Movies: Upstream Color

Upstream Color is the second feature film by Shane Carruth, here working as writer, director, composer, and starring in a lead role (as the character Jeff). Carruth's first feature, Primer, was a low budget science fiction tale about a couple of engineers who accidentally invent a time travel device, and the consequences of inventing such a thing. Primer is perhaps the only time-travel film that has a flawlessly mapped out internal logic (and it's no wonder he later acted as a consultant on the film Looper). That first film made a big impression on a lot of people, who anxiously awaited Carruth's next project. Nine years (!) later, we have Upstream Color.

Amy Seimetz stars as Kris, a young professional that works at what appears to be a media company, who one night at a club is tasered, abducted, and subsequently infected (via airway transmission) with a parasite by a man listed in the credits only as 'Thief' (Thiago Martins). The parasite contains (or rather, may actually be) a plant-derived chemical that makes Kris highly suggestible, among other things. The Thief uses Kris' mental state to put her through a series of routines, deprives her of food, and ultimately has her sign away all of her savings to him. When he's done with her, he leaves. The parasite grows within her. The story is just beginning.

Did I mention the film is also deeply concerned about love, loss, identity, memory, and sound?

Here's where I'm going to stop with the plot description because at a certain point it's just going to be a laundry list of strange characters and bizarre occurrences intermingled with ordinary lives and truthful moments, and it will give away the entire film but not make much sense as a synopsis. It makes more sense as you're experiencing it than it does to read about it. It is not a conventional narrative.

Parasites and such might make you think of David Cronenberg's earlier work, but that's not really the tone here. Upstream Color is more dreamily melancholy than nightmarish. If it's reminiscent of the work of any other directors, I would say perhaps a subtle mash-up of Terrence Malick and Steven Soderbergh.

There's poetry to be found, visually (where the similarities between the composition of film frames and their content creates a sort of "rhyming"), and literally (Henry Thoreau's "Walden" plays an important role).

As someone who has a keen interest in the prospects of indie filmmaking but hasn't yet taken the plunge, I should note that the film was shot on a freeware-hacked, $900-ish Panasonic GH2 DSLR. While the image was likely enhanced before its release to theatres, it was slightly soft, especially during the opening. I still find it exciting that you can make a feature for theatrical release using equipment you can buy at Best Buy. The future is now!

While engaging for the most part, the languid, hallucinatory quality of parts of the film did actually put me to sleep at times. It happened mostly towards the very end; I was tired to begin with; and it was those "microsleep" experiences where you wake up, realize you were asleep, but then surmise from where you are in the film that you only missed a few seconds at most. I include this note only to suggest that, while I enjoyed it, I think the film is definitely not for everyone (especially, say, if you like your films with a little more action, and a little less parasitic infection).

I saw it at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. For other cities, here are the film's North American theatrical release dates.

EDIT 04/16/2013

The film's score can be streamed via Soundcloud here.

Also, here's an interesting interview: Shane Carruth on Control and the Self-Distribution of UPSTREAM COLOR.

Movies: Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty, in its simplest terms, is about the decade long pursuit and eventual assassination of Osama Bin Laden. It's written by journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, partnered again after their successful collaboration on the excellent Academy Award winning 2010 feature The Hurt Locker, which dealt with bomb squads in Iraq. Between the two, Zero Dark Thirty is the superior film. While it may not actually be any more realistic in comparison, it certainly feels that way (that said, it is clearly a movie, not a documentary).

Jessica Chastain expertly plays Maya, whose first, and we come to learn only, case in her CIA career is the manhunt for the Al-Queda leader. Perhaps having a female protagonist helped Bigelow more effectively connect with the material. As acted and directed, Maya is a compelling character. Some complain that she's perhaps too cerebral, and somewhat emotionally distant, but I found it believable under the circumstances of her job and of "the war". Even so, she's plenty emotional. The final scene, a simple long, mostly silent closeup of her face, is ample evidence.

There are those who feel that the film is controversial in that, for them, it promotes the use of torture as a valuable tool to extract information. Instead, I found that the torture was presented straightforwardly as a matter of fact, leaving the audience to draw and discuss their own conclusions as to its usefulness and morality (personally, I can't imagine an audience member having a positive or perhaps jingoistic reaction to any of the torture scenes).

Both Maya and Maya's initial entry point into CIA interrogation procedures, Dan (a nicely understated perfomance by Jason Clarke) are ultimately affected by the grislier side of their work (Dan's is grislier, in that he is more "hands-on"). Perhaps it's the quality of universal workplace banality during the torture scenes, that sense in the room of "just another day at the office" for the interrogators, that some of the film's harsher critics see as an endorsement of certain interrogation tactics. I found it enhanced the horror of the entire situation.

The opening of the film starts with only white, Courier text on black, reading "September 11, 2001", then a sustained number of minutes with just that black screen and overlapping audio recordings of 9/11 emergency calls and news commentary. It's equally harrowing and effective.

The climax of the film comes when the military infiltration unit, colloquially called "The Canaries", make their attempt at breaching the Pakistan located compound where Osama Bin Laden finally met his end. The surprise of this group is Chris Pratt as squad member Justin. Where audiences are mostly familiar with him for his work as the goofy Andy on television's sitcom Parks and Recreation (and perhaps his fine dramatic turn in the feature baseball drama Moneyball), here he is a ripped, imposing soldier. His reaction to the outcome of a particular moment during the raid is intentionally almost washed away by the pressure of the time sensitive and potentially deadly nature of the raid, but he communicates it mostly with his eyes and voice, and it's stellar. A small moment, but stellar.

The film is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to supporting players. If you watch a lot of films you'll recognize a ton of exceptional character actors. Kyle Chandler (who also plays a CIA executive in Argo, coincidentally), Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, and Mark Strong are among them.

I think that the Academy Awards, having upped their Best Feature category to potentially 10 films, will have to do the same with the Directing category. This is Bigelow's best work to date, and it's a shame she's been overlooked (though I wouldn't necessarily bump someone else for her; it's an impressive list of directors as is, 2012 a good year).

Recommended.

Movies: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Back on Boxing Day in 2012, I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto, in a cinema that was showing it at 48 frames-per-second or "fps" (which has been dubbed "HFR" for "High Frame Rate" by the dubious Hollywood marketing wags), in stereoscopic 3D (which I'll dub "S3D", so I don't go mad from typing). The glasses were passive, meaning that they are the recycled polarized version, rather than the large, powered, alternating, active shutter glasses that some stereoscopic presentations are afforded. I was almost exact centre seat-wise, and two rows closer to screen row-wise, so it was almost ideal seating (two rows back and my resting eyeline would've been exactly centre to the screen).

I must say that my viewing of the film was mostly for research purposes, as I work in the animation and visual effects industry. I'm not a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings films. In fact by the last one I was mostly done with them, though I do have them on DVD, again mainly as work reference. I've never read any J.R.R. Tolkien works, and have no desire to do so. My main previous experience with Tolkien was though the Rankin/Bass animated musical versions I saw on TV as a child. Other than the Lloyd Alexander books I read in my pre-teen years, straight up fantasy fiction with wizards and the like has never really been my bag.

The first strange thing I noticed was that when the "Wingnut" title card came up, it was severely aliased, which was very noticeable as white text on a black background. Then the main Hobbit title came up, and the image was fine with no aliasing, banding, or noise of any kind, and I wouldn't see that problem again until the the very end, with the film's white-on-black closing credits.

I had heard complaints that the film looked like a videotaped stage play, so I was braced for that look. When the film's prologue began, what I was not prepared for was the experience of the majority of the footage looking as though it was fast-fowarded, as though someone was zinging through old VHS tapes on a VCR. That the prologue was mostly manically choreographed and edited only exacerbated the issue. It was such an onslaught of visual ugliness that I seriously considered leaving the theatre for a refund. I stayed, but I continued to notice this phenomenon repeatedly throughout the film, mostly when either characters and objects in frame or the camera did any fast movements, whether subtle or broad. Natural things like running, fighting, or falling just looked strange at times.

I have yet to read a satisfactory explanation of the so-called "Benny Hill Effect".

Where the 48 fps frame rate really benefits the film is in its improvement of the S3D experience. Where stereoscopic films at 24 fps often suffer from a View-Master look, where the scale of subjects often looks miniaturized and the depth somewhat shallow, I found the scale, heft, and depth of subjects at 48 fps with S3D seemed closer to reality. In particular, wide, slow arcing shots of landscapes with characters moving through them had a deep, epic quality. S3D at 48fps was also much more comfortable on my eyes, as I could shift my focus around the frame without experiencing the usual eyestrain that occurs with S3D at 24fps.

In general with 48 fps, I found that scenes with subtler, dimmer lighting were preferable to those with more stylized, direct lighting. Scenes at Bag End mostly looked awful, and scenes at dwindling campfires or in caves looked quite nice, for example.

Most of the VFX work is of the highest calibre, but there are a few rushed effects here and there, the worst of which is the sequence when Radagast the Brown on his sleigh driven by rabbits is pursued by orcs on wargs, which visually is exceptionally phony. Many sub-par vfx shots are also in the terrible prologue, and there is an dwarf-orc war in multiple flashbacks that might have worked better if it weren't so visually stylized with haze and blooms.

Aside from all this talk about technique, as far as the actual content of the film goes...

Martin Freeman is charming as Bilbo Baggins, the title character, and his comic timing well serves the light nature of the original narrative. Unfortunately writer/director Peter Jackson works against this tone by trying to shoehorn in as many connections to his previous Rings trilogy as possible, with all the portentous bloviating that entails. A 200 page light-hearted adventure romp for kids shouldn't be turned into a three film, nine hour drag, methinks.

I wasn't bored, but it was overlong, and the only two characters that held any interest for me were Bilbo, and when he shows up, Gollum (again acted by Andy Serkis - and - a boatload of Weta character animators, despite anything you hear or read to the contrary). Their sequence together, which I think is known as the "Cave of Riddles", is likely the best of the film.

It was a bit of fun to see Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords in a small speaking role.

In summary: the film content-wise is mediocre but not terrible, and technique-wise it's often off-putting, and will continue to be for subsequent films until they get the kinks sorted out (and there are a lot of kinks to sort thus far). It is the first of its kind, though, so I guess that's something.