iirc?
i think it was a pretty distinctive cut afterwards, and i thought it indicated that her personality had changed in some fundamental way.

yeah i think that's right

Don't bother solving it: http://www.avclub.com/articles/upstream-color-room-237-and-why-some-movie-mysteri,97371/

Mid-level movie critics all got different haircuts post-Room 237.

the "woman goes through a rape scenario and comes out the other side tougher, hunting for revenge and with a short haircut" trope was among the weakest elements of this film, i'd prefer not to think about it too much myself

i dunno, it's kinda schlocky but i like that.

the schloc1ness is why it kinda feels forgivable but the gravitas he's trying to play with negates it imo

i thought maybe it was decorative faux gravitas

from the target collection

the "woman goes through a rape scenario and comes out the other side tougher, hunting for revenge and with a short haircut" trope

she didn't seem tougher to me, she seemed utterly lost and fragile? she had the gun before she was assaulted, and when she shot the pig farmer, it hardly seemed triumphant in any way at all.

okay, you're probably right there. substitute "victimized" for "tougher"

i liked her hostile outbursts

i came out of this not thinking much of it, but i keep coming back to it + dwelling on certain parts. my favorite thing about Primer was the rhythm of the dialogue as the guys were figuring things out, in this movie you only really get that in the sequence where the lady and the dude start piecing things together. but i liked it anyway. the stuff with the kidnapping and the operation really made my skin crawl... some of the emotional material didn't really resonate, i think carruth as an actor may have bitten off more than he could chew, but i still sorta want to root him on for trying. i hope his next movie doesnt take another 9 years to get made

some of the reviews talk about how cold and mechanistic it is, i wonder if that'd occur to as many people if the narrative of carruth being an engineer wasnt already supplied (well, having made Primer doesn't hurt either). the film made me think more of Soderbergh and maybe Roeg than Malick

really, a week after seeing this, maybe a day, I had no idea who the fuck "the Orchid Mother and Daughter" were. Remember when individual films didn't have to be deep, impenetrable studies?

No.

yes... those were dark days

h4a I think he's said in interviews that he's planning on making "The Modern Ocean" on a much-sooner-than-nine-years schedule.

my favorite thing about Primer was the rhythm of the dialogue as the guys were figuring things out, in this movie you only really get that in the sequence where the lady and the dude start piecing things together.

i have made a fan only kickstarter gift recut of this scene in which mark ruffalo & kirsten dunst begin the process of distributing the tapes to others, it is a striking climax that lends emotional punch to this otherwise monotonous student film

Remember when individual films didn't have to be deep, impenetrable studies?

― ballin' from Maine to Mexico (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, May 8, 2013 1:41 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

even years later, i still have no idea what you want from a film at all

A fight.

Men dressed for dinner

i have made a fan only kickstarter gift recut of this scene in which mark ruffalo & kirsten dunst begin the process of distributing the tapes to others, it is a striking climax that lends emotional punch to this otherwise monotonous student film

― daft on the causes of punk (schlump), Wednesday, May 8, 2013 2:55 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

idgi

i still have no idea what you want from a film at all

No one thing, dawg. I even like this film, sort of. I think the increasing contentment of filmmakers in making stuff comprehensible almost entirely to themselves is a bit insular tho.

pigs, Thoreau, Emerson etc:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/the-thoreau-poison.html

it's funny the last three movies i've seen are this, to the wonder, and post tenebras lux--but i wouldn't really call it a trend?

there are more, i think.

i do agree re: this film, primer too, i kind of like them but i'm kind of like ehhhh im not sure at the same time

i came out of this not thinking much of it, but i keep coming back to it + dwelling on certain parts.

agree with this

Holy Motors, The Master ...

recent Gus Van Sant to a degree

This felt more accessible to me than Primer, but less accessible than the other movies cited as points of comparison. (Haven't seen the Reygadas or the new Malick yet.)

watched this the other day i enjoyed this quite a bit, found myself thinking about it a lot

i definitely found myself more captivated by the ecosystem / lifecycle itself, and less about the main characters' relationship or even about them, since they seemed to lack any sort of agency at all -- like i could not understand or connect with them as characters because they didn't have any choices to make, they were just compelled by various forces they barely understood. i'm not sure whether it's meant to express a a sense of determinism but it felt a bit hollow

but that said, i did appreciate how the lifecycle of this parasitic creature was expressed through characters who were themselves engaged in parasitic relationships / behaviors -- the material theft, the orchid harvesting (poaching?), the sampler's exploitive voyeurism

"Showing Hollywood the way: how 'Upstream Color' hit iTunes without leaving theaters - Simultaneous digital release is what many big studios are pining for, and Shane Carruth just beat them to it"

many, many movies have done that before this one

yeah that's been in the works for a decade, basically theaters (=nat'l association of theater owners, NATO) have so far prevented the big studios from heading down that route, plus they still feel like they need the huge publicity still attending a theatrical premiere/initial release to "sell" the film through the subsequent release windows. upstream color was never going to get that kind of rollout anyway.

one of the dynamics of blockbuster filmmaking IIRC

btw i generally approve of personal mythopoetics in film.

i don't think that's what the opportunistic minor talent van sant is up to-- he just seems to cop various art-film moves and applies them to sensational topics (he's not the only one to do this, but he's the most successful probably). i like his mainstream work a little better than his artier stuff, although the new one w/ matt damon looks atrocious (did anyone see that?)

pt anderson is a more complex case. i think the most radical thing he's doing lately is to upend expectations of character development. but he also really likes indulging actors and i think that explains his perverse dramaturgy. i liked the master better than any of his previous films btw.

If movies are dreams, and if dreams represent disguised wishes, then Hollywood movies, created by many hands under high economic pressure, disguise the wishes of something like the hive mind of capitalism. The symbols and myths in a box-office hit contain fantasies that many people want to believe, or that their socioeconomic superiors want them to believe. An interpreter may enjoy exposing a hit movie’s fantasy, but he would usually be wrong to mistake what he finds there for an artist’s vision of the world.

i don't like this. this is nicely stated, but it's a version of a base assumption of academic and "elitist" critics. that blockbuster films, or perhaps "Hollywood movies," can be profitably read as symptoms of larger forces, dispensing with notions of intentionality or directorial vision. whereas art/indie/foreign/"other" films can be read precisely as communications from their makers, somehow outside the same social forces that have left scrutable traces on their Hollywood opposite numbers. like a lot of assumptions there's a bit of truth in there. but it's also a (surprise!) elitist and condescending notion. it diminishes (or fails to acknowledges) the virtues of craft, convention, genre. in this context auteurism functions as an escape hatch for appointed mainstream directors whose films can be interpreted along art-film lines.

it also assumes a capital-R Romantic notion of the "artist's vision" which implies a pretty drastic misunderstanding of popular art.

but i digress.

tho otherwise that article is brilliant

There's an undercurrent of tech-sector "disruption" (sorry!) in the tone of that article too.

Promised Land was the worst GVS since Good Will Hunting.

i just want to read amateurist on movies all the time

On Netflix Canada (and possibly US) now.

Still working through my scorching crush (dormant for awhile, now reactivated) on S. Carruth. Lord have mercy, I do appreciate an incredibly neurotic control-freak nerd. Movie's p cool too; more on that later, maybe.

also this movie is not "teal and orange," as someone said upthread

it is BLUE AND YELLOW

otm

This sucked.

the quiet pathos of sitting in the middle of a pig farm playing a MIDI controller not attached to anything

one thousand grad students locked in a room banging away at one thousand unplugged midi controllers

I liked this, but Jordan is very on point

ha, i liked it too!

The whole Foley/Sound Design angle was poorly executed.

agreed, but at the same time the sounds and textures were a big part of my enjoyment of the movie. carruth clearly has a passion for field recording & sound design.

I really liked the field recordings too! This movie keeps getting better the more I think about it. There should be an Upstream Color filter you can apply to any boring genre movie to turn it into spirit pig/worm surgery/field recording masterpiece.

too bad there are no more video stores, that would make a good section name

'you got any spirit pig movies?'

'there's over there together with the worm surgery ones'

i want more movies like this

invent the filter!

In the last couple months I've seen Amy Seimetz in this, as a cartoonishly deadbeat mom on The Killing, and as a well-adjusted "quirky" romantic interest on Family Tree. Range!

i wish i were that enterprising!

xp

big fan of Primer but I wasn't that into this. started out very interesting with the worm harvesting and abduction bit but when it narrowed down to just the one couple it kind of lost me. I wanted to know more about the wider conspiracy. like, what was the pig farmer's relationship if any to the abductor / thief?

having the pig farmer also be some kind of ambient musician / sound artist made no sense to me.

the opening sequence seems to imply that there are applications for the worm powers other than fucking people over (like when the kids are drinking the juice and using it to mirror each other / do kung fu) but then that side of the story is just completely dropped. as a relationship movie I didn't think it was all that good.

caruth is actually playing a peripheral character; the relationship is between seimetz's character and the pigs.

or rather man's problematic relationship with food supply.

fell asleep watching this tbh

free your spirit pig

IMO, this is one of those almost Lynchian kinds of movies where the plot is *kind of* important but still takes a backseat to the overall experience of the visuals and sound. I think it really succeeds at just being a visceral movie. Almost the polar opposite of Primer, which is so much more cold, cerebral, and plot-driven (but not without its share of atmosphere and feel). So much of this movie just seems to be about touch and emotions, and about the breakdown of identity. I don't know if the crazy sci-fi worm-pig-orchid lifecycle conceit was the only path to that (Carruth seems to think it was), and it does create all kinds of weird, annoyingly unanswerable plot questions.

Anyway, Carruth is 2 for 2 now in my book, and I'm excited to see what he does next.

maybe the reason it feels more heavily concerned with plot and making sense to me is having watched pacific rim beforehand.

if i think about dmr's complaints (i had the same ones basically) they bother me but, if i dont, i find i actually quite liked this movie and it left a good impression on me. i guess some things are bit more feel-y?

i find it interesting that no one really likes/connects 2 the love story aspect. i was really into that, & the stuff kindof abt the impossibility of really connecting w/ someone, blending memories, how can u communicate your real self etc etc idk.....i think in some youtube q&a all of that is what mike silverblatt lached onto in a statement after a screening & it made me feel validated that he being such a perceptive reader dug that aspect too but maybe that just means im like him & really attuned 2 that stuff as a true bookish aspie shut-in type

I definitely liked some aspects of the movie ... I was impressed by how much story was told with no dialogue in the last 25 or so minutes and certain scenes like them digging up the yard looking for a high-pitched noise were pretty tense and effective. I think it was one of those movies were I really liked the setup but then felt let down by where they went with it (I'd put Looper in the same category).

they did go back to the conspiracy thing at the end, though. the sound recordings were meant to draw them back i thought.

A month or so after seeing this, I have to say that I don't have very clear memories of it. It hasn't stuck with me the way Primer did. I enjoyed it as an experience, but its overall effect was less enigmatic than just sort of hazy.

I enjoyed this but it lost me when it cut to the neighbours(?) - couple with ginger girl and beardy guy - and the pig guy being apparently omnipresent.
Primer was tauter than taut plot-wise, not an unnecessary shot afaict, but I'm not sure I could say the same about this and it couldn't really sustain that kind of mood for the whole time.
I don't really get how Jeff came into the movie, I thought he was watching her in a sinister way on the train but I guess not?

I saw it in the same cinema I saw Berberian Sound Studio and the focus on the sound recordings and their contexts reminded me of that a little.

what was the pig farmer's relationship if any to the abductor / thief?

pig farmer is jacob from LOST, abductor/thief/kids are his minions/acolytes.

I was psyched for this movie and left cold by it. It just seemed like a touchy feely Scanner Darkly. While I started out just zoning on the photography & editing, by the time they found a very dubiously placed orchid in a cold spring and started thinking about how unlikely that was, I knew I had disconnected with this movie altogether

I don't think there was any evidence of a connection between the pig farmer and the abductor/thief. If anything, the pig guy was kind of "rescuing" people by pulling out their worms.

"rescuing" people by pulling out their worms
lol

I lost track of how the girl got to the pig farm though

she followed her heart to her spirit pig

I feel mildly embarrassed now because it appears that I am the only one on this thread who couldn't make out what the hell was going on.
I think I made the mistake of watching it when I was hungover and thus not giving it enough attention. It looked beautiful though. I will need to watch it again before I come to a conclusive verdict.

The Thief, the Sampler, and the Orchid Mother and Daughter are all unknown to one another. They are connected by the worm but don't really know that or understand it.

When you capitalize it like that it looks like a Greenaway film title

This was terrible but cool that it was shot with a GH2

Basically any explanation about the worm or the pigs or the soundcatcher appeals to some part of me, and I'm assuming it's because I've got a secret worm inside my body.

The pig gandalf sampler guy ensured gathering of the fellowship by encoding Whitman into the worms
equivalent to hurleys numbers station in LOST

Are there any extras on the DVD, like Carruth's commentary or anything?

What a bad movie full of good stuff.

Just watched this introduced by my friend (an academic) at our local cinema; really enjoyed it. Not sure how to parse it. Seems to be about repercussions and loss of self...

it's also about removing your inner parasite in order to free your spirit pig

It felt more like a record than a movie. Like a FILM. A proper film. Not like a play that's been filmed, or a story made into a movie. Like it used every facet of film as medium.

LL otm

What a bad movie full of good stuff.

― Fetchboy, Wednesday, September 25, 2013 9:32 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^

Are there any extras on the DVD, like Carruth's commentary or anything?

Nope. As someone who has no desire to hear filmmakers "explain" movies like this I say huzzah. (Then again I have no desire to figure out this one in a literal way.)

That + I also have no desire to see this one again.

Not in a bad way. It's just one of those movies I think I'd rather remember than experience again.

i really want to see it again to just experience it, rather than try to figure it out at the same time.

I don't think this worked for me on a Lynchian level or otherwise. There were some groovy audiovisual things going on but not enough to keep me interested. With Lynch I'm always glued to my seat, scared to tear my face away. This is another in a seemingly endless line of recent indie movies channeling identity crisis via a washed-out couple in their mid-30s babbling vacant words at each other in the middle of a kitchen. It really lagged about a third of the way through, a deliberately confusing montage of temporal and spatial displacement that nevertheless felt a bit like a trope we've seen before. I didn't hate the movie, but it wasn't Primer.

a washed-out couple in their mid-30s babbling vacant words at each other in the middle of a kitchen

my life

channeling identity crisis via a washed-out couple in their mid-30s babbling vacant words at each other in the middle of a kitchen.

I've been trying to find time to watch that last Miranda July movie for two months.

Haha, that's the other one I was talking about. I never want to see a film that does that again.

Whatever kept July from impersonating her g-d dying cat.

Two movies are not "an endless line" ... but did you mean the couples are washed-out or washed-up?

(I guess I prefer vacant babble to Primer, tho.)

xpost both. i dunno, i feel like i've seen a lot of this detached soft-focus 'what is it all about? what are you talking about? wait-whuh.... who am I?' kind of stuff a bunch of times before. maybe directors be having a personality crisis or something but i find it a pretty boring way to convey arty dissociation.

maybe just absorb the film instead of analyzing constantly, it's not something you necessarily have to think deeply about

it's just music goddamn it!

hehe, but what i'm saying here is it didn't really pull off that 'just sit back and enjoy the ride' feeling for me (as i get with Lynch and some other directors of that kind) because bits of it were either tedious or done-before or just overly confusing.

your connection with your spirit pig is strained

The worm has control.

Jainism but with worm/spirit pig duology

fuk, I meant zoroastrianism, whatever

I liked almost everything about it, tho I did watch it in 20-30 minute sprints. would def watch a tv series shot in this style.

glad to see somebody posted that carruth doesn't see the sampler as the antagonist. my takeaway was that the thief was the bad guy and the sampler was some sort of surreptitious healer, but reading some other posts on the thread I thought maybe I was mistaken. guess I should go read some interviews and crackpot internet theories.

follow your spirit pig where it leads you

I hope he makes upstream color II electric pigaloo

neon pigaloo

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/197/529174900_40c23dd968_o.jpg

Apparently no one has linked this, re "open" and "closed" movies:

http://chicagosburning.tumblr.com/post/50869565487/cb-195-sorry-were-closed-come-in-were-open

I am not understanding the comparisons with Lynch, at all.

The Thief is the devil and The Sampler is God - compassionate and showing us things as they are / sound like. The Thief sticks the worms of weakness into us - psychosis or substance abuse - but if we turn to The Sampler he can get it out. But The Sampler is part of the problem, as he is part of the cycle, which is extraneous to Man, so once we realize that - but accepting the self-help wisdom of Walden - we have to kill The Sampler to get rid of The Thief, before we can become on with the pigs.

It's all some sort of Randian bullshit, in other words.

wut

Just watched this, liked it a lot. I particularly liked that it seemed allergic to explication/explanation. No voiceover, no "aha" explanation, plenty of loose threads, plenty of potential ways to understand the linkages between the various characters but no overt parsing as far as heroes/villains or even passive victims/active agents, even though there are parts that draw upon lots of genres and emotional frameworks. It was refreshing. I can see how it might bug the crap out of some people but I really liked its weird restraint.

This picture made me think of this movie:
http://37.media.tumblr.com/0b43db2a4357a88ae7ccd464f4b65c50/tumblr_n3fwe2FcGZ1r4dx5zo1_500.jpg

:D

Barnyard productionz

http://https%3A//farm4.staticflickr.com/3922/14916512806_d9a43b179a.jpg

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/150x100q90/745/gGyG5M.jpg

I'd been looking forward to seeing this movie for so long, but I wanted to wait until the right night to watch it, which was tonight. Wow, what a neat movie. I even managed to go in totally blind, which might have made it even better. Or at least more compelling. Don't get the upthread comparison to Lynch at all. I thought it was like a cross between Cronenberg and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/anne-hathaway-keanu-reeves-daniel-radcliffe-modern-ocean-1201632722/

not sure what it says about me that the prospect of a film about shipping routes has me very excited

caught myself thinking "free your spirit pig" again the other day

it sounds a bit mysterious, like is it set in a specific era or what?

Well the modern era of course, but it still could be a period movie

I'm with you ogmor! I'm excited!

Cast looks awful ugh.

having Reeves and Goldblum in the same movie doesn't seem legal

not sure what it says about me that the prospect of a film about shipping routes has me very excited

― ogmor, Wednesday, November 4, 2015 5:42 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

reeves thing isn't that disheartening tbh although perhaps i liked him in john wick more than a fair amount of people

either way, great that carruth got another project off the ground so soon after upstream color (by comparison to the gap between primer and UC, at least), also reminds me that i need to watch upstream color again - haven't since it came out

My wife said upstream color made her feel like she was going crazy. I loved it though. I should watch it again too.

Just popped onto his wiki to see what's up, and as far as I can tell ... nothing?

In 2014, Carruth announced a new film, The Modern Ocean, based on international shipping and the lives of those involved. On August 12, 2015, it was reported that the film was in pre-production, and its ensemble cast was announced in November 2015; it will include Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves, Tom Holland and Daniel Radcliffe. However, in an interview in 2018, Carruth noted that the film is "not gonna happen anytime soon".

Why should he hurry

Thought it neat that Upstream Color was edited by David Lowery, who also edited his own film A Ghost Story to similar ends.

My only objection watching UC is that the ubitquitous excerpts from to On Walden Pond are way too on the nose.

Another article I read made it sound like The Modern Ocean is dead as a project and he’s had to move on to other things. Really sucks, would be neat to see what he could do on a big scale.

Why should he hurry

Lotsa whys at work. But I'd say he should hurry to get it done? Because the cast will move on? Because the funding will drop out? Or maybe both happened already and he's on to the next thing. Mostly I just want more movies from him!

Of course I want him to take his time and make movies as singular as his first two, but for practical reasons he seems prone to distractions and delays. Taking small acting gigs, for example, or doing music. It looks like he did the music for the TV version of "The Girlfriend Experience," which I suspect could be Soderbergh's way of throwing him some cash. Looks like he (and Lowery and Amirpour?) also directed some episodes of a nature documentary series? Lowery, for comparison, has made four features since Upstream Color was released, incl. a big-budget Disney movie. The last thing I'd want is for Carruth to be jaded into nothingness, but he also seems like the kind of guy to surprise everyone with a new movie no one knew was coming.

That movie isn't happening and hasn't been happening for a while. He moved on.

(Don't get me wrong, I didn't necessarily want him to make *that* movie, just *a* movie.)

He abandoned a project a significant way in before making Upstream (there's a bit of footage from it in the movie). He really seems to not want to put his name to stuff that's not up to snuff. I'd love another Carruth movie but way more filmmakers should be half as self-critical.

Or independent.

He really seems to not want to put his name to stuff that's not up to snuff.

― bhad bundy (Simon H.), Thursday, 21 February 2019 13:28 (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why did he put he put out Upstream Color then

*hides*

Boo hiss

I cannot remember a single thing about that movie. choice bits?

nm I just realised I could scroll upwards

UPTHREAD SCROLLER

He's in the thriller/horror film Dead Center: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8806104/ Did that come out properly in the US? It's getting a (single) showing at the film festival here in Glasgow just at the moment.

OK, so it's still to come out more widely... https://variety.com/2018/film/uncategorized/arrow-films-acquires-the-dead-center-starring-shane-carruth-for-u-s-and-other-territories-exclusive-1203016196/

Has anyone read the screenplay for 'A Topiary'? This is the previous abandoned film you mean, Simon H? Is it worth tackling? https://indiegroundfilms.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/a-topiary-numbered.pdf

That was the abandoned one, yeah. I haven't read it.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/05/shane-carruth-interview-quitting-filmmaking-the-wanting-mare-1202232967/

He sounds pretty bitter, but not without good reason, and I'm pleased to discover he's a fan of Coatwolf/Bellflower and Joe Pera. And that movie he asked not to be credited on looks insane.

Interesting interview, but also seems like the sort of interview someone gives right before they surprise release a new film. I mean, I doubt it, but you can always hope!

I really don't think we should expect that project he mentioned anytime soon. That big-ish sounding nautical movie of his fell apart not that long ago and he seems to only do anything when it's exactly right.

I enjoy how he evidently ended his phoner with an uninterrupted 5+ minute speech about The Last Supper

Quitting is pretty lame imo

He does come across as someone you’d probably prefer to avoid working with. Of course that seems to describe 95% of film directors/producers, regardless of budget

Scanning the credits of his two finished movies, he seems to do the bulk of the work himself anyway.

like iirc he starred in, wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored UC lol

he could still hate working with himself

Cant blame him for quitting tbh. When he started 20 years ago it was always going to be hard for a guy like him to make the movies he wanted to make unless you were willing to do everything yourself, spend a decade a decade of your life raising chickenfeed, and be ok making zero money. Today its impossible. Easy to imagine him finally coming to terms with the fact that if hes not willing to jump through hoops directing streaming episodes of Aquaman High School or whatever then theres no future for him and he might as well peace out.

I’ve had so many emails to myself that never made it past the drafts folder, knowing I’d never read them anyway

The Dead Center was a neat little movie. If nothing else it would be neat if he did more acting.

I don’t blame the guy for moving on either, I’ve been lucky to get opportunities to get out of ruts on multiple occasions; he just comes across as a pretty arrogant, condescending Muskoid in that interview

Yeah, person with principles who no one anywhere has any beef with (that I know of) and don't like spending other people's money to fund his projects... that's some Muskoid shit right there

Upstream Color was so hard to watch and so amazing I just cannot fault him.

You don’t get any “I’m smarter than everyone in this crooked town” vibe from that interview? OK

I mean is he not? He might be. FSVO smart.

otoh he’s a rick and morty guy

Again, I don’t know this guy, I can’t fault him. He just comes off like a dick according to my instincts. I know lots of dicks.

I can’t really harsh on anyone who acts like they are smarter than everyone else bc I’ve been doing that my whole life and only consciously trying not to for some of it.

Yeah I mean I’m sure he’s a dick, comparing him to Elon Musk just seems extreme! Why would a non-dick say to himself “I’d like to make movies but I can’t accommodate the very idea of collaboration.”

There's value in knowing how you prefer to work and not dicking around doing it some other way only to make an inferior product. And in the meantime he's chipping in on other people's projects, idk seems sensible enough to me.

Incidentally that teaser trailer for the movie he didn't actually want a producer credit on (lol) looks insane.

Oh lol I already said that. It's late

Yeah I always assumed he did everything himself not due to being a control freak but just due to having no money? Primer was as $7000 movie, I think Upstream Color was $100,000. I'm sure the guy would have loved to have been able to afford cinematographers and composers and designers to collaborate with. Actually seems like kind of the main thing he's bitter about tbf, go figure.

i mean the guy literally devoted 15 years of his life to making these two insanely weird & personal movies, both of which were only remotely possible bc he did almost everything himself. Whats he supposed to say, "i suck and shouldnt be allowed to make movies, garfield rules"?

It makes sense he'd be pals with the Coatwolf guys, who are just as fiercely independent / unwilling to mess with studios (and thus make a movie a decade, seemingly)

One is meant to be there so you can make out with your date on a Friday night, and the other is there so you can be edified for the next 30 years. We just pretend they’re the same.

rockism is alive and well and finding spiral patterns in your favourite paintings ;)

that trailer gave me the same sinking feeling that UC did and I am probably not the right audience for any of this stuff tbh

Did anyone read the screenplay for 'A Topiary'? I'm sad it never got made.

imago UC is dope and probably a lot more unsettling than you're expecting. His score is cool as well.

i saw it at the time!! parts of it were really cool, notably the sound design, but it largely left me cold

Damn not in touch w yr spirit pig

worth checking out who literally invented the 'spirit pig' meme :P

has anyone seen Amy Seimetz's Sun Don't Shine w/ Kate Lyn Shiel? always been curious about that one

i love sun don't shine. more than most iirc. thought it was extremely impressive how the mental/environmental warp of a florida swamp is the texture of the film, you feel overcooked and crazy as the characters through the whole thing. i've only seen it once but it really stuck with me

i've also only seen upstream color once bc it was too intense of an emotional experience, one of my favorite movies of all time still

I don’t want a credit. I told him that. All of this is made-up bullshit.

reading this interview made me love shane carruth

"what sort of art really impresses you these days"

"the last supper"

my man

the rockist pose doesn't even bother me because he's not a critic, he's a writer/director. of course he would feel that way given the effort he pours into his work. "these guys over here are making bullshit the only purpose of which is marketing while i'm barely getting buy trying to say something." anyone who's spent any amount of time trying to perfect their craft while money gets thrown at the hacks around them to make hackwork can feel this on a fundamental level cf. i am feeling this on a fundamental level

fwiw I interviewed him around the time of Primer, and looking back at some quotes I transcribed, his attitude/stance is not that different from that recent interview. He was pretty burnt out, jaded, disgruntled, self-deprecating etc. And he wasn't a dick, if memory serves. One quote I got from him was basically him complaining that "Primer" took so much time and energy from him, with so little reward, that he would sooner go back to engineering rather than attempting anything like that again.

primer won the grand jury prize at sundance, its not crazy imo for that person to be annoyed that after almost 20 years of grinding hes been able to get exactly one project off the ground for the equivalent budget of apprx 8 minutes of Tiger King

I always liked how he ended up "having" to cast himself in Primer cause everyone he auditioned was "acting too much' or something to that effect.

I've said this before but fans of Carruth and ppl in his orbit really need to see at least s1 of The Girlfriend Experience, the series, which involves pretty much that whole loose squad (Carruth, Lyn Shiel, Seimetz, as well as Lodge Kerrigan)

didn't he do the music for that?

yep, and he has a memorable cameo as well

he should just suck it up and sell out a bit imo

otm

you'll be happy to learn he's in Amazon's Tales From the Loop (anyone seen it?)

I've watched half of it so far, it's very good

should just go back to engineering

I'm sure it's been said around here before but rockism doesn't really apply to film in the same way it applies to music

engineers are dime a dozen. he’s probably not even that good at it. he should dumb his shit down and make one Nolanesque MOR brainblaster, get super rich and famous, then do whatever he wants. it’s obvious

It’s always obvious what other people should do!!

"we need more garbage, he should go make some"

it needn’t even be garbage, just accept that you work in a capital intensive and commercialized medium and figure out how to make cool art in that constraint. he could prob make something like 35% smarter than Nolan and still smash

worth trying it out before quitting at least \o/

the world is littered with ppl who agree with that, I am glad there are at least a few uncompromising ppl out there

In a field where collaboration is crucial to getting work completed, being uncompromising can be self-defeating

plenty of compromising ppl end up every bit as miserable anyway for the opposite reason! at least when he makes things they're actually worthwhile

xpost Unless you're the writer/star/editor/director/producer/composer/FX guy. But not Robert Rodriguez.

what he really needs to do is take part in a webinar about being a more effective manager

instead of complaining about the industry he should just hire a life coach, then he'll eventually get that promotion to senior regional filmmaker

there's only one mainstream project I want to see him star in, and that's as the grown-up, world-weary Brendan in the office-set Brick sequel that will only ever exist in my head

he should dumb his shit down and make one Nolanesque MOR brainblaster, get super rich and famous, then do whatever he wants. it’s obvious

true he should just decide to make an extremely successful tentpole movie, someone should email him with that suggestion

people love tom cruise, he should try asking tom cruise to be in his next movie, then after that he'll be able to do whatever he wants

where does this instinct to sarcastically talk down to everyone you disagree with come from? Why did it become the second most popular way to post on these boards?

idk same place you got "dick" & "Muskoid" from?

oh you tease you're not going to get us to ask about the first most popular way

where does this instinct to sarcastically talk down to everyone you disagree with come from?

hums the ILX version of the stonecutters theme song

in all seriousness tombot you shouldn't be surprised when ppl push back on yr characterization of someone whose work you apparently know nothing about

reading this interview made me love shane carruth

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, May 25, 2020 10:10 AM (four hours ago)

even more than i did before! i don't feel that he is a dick.

It's a shame he's so uncompromising if only because I am extremely curious what a MOR Shane Carruth picture would look like.

feel like Zal Batmanglij/Brit Marling/Mike Cahill have been trying to mine a similar vibe while still not going full MOR for a while now

Carruth doesn't seem like a dick from that interview, or from anything else I've read about him. interested to see anything he's involved in.

All the Marling/Cahill stuff I've seen is dreadful alas

he should dumb his shit down and make one Nolanesque MOR brainblaster, get super rich and famous, then do whatever he wants. it’s obvious

worth trying it out before quitting at least \o/

I read an interview recently where he says he wasted years on trying to do this, wish I could remember where I saw that linked 🤔

who among us has the patience to put up with pure Hollywood bullshit for two years

It always sounded like The Modern Ocean would be that kind of higher profile and more accessible thing from him. There were certainly big names attached to it.

Kinda crazy that first sentence in that Hollywood Reporter piece refers to him as an "emerging talent."

So what happened with Modern Oceans? You'd think that cast would have gotten him enough funding, plus he's got lots of high profile friends. Anyway, glancing at his wikipedia page, there's an interview back from October where he talks about quitting, too. How long did Soderbergh's retirement or sabbatical or whatever last, two or three years?

Yes, retirement comes up in that interview I read sometime, wish I could remember when 🤔, specifically because they mention that he made headlines last year by talking about retiring.

Hardly like-for-like, given Soderbergh's level of output from before the retirement, but:

He announced his retirement from film-making in February 2013.

During his retirement he: had a completed telemovie screen at Cannes in competition for the Palme d'Or and enjoy theatrical release outside the US; directed & shot & edited ten hour-long episodes of The Knick; did a draft cut of Spike Jonze's Her, trimming the film from 2.5 hours to 90 minutes; developed & produced the half-hour-episode dramedy series Red Oaks; developed a six-hour narrative / 18-or-w/e-hour interactive mystery; shot & operated camera on & edited a feature film sequel to an earlier feature that he'd directed & shot & edited; compiled & music directed an installation piece combining the 1946 The Killers with the 1964 The Killers; edited & sound directed a mashup installation piece incorporating parts of his The Underneath and the noir it was based on, Criss Cross; generated a "silent" film version of Raiders Of The Lost Ark by removing the colour and scoring it with Reznor & Ross cues from The Social Network; cut a 110-minute edit of 2001: A Space Odyssey; cut a 108-minute edit of Heaven's Gate; directed & shot & edited another ten hour-long episodes of The Knick; and EP'ed the Girlfriend Experience TV series, hiring Shane Carruth to score it. Plus he started a new day job as importer and promoter of a Bolivian liquor.

He un-announced his retirement from film-making in February 2016.


(Then before he made the unretirement film, he cut & music directed a feature-length mashup of the three theatrical films starring Michael Caine as Len Deighton's Harry Palmer.)

I think my interpretation of his dickishness in that interview can be chalked up to my “takes one to know one” instinct. Then again I usually am surprised that more people don’t think I’m a dick.

wait I forgot Sodes's mashup of Psycho (1960) and Psycho (1998), called Psychos

also he revived an earlier side-gig, directing Chloe Grace Moretz in a play by his frequent collaborator Scott Burns

i agree that carruth has been pretty consistently himself since he surfaced; he's a smart, intense guy who is well aware of the conditions working against him. i can understand the reasoning in not wanting to continue to hustle for budget when the ideas in your head aren't going to be realized for anything close to the 100k upstream color cost. at the same time, i was never particularly optimistic that the shipping routes movie or the other stuff he was working on post-UC would ever see the light of day.

oh well, we'll always have upstream color, one of the most beautiful and affecting movies i've ever seen.

yeah Primer is technically astonishing but leaves me cold, UC surprised me with its beating heart

Fwiw i would’ve said the same thing abt orson Welles if ilx threads existed back then

Here's another current interview covering much of the same ground: https://theplaylist.net/shane-carruth-interview-retirement-20200523/

He says of The Modern Ocean, and even A Topiary, that they're 'probably' over. Though it doesn't sound totally definitive and he maybe suggests letting someone else tackle them? Maybe I'm just being too hopeful.

Soderbergh seemingly loves to work and believes he hones his craft by going through the actions, which makes Carruth's insistence that he find the right situation to make the right thing more frustrating if you like the latter's work.

I guess it comes down to personality and view, whether you make the work you like by grinding through tons of material to the point where you're confident in your technique, or you meticulously work through a couple hours of movie by your own hand for years in order to make the one thing you love.

Yeah good point, its an interesting divide. I feel like I've been on different sides of it at different times in my own life. "I love getting slightly better at this!" vs "what annoying stuff do I need to figure out to get this thing out of my brain & into the world."

Soderbergh namechecked Carruth in that State of the Industry speech thing he did, I wonder if they ever sat down together.

I think I'm definitely in the anxiety/procrastination side of things where I'm afraid to finish things because I want a good outcome? Trying to become a little Soderbergh of my field in recent years

Soderbergh definitely seems to do stuff just to challenge himself, like the "Raiders," "Psycho" and "2001" larks, or filming on an iPhone, or "Bubble," or acting as his own DP or whatever else it takes. Like, I must have known this, but Soderbergh apparently filmed second unit stuff for the first "Hunger Games" movie, more or less just as an exercise. But he can also make slick movies and work with movie stars, which who knows if Carruth is capable of doing but which seems key to getting green lit by studios. Though if Robert Eggers and Ari Aster et al. can do what they do, I don't see why Carruth couldn't. "The Lighthouse," a more or less academy ratio, black and white psycho-sexual homoerotic tale of seamen/semen/seamonsters, was a pretty bonkers movie to get such a wide release. Carruth must have some specific, particularly ineffable goals he has convinced himself he can not achieve.

I love Soderbergh but some of his movies are absolute dogshit. I get the impulse to only want to put out things that live up to a very particular/rigorous standard.

I would really like to read/hear more about his efforts to secure outside funding for more ambitious projects. Like I have no idea whether it was business realities or self sabotage (or both) that sunk The Modern Ocean.

seems fairly obvious that carruth indeed has some specific and ineffable goals.

"I want a movie that causes synesthesia! I want a movie that is spoken in English but heard in Esperanto! I want a movie that stars a completely CG actor that does not fall into the uncanny valley! And it must be screened exclusively in Cinerama!"

heh, i remembered seeing the upstream color premiere with carruth on hand saying his net film should be out shortly and, sure enough I mentioned upthread

Carruth spoke after the showing and when someone asked him how much the movie cost, he said he'd rather not say. That Primer benefited from the legend but that he was more than a little tired of hearing how it was such a good movie for so cheap and he wants this one to stand on its own merits.
apparently he's "nearly" done with his next film and this one won't have any super-real, fantastic plot devices. it's not a spoiler to say that, like Primer, Upstream Color rotates around some supernatural elements but only in the sense that Eraserhead does too
― I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. (forksclovetofu), Monday, April 8, 2013 8:39 PM (seven years ago)

https://t.co/aFYGCxYHbQ

This will probably get taken down because I lifted a bunch of shots from films.

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) May 29, 2020

Ah, wow. Ha, that's amazing, it's exactly as he described it.

it’s really funny that he used the music from Inception imo

I chuckled at his/the UC Twitter bio

The second film from the award-winning Writer and Director of PRIMER. Also it did fine domestically so...

The Wanting Mare looks really promising. I'm a sucker for films/literature that are couched in a scifi/postapoc/fantasy world, but aren't about those worlds.

As for The Modern Ocean, I suppose I'll have to make do with container ship time lapses.

That's got me simultaneously excited and pissed off about movies all over again! I really wanna watch the full A Topiary now. might revisit UC.

He's released The Modern Ocean screenplay!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xunl7kkmnvccgl/TheModernOcean_for_Steven.pdf?dl=0

https://t.co/x0tJTRN4qn

That's the script for The Modern Ocean. I kept it quiet for a long time because...I don't like scripts because they are not movies and movies are not film and I just didn't want to be embarrassed. But now I think it might be fun. It's all good, now.

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

He's also posted some music clips for certain scenes, plus a load of artwork done for A Topiary and it looks like some video. All linked on his twitter (@UpstreamColor).

I'm very excited to see all this, but it also adds to my worry about him (he says himself in a twitter reply to the Modern Ocean script post that he's "not alright"). I hope he has some good friends and/or family.

Can you reveal the casting for this? I know Radcliffe, Reeves, Holland, Moretz are all attached at one point

— tindell (@jimtindell) June 17, 2020

Yeah, they were all attached. I spent a weird few months where I didn't know why we were casting all these famous people but Carmen Cuba guided me and we were so clear about 'we need color in this'. We really tried. It's not easy. I skyped with Irfan Khan...

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

...who is/was one of the best actors in the world. I will never forget it. We only talked for 10 minutes. He was in New Delhi in an apartment smoking a blunt. We knew the same second yep this is going to happen. He would have been the captain of the Torc Eleanor.

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

So there's a sort of Modern Ocean tease he posted, too?

https://t.co/PXo4T00ugK

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) June 17, 2020

I basically don't read scripts but I might have to make an exception.

After looking at the cgi tests and fantastic illustrations, I'm doubly bummed out that I'm never going to get to see A Topiary.

Looking through the Topiary illustrations, those images of the doglike legs attached to those wooden crates... what a weird, rich piece of imagery.

Evidently Amy Seimetz has a restraining order against him, which he uh revealed with some artful framing on Twitter

So Shane Carruth posted a picture of a restraining order Amy Seimetz has against him and no one noticed what the hell #FilmTwitter https://t.co/w4pNyA2oTn

— Boomer CIA (@BoomerCia) July 25, 2020

ah, fuck.

This isn’t striking me as entirely shocking.

no comment

ahh jesus christ

mostly for the completely insane “just leaving this in the corner” bit but also my heart sinking in disappointment

kinda nuts no matter how you slice it

disappointingly unsurprised sigh

Yeah I don’t know wtf is going on here, pretty weird. Maybe unfair, but to me this dude has always exuded the kind of Sensitive Nice Guy Nerd aura that sends off some alarm bells. Like issues with women, questionable political takes, or a gross Reddit account surfacing wouldn’t surprise me.

wow, tombot proven sadly otm after all

He's proclaimed a lot of technological/social media ignorance lately on twitter, but I find it hard to believe it wasn't a deliberate thing to have it there in the corner of the photo, which is pretty bad in and of itself.

Variety has published some details and they're damning to say the least. My interest in him instantly soured on reading this.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/shane-carruth-accused-abusing-amy-seimetz-1234717339/

I guess the real reason he couldn't get any projects off the ground is cuz he's a psycho, huh. Welp, time to go throw my copy of UC in the trash

Don't throw out UC because its director turned out to be a narcissistic and abusive asshole (as if the ludicrously self-important, world-against-me interviews weren't clue enough) - don't throw out the art with the artist - throw it out because it isn't very good.

why do you do this

i for one will never be able to watch it again bc it stars shame carruth and amy seimetz as two people in a relationship

“throw it out because it isn’t very good” fuck off

woof i wrote that before i even read the details, continue to fuck off lj

if you think it's good, don't throw it out idk

and yeah granted it might be hard to see it again given what's transpired with the lead actors irl but i'm firmly against the cancelling of art itself due to the artist's later transgressions

sorry if i phrased it a bit glibly but i was reacting to the extremely basic & regrettable sentiment 'welp time to throw out UC!' which is imo performative solidarity of the most pointless kind. you know that seimetz's work is in that film as well right?

at this point I can usually pretty comfortably do the art/artist separation jive when it comes to already released work (esp with film as there are so many components) but yeah no more interest going forward.

i'm firmly against the cancelling of art itself due to the artist's later transgressions

― imago, Tuesday, July 28, 2020 5:06 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i’m proud of you but did you have to make this argument fucking immediately

i’m not canceling upstream color. i will fundamentally never be able to watch it again without being sick to my stomach

that is fair

Doesn't sound like there's much chance of anything going forward. Agreed that the subject matter of UC and the fact that seimetz and carruth play the leads will make this a particularly difficult case of separating art and artist. My dvd (rewatched recently, it stands up imo) likely to sit unopened on the shelf for the foreseeable

I was being sort of glib the way I phrased it, so I get why imago reacted as he did, but Brad has well elucidated the reasons why I won't be able to watch this film again. I'm generally against "cancelling" works of art too, but you really can't separate art & artist here.

i'm disappointed in shane carruth
don't have much else to say
i wish male brilliance weren't so frequently paired with narcissism and abusive behavior

Upstream colour should be cancelled, as in no cinema should screen it again, nor should it be available on any platform either at least until Carruth isn't able to obtain any kind of material benefit from this.

He should never be involved in another project either, and he should be hounded from public life.

It's absolutely fine and sensible to throw out the art with the srtist. It's just not required to do so.

I'm glad we leapt immediately into this extremely fun conversation

every day my killfile grows stronger

LL otm

quick, let's write to theaters to make sure to cancel all their Shane Carruth screenings lol

unlike with most of these cases, the subject actually was never actually on the "winning" side of their industry so no real campaign to dislodge is required

Perfectly reasonable to think a small arthouse theatre might do a re-screening at some point in future.

I don't know about cinemas, but Primer was screening on Mubi just a few weeks ago.

I wonder, sadly, if his recent sudden release of the Modern Ocean script and various other things that he'd previously hidden away for years was some kind of pre-emptive attempt at distraction, or positive self-publicity, before any bad stuff came out.

wow that Variety article was stomach-turning

Sickened by this. I can forgive arrogance or eccentricity in artists, but not willful cruelty or stalking.

I suspect some substance abuse issues, and if that's the case I hope for his sake he has an intervention (and stays away from AS). I liked his movies, they were engaging puzzles or awkwardly affecting, and had a unique eye and voice. But he's off my list.

Fuck this guy

He's still tweeting a lot and it's an absolute horror show.

#respectTheArt

kind of upset I even pasted this in here now, you just know that his whole fucked-up game in putting the order in a random photo on his twitter was to get people to notice it and have the attention fuck with Amy Seimetz. Disgusted.

I followed him on twitter when he started leaking all sorts of unreleased stuff. Now he seems to be having some sort of breakdown. He's currently quoting lyrics from the new Taylor Swift.

what's his twitter handle? i searched and did not find anything that looked like the right one.

he has taken over the upstream color account

With you I serve. pic.twitter.com/2Th5PvOGOO

— Upstream Color (@UpstreamColor) July 29, 2020

he's going on about a mouse in his house?

he does not see to be doing well

yeah not even saying this to be make him seem more sympathetic or anything but he seems to have either really cracked or is doing an excellent job of making it seem that way

He’s another good example of the sort of person whose main outlet is seeking attention and is prone to sudden reversals of favor in relationships and a propensity to feeling persecuted.

Lol.

Trying to picture Hitchcock being kicked off as director after an 'incident' and acting out on his own twitter.

the literal only upside of this is finding out that Seimetz has a new movie and it looks sick

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/07/amy-seimetz-abuse-allegations-shane-carruth-1234576617

it seems like she's hooked in with Benson/Moorhead and possibly the Coatwolf people now which is neat to me

and as others mentioned I can't recommend Girlfriend Experience s1, which she co-wrote/directed with Lodge Kerrigan, highly enough. (fair warning that Carruth briefly cameos as...a dead-eyed psychotic sex pest :/)

Go with what you know.

Anyway all these years I've heard 'these films are incredible, you've got to see them' and thought "Okay one day" but I did hear a very indirect rumor a couple of years ago via a Twitter friend that he was at the least pretty shitty and thought "Hm, maybe not." After all these past few days I shrugged and finally just read the Wikipedia summaries and hopefully I won't think of the guy much again. Life's too short.

I screened Upstream Color to/with different friends and the reactions were always delightful. no ugliness on Carruth's part will diminish the specialness of those experiences. but as brad said the nature of the situation and the fact that the movie is almost entirely an intimate Carruth/Seimetz two-hander makes a rewatch very difficult to imagine. and certainly I would never again be an evangelist for it as I was then even if I'm more flexible on the art/artist issue than some/most.

yes it's truly an amazing film. it's too bad it's tainted now due to his fucking shitty behaviour.

Anyway

Shane Carruth, the director of independent films “Upstream Color” and “Primer,” was arrested last week at the home of his ex-girlfriend on allegations of domestic assault. https://t.co/6kCVq1sRgd pic.twitter.com/oFfT6TF2rH

— Variety (@Variety) January 19, 2022

Ugh!! This guy is SO awful — makes me wonder how he made it as far as he did.

being awful probably helped 🤮

So unusual for awful people to be successful in film.

valuable insight jimbeaux

xp you have a pretty rangey definition of “successful in film”

It doesn't ALWAYS hold true, but given this and several other recently documented cases, there's definitely reason to be, shall we say, hesitant about men whose art involves 'the brutal exploitation and torture of a woman', as Forks put it way upthread long before anyone suspected a thing about him. Waving those red flags where everyone can see 'em

xp Yeah, I stretched it for purposes of the joke, but otoh Primer is still pretty fucking good.