![\"upstream\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/upstream1.jpg\")
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\nJune 29th, 2013 12:06 AM.\u00a0 My girlfriend\u00a0and I nestled in for a night on Netflix.\u00a0 This is what happened.<\/p>\n
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\nJune 29th, 2013 12:06 AM.\u00a0 My girlfriend\u00a0and I nestled in for a night on Netflix.\u00a0 This is what happened.<\/p>\n
It started with a really \u2018clever\u2019 and \u2018quirky\u2019 movie called Spork<\/a>.\u00a0 That didn’t last long.\u00a0 Then we tried Kink<\/a>, a Canadian TV show about an assortment of really arrogant and obnoxious S&M purveyors.\u00a0 The bumpers took up more time than the fucking interviews.\u00a0 Next.\u00a0 Then we tried that Sushi documentary that every keeps talking about but it was boring as fuck.\u00a0 Then we entered what I call ‘the blur’. This is where you turn off so many movies that are all so similar that they run together.\u00a0 I can’t remember what any of them are called.<\/p>\n After a while, Netflix kind of beats you down and you end up sticking with the least shitty thing.\u00a0 Generally, you want to pick something that’s just bad enough to be fun to make fun of, making it bearable.\u00a0 Most movies are far below that, but finally, I found one.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I wrote right after it ended: Ok, hold on. It\u2019s 5:28 AM, I just watched a movie, and I need to write about it.\u00a0 I literally just finished it and I have to try to get this out while it\u2019s still fresh. Okay, there are these little kids playing some kind of patty cake game. A black kid with glasses and another kid.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s this guy and he\u2019s collecting these little grubs from the soil in his backyard.\u00a0 He looks at them under a microscope and puts them in mason jars.\u00a0 Then he goes into the bathroom and gets some pills and replaces the powder inside with the grubs.\u00a0 Then he takes the pills to a bar nightclub kind of place and we see an attractive woman.\u00a0 Then we see her being dragged outside in the rain by the grub guy and he does some kind of stomach pump on her and the grub comes out of her.\u00a0 She gets up and stumbles around a little in the rain.<\/em><\/p>\n The next scene has the woman in an oddly lit room with grub man sitting across from her.\u00a0 She is under hypnosis and he\u2019s giving her commands.\u00a0 She does what he says and the next time we see her it\u2019s light outside and she’s copying down a page out of the book Walden, freehand, and then folding the paper and glue-sticking it into a ring.\u00a0 Her reward for doing this is a sip of water.\u00a0 Then he has her drive to her bank and take out a bunch of money for him.\u00a0 Then she eats a bunch of food while sitting indian style in front of her fridge.<\/em><\/p>\n Next we see footage from inside her body and it\u2019s the grubs.\u00a0 I thought the guy pumped them out or something?\u00a0 I know, no idea.\u00a0 So her hands start moving and then we can see the grubs under her skin so naturally she freaks out and starts trying to cut them with a steak knife through her skin.<\/em><\/p>\n Then it\u2019s raining again and she\u2019s outside and we hear this loud industrial sound being played through speakers that just keeps repeating.\u00a0 She\u2019s lead into a kind of medical tent and a guy has her drink a bunch of white liquid.\u00a0 Then he attaches a gas hose to a pig\u2019s snout and cuts into the pig.\u00a0 We see that the girl and the pig are connected to each other by a little hose.<\/em><\/p>\n Then the girl is on a subway train and a guy starts hitting on her.\u00a0 She gives him her business card and he keeps demanding, sternly, that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t need any signage\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n So they get together and I can\u2019t remember some of this part but then there\u2019s a sequence where she keeps talking about a guy named Renny that did something in a pool when she was a kid and the guy gets mad because he says that happened during his childhood.\u00a0 Around this part is also the sequence where there\u2019s this other couple, a guy with a beard and a redhead, and he keeps leaving the house and every time he does the lady says \u2018\u2019I love you\u201d and he says some variation of \u201cthose are just words\u201d, and leaves.\u00a0 This sequence is all kind of blended together and keeps ramping up to a thing where the main couple starts running around and you see that they own a flashlight and a gun and then it ends with them laying in their bathtub, fully clothed, holding the flashlight out as if they\u2019re in danger.<\/em><\/p>\n Throughout all of this we keep going back to the guy who did the pig surgery.\u00a0 There\u2019s a whole scene near the beginning of the second act where he records a bunch of sound effects by like rubbing a thing on a big pipe or\u00a0 dropping rocks along the inside of a sewer drain.<\/em><\/p>\n Later, he asks a guy a question about his pigs.\u00a0 Oh wait, this is after going into the pig field and just like putting his hand out to the pigs and letting them get his hand all muddy.\u00a0 But yeah, the guy he asks says something about his pigs and then later he goes home and scoops up a bunch of the baby pigs and puts them in a burlap sack.\u00a0 He goes to a bridge the runs over a river and drops the baby pig bag into the river.<\/em><\/p>\n So later, in the river, a bunch of blue stuff comes out of the baby pig bag and it makes these blue flowers.\u00a0 These women carefully walk across the roots of a big tree along the river and dig up the blue flowers, take them back to a shed, and water them.\u00a0 Then we see the grubs coming out of them.<\/em><\/p>\n But back to the couple\u2014they\u2019re in a hotel room and the guy explains that he does something for the hotel chains for work, and a perk is that he gets to stay in them for free.\u00a0 She asks why he chooses to stay in the room but instead of answering her we see them in the hotel kitchen, alone together, eating cheeseburgers and drinking wine.\u00a0 He asks her if her burger is good and she says no.<\/em><\/p>\n Later, he explains that he doesn\u2019t really work for hotels and that he did some business job but was fired because of something, and gets paid cash to avoid going to jail?\u00a0 She says it was smart he waited so long to tell her. Later on in the film we learn that where he worked was an office building, but it\u2019s been cleaned out.<\/em><\/p>\n Then later the girl is swimming in a pool, diving to the bottom and getting these rocks and putting them in a pile at the edge of the pool.\u00a0 The guy comes up and starts reading from Walden.\u00a0 She finishes the quotes.\u00a0 Then the couple drives out to the pig farm and they do a few of the things the other guy did while recording sound effects, like drop a rock along a drainage pipe.\u00a0 Then, the guy goes to a CD store and buys all the CDs by some band.\u00a0 He has his wife listen to them and then they\u2019re in his old office building.\u00a0 The pig farmer guy approaches them and he walks over to a wall and slowly sits on the floor.\u00a0 His motion is intercut with him doing the same thing at the farm, except at the farm the woman has shot him and in the office he\u2019s just sitting there.<\/em><\/p>\n She finds a box of information and she and the guy start looking through it.\u00a0 It\u2019s Polaroids of all the people who\u2019ve been brainwashed.\u00a0 The husband and wife (oh yeah, I forgot, they got married because at one point on the street the guy just started saying, “we\u2019re married, I\u2019m marrying you”) send copies of Walden and the info page and polaroid to each brainwashed person and they all show up wearing suits and ties to the pig farm.\u00a0 The couple then gathers up all the pigs and the flowers in the river are white now, instead of blue. And then it’s later on and the girl has longer hair.<\/em><\/p>\n The End.<\/em><\/p>\n That movie is called Upstream Color, and I\u2019m pretty sure I just wrote out the shooting script verbatim.\u00a0 They say in reviews, and especially in criticism, that you aren\u2019t supposed to recount too much of the plot.\u00a0 But in the case of Upstream Color, it\u2019s the only thing you can<\/em> do.\u00a0 The movie is not about anything.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that series of things, happening in not exactly that order, but close enough.\u00a0 There is never one single iota of an attempt to explain how it is that the characters ever know anything about what’s happening or why any of these things are happening in the first place.<\/p>\n This is the description on IMDb:<\/p>\n A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.<\/i><\/p>\n There\u2019s this common and very timid and fallacious notion in art that when somebody like me comes along and trashes a movie like this, I \u201cjust don\u2019t get it\u201d.\u00a0 The problem is that I do<\/i> get it.\u00a0 Getting it equals not liking it.\u00a0 In order to like it, you\u2019d have to not get it, because what it is is simply a whole lot of nothing masquerading as ideas.<\/p>\n With a vague description of your work and the ability, in art, to hide behind a cloak of abstraction, you can really do whatever you want.\u00a0 And that\u2019s beautiful\u2014art shouldn\u2019t have rules, and it doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t make senseless messes with no clarity \u2018darling\u2019, \u2018interesting\u2019, or any other broad, descriptive word you want to use\u2014it makes them boring.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Watching Upstream Color made me really question why I like David Lynch.\u00a0 What works for me about Eraserhead<\/a> and Mulholland Drive<\/a>, which at the end of the day have just as little story as movies like this?\u00a0 David Lynch and his filmography is proof positive that abstraction can be fruitful if you at least make the experience fun for your viewer.\u00a0 Eraserhead is not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination.\u00a0 But there is a very effective tone created by the lighting, composition, soundtrack, and performances.\u00a0 When Henry goes to Mary\u2019s for dinner, you feel like you\u2019re in that house and you\u2019re on his side.\u00a0 The dad is funny and Jack Nance plays a wonderful straight man.\u00a0 You even get a sense of the comment the movie might be making about the future of an industrialized society.\u00a0 It\u2019s faint, but there\u2019s a biting satire in the presentation.<\/p>\n Is David Lynch arbitrary at times?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Masturbatory?\u00a0 Of course\u2014but what great artist isn\u2019t?\u00a0 Are all of his movies good?\u00a0 Of course not\u2014but who\u2019s are?\u00a0 The point remains that you can at least see the ideas.\u00a0 Lynch gives you enough to latch onto.\u00a0 And his greatest victory perhaps is that you aren’t busy asking why or how.\u00a0 In Eraserhead, for example, you kind of just accept that their baby is a deformed mutant.\u00a0 It’s not gimmicky\u2014it’s just what’s happening.\u00a0 In movies like Upstream Color and Cube<\/a> and whatever, you’re constantly asking \u201cBut wait, why? How?<\/i>\u201d\u00a0 This is because the characters are so thin and their motivations are so unclear and the story so incoherent that you expect to be given answers.\u00a0 When you aren’t, the pretentious viewer assumes brilliance. (Just look at how reaching this review<\/a> is.)\u00a0 I’d rather call it what it is: thin, underdone, shallow garbage.<\/p>\n Upstream Color is an assault on the viewer, and not in that good, fashionable way that asshole filmmakers think is so cool.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a bunch of footage slapped together.\u00a0 It might have well been edited by a blender.<\/p>\n I wasn’t that surprised to find out it’s the much-awaited sophomore effort by the dude who made Primer<\/a>\u2014a movie hobbled together from 16mm film the director carved out of scrap lumber. (I stole that joke from Mr. Show<\/a>.)\u00a0 Primer is famous for being made for $7,000 dollars and still being shot on film and only that.\u00a0 It’s just another overcomplicated, \u2018clever\u2019, confuse-fest where characters speak knowingly about time travel and shit.\u00a0 It’s no wonder that given more resources the dude would make this thing.<\/p>\n But hey, I had fun.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to see what\u2019s inside somebody\u2019s head for 90 minutes.\u00a0 Apparently Shane Carruth\u2019s head is filled with a bunch of gobbledegook about grubs and pigs and stuff.\u00a0 It\u2019s not good art, but the idea of it existing is interesting\u2014and that’s what’s truly great about Netflix!<\/p>\n Upstream Color, like so many other movies on Netflix, is simply a bunch of ideas that somebody wrote down and convinced other people to give them millions to make.\u00a0 (According to IMDb, it grossed $415,000.\u00a0 That\u2019s a lot more money than I\u2019ve made in my life.)\u00a0 He or she spent time casting and lighting, storyboarding and slaving over it, and then edited it for months.\u00a0 The simple fact that it exists and that I was able to watch it is amazing.\u00a0 So thank you, Shane.\u00a0 And thank you, Netflix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It started with a really \u2018clever\u2019 and \u2018quirky\u2019 movie called Spork<\/a>.\u00a0 That didn’t last long.\u00a0 Then we tried Kink<\/a>, a Canadian TV show about an assortment of really arrogant and obnoxious S&M purveyors.\u00a0 The bumpers took up more time than the fucking interviews.\u00a0 Next.\u00a0 Then we tried that Sushi documentary that every keeps talking about but it was boring as fuck.\u00a0 Then we entered what I call ‘the blur’. This is where you turn off so many movies that are all so similar that they run together.\u00a0 I can’t remember what any of them are called.<\/p>\n After a while, Netflix kind of beats you down and you end up sticking with the least shitty thing.\u00a0 Generally, you want to pick something that’s just bad enough to be fun to make fun of, making it bearable.\u00a0 Most movies are far below that, but finally, I found one.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I wrote right after it ended:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,15],"tags":[40,586,1046,37,2235,2236,2240,193,2234,1404,1591,104,185,2237,2238,1588,2241,1590],"class_list":["post-2813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsreviews","tag-cube","tag-david-lynch","tag-eraserhead","tag-greg-deliso","tag-kink","tag-kink-tv-show","tag-mulholland-drive","tag-netflix-reviews","tag-nights-on-netflix","tag-primer","tag-shane-carruth","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-spork","tag-spork-movie","tag-upstream-color","tag-upstream-color-gross","tag-upstream-color-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2837,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions\/2837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n[Editor\u2019s Note: Spoilers ahead. If you don\u2019t want to read a detailed plot synopsis of Upstream Color<\/a>, skip the indented text.]<\/p>\n
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\nJune 29th, 2013 12:06 AM.\u00a0 My girlfriend\u00a0and I nestled in for a night on Netflix.\u00a0 This is what happened.<\/p>\n