20140201: Movie Review--Upstream Color

Upstream Color

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. American live action feature length film, 2013, NR, 96 minutes, drama, indie, SciFi, aspect 2.35; spoken word is in English.
2. IMDB: 6.9/10.0 from 10, 456 audience ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 85% on the meter; 71% liked it from 9,717 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.5/5.0 from 109,355 audience ratings.
5. Written and directed by: Shane Carruth.
6. Starring: Amy Seimetz as Kris, Shane Carruth as Jeff,  Andrew Sensenig as The Sampler.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Kris is attacked one night with an electric stun device, then force-fed a worm of some sort.   She gives her money to the scum who attacked her.  She takes equity out of real property in which she has some ownership.  Most things of value that she has she cashes in or surrenders to her abductor and parasite.  Another man abducts her and transfers some of the worms to pigs that are tagged.  Apparently there are other victims of this aggressive identity theft.


2. After the worms are removed, she slowly regains self awareness.  She loses her job when she reports to work again.  She challenges the bank operations she has done, but the bank has photographic evidence that she in fact instigated her own financial meltdown.


3. She meets Jeff, who seems to have gone through a similar process of life rape.  These two broken people spend time together.  Both of them have memory problems.  He can hold down a job doing financial work off the record...until he decides to beat up his co-workers.  She's had some sort of problem where she cannot have children.  About the time he decided to lose his job, she has some sort of work related foul up.  They end up cuddling in the empty bathtub with their clothes on.


4. At one point, the keeper of the pigs gathers up a litter from an infected mother.  He ties the piglets up in a burlap bag on throws them into a stream.  Everything rots.  The worms travel to some orchids.  The orchids are collected, packaged,  and sold, complete with the parasites.  Great.


5. The book Walden is shown, read from, discussed, and referred to during the film.


6. They eventually obtain some of the pig farmer's records. These include information about them, but they turn it into a mailing list.  They mail a copy of Walden, and invite other victims to the pig farm.


3. Conclusions
1. Some of the words and phrases I see applied to this film are cerebral, artistic, intellectual, 'artistic side of the brain,' beautiful, compelling and so on.  I would counter with pretentious, ugly, pointless, unfocused, deficient, ill-planned, bovine scatology.
2. One line summary: It takes considerable skill to make a film this bad.
3. One star of five.  Four black holes for cinematography, sound, acting, and screenplay.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 0/10 Some stretches of this film show expertise.  Based on that, one must figure that the poor quality of the film was a choice.  Poor framing, poor focus, poor depth of field, jerky camera, massive, avoidable flair not avoided, and so on.  The number of abrupt meaningless transitions is rather high, in the hundreds at least.


2. Sound: 0/10 The incidental music is irritating at best, mind numbingly bad at worst.  The voice miking is rather variable.  I had my hand on the volume control just so I could attempt to hear the dialog or not be drowned out by the atrocious music.  In several passages, the visuals have the characters silent while the sound from another scene is being played.  This choice not to synchronise is repellent.


3. Acting: 0/10 Speaking without affect: no smiles, no frowns, no sparkling eyes, no concern.  Fire the casting director as well as the director.  Most of all, lose the two lead actors.  High school actors with calm faces could have done as well.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 Death by a thousand (editing) cuts.  Remember the fable of 'The Emperor Has No Clothes.'  This movie sucks rocks.