"Have you seen Upstream Color?"
No.
"I thought it was brilliant."
Really?
"Well I dunno...
"Upstream Color is a terrible movie. It's a new hardcore mumblecore movie, directed by that guy who made Primer - a super low budget science fiction film about time travel. Was Primer a good movie? I remember a lot of people watched that movie and liked it. Naturally, lots of people watch stuff they enjoyed in college. So I watched Primer once on netflix stream back in 2007, but forgot soon after because it was an emotionless, boring experience about time travel. Meh.
Flash forward to the internet in 2013 and BOOM guess who's back! Steve Carr a kara vermuth ?something, the Christopher Nolan of low budget sci-fi movies. A lot of people like using charts and graphs to explain why movies like Primer and Memento are really interesting and fun to deconstruct. Obviously, humans fabricate and manipulate data to justify any claim they make; the same is true for movie analysis. Take a look at my graph below for example:
See graph
But I digress. Upstream Color plays out exactly as it does in its very own trailer. Shane has crafted yet another emotionless, boring experience that plays out like a slow climax about some events that don't really matter. The entire movie is either a climatic note in a jerk-off song about robots, or nothing happening.
Some of the movie-sucking highlights include: The acting, The dialogue "I want to marry you" the cinematography (why is every shot shallow DOF) the editing (ASL 2.4 seconds?) the boringness, the paleness, the nothingness.
Movies like Memento and Primer are about boring stories that are edited in a way to convey a sense of importance and uniqueness. They're still boring stories about white people that don't really exist. If these movies teach us anything at all, it's that there are thousands of boring white people living life every day, contemplating what not to eat for dinner. Upstream Color is somehow more obnoxious than its predecessor, which is very sad because in this day and age it's pretty easy to make experimental cinema or video that doesn't abide to traditional narrative or structure etc. youtube/jason cozza.com
ugh, exactly
Unless you want to see a laughable example of indie art that wasn't produced by Lena Dunham, I cannot recommend that you watch UC. There are so many better things that you can do with 95 minutes of your life. I encourage you to do them.
