Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: Upstream Color

 I'm not sure that I could tell you what Upstream Color is about. Then again, I'm not sure that writer / director / co-star Shane Carruth necessarily wants me to be able to, or that there even is one clear reading to take away from the film. The first line of dialogue, spoken a few moments into the film is "keep trying until you find one," which might be the only hint for audiences searching to untangle the narrative and find what's beneath. It's up to you to decide what Upstream Color means to you, and that is as much or as little as there is.

 That's not meant to diminish Upstream Color, which is, in many ways, as dense as Carruth's debut, Primer - still one of the best and carefully thought out time travel movies you're likely to see. It's a movie that sticks with you, that digs into your subconscious, that beckons you to return and watch it again, to pick up pieces you missed the first or second or third time, and to keep trying. What you take away from Upstream Color might shift based on what you see that you didn't before, or the way you respond to a line of dialogue or an image. I've even considered not explaining what happens in the film - even in a rudimentary fashion - because part of the thrill of watching it for the first time is putting together the pieces as you go along, unsure of how they fit together.
 

 Upstream Color's narrative plays out like someone dropping a jigsaw puzzle onto the floor and sliding the disparate pieces around, only deciding where things need to be near the end. The events in the film are, at their core, cyclical until the very end, when the pattern is disrupted (that I won't necessarily say is a SPOILER, although there may be others littered throughout). Of course, you can start anywhere in the cycle, as Carruth is well aware, and still get to the same point, even if the audience isn't sure what part they came in on. In broad strokes, the film is about a drug manufactured by the grubs who live on a plant with blue petals. The diluted version of the drug can be made by simply pouring some soda through a strainer the grub is in, and the effects create a sort of tandem mind between the people who take it.

 For the dealer (Thiago Martins) - identified as "Thief" in the credits - that's not enough to make a living on, so every now and then he doses someone with an undiluted version: the entire grub. For our purposes, this victim is Kris (Amy Seimetz). The effects leave her highly susceptible to suggestion, and the Thief uses this to his advantage, asking her to take out loans and give him the money. But being easily suggested isn't the only issue with this drug. There are... side effects. Before he can abandon Kris to her own devices, he takes her to The Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), for reasons better left to be discovered. Later, Kris meets Jeff (Carruth), another lost soul trying to cope with a loss in his past, one that may or may not be related to the Thief and The Sampler...

 That's as much as I'm comfortable telling you about Upstream Color, and that's actually telling you a lot. I've described the first thirty minutes of the movie, which is concerned mostly with the methodical operation the Thief runs to brainwash Kris and take her money. Where the drug comes from, how it affects you after it runs its course, and what The Sampler does other than create music from sounds he makes in nature, I leave up to you to discover. It's worth warning you that people with a sensitivity towards animals might have trouble with a few scenes in Upstream Color, so much so that even though it isn't real, it's quite haunting. You should know that going in, and that in many ways it's directly linked to what the title of the film means.

 Is Upstream Color meant to be put together? That, I suspect, is up to the viewers drawn to it. If you've seen Primer, you know Carruth's approach to narrative is unorthodox - he operates in a non-linear fashion, even when not making a movie about time travel. Upstream Color makes sudden lurches forward, and sometimes backwards, without necessarily acknowledging the shift in time. Conversations begin in one place and end in another. Memory becomes scrambled and loses its subjective quality (this is most certainly a running theme of the second half of the film). One could argue that we're simply being presented disparate moments that aren't intended to be put together, which is not to dismiss the potency of what we're seeing - only that finding the underlying theme might not be the point. Upstream Color might simply be experiential storytelling, if you choose to watch it that way. For those who love to seek out riddles, to answer ellipses, there's plenty of that to dig into as well.

 Upstream Color makes an explicit connection to Thoreau's Walden, and it's continuously referenced throughout the film (it may be the only consistent through-line in the movie), although I cannot say with certainty its significance when you find out why it's important near the end of the film. There is something to be said for the longing of capturing a specific moment in time that haunts the characters in Upstream Color, and part of the film close to the end reminded me a bit of Chan-wook Park's Lady Vengeance, although the significance of the moment for the characters in each film is very different. I do feel, for the moment, that a sense of loss (of memory, feelings, and time) binds together the Thief's victims, and they are inexplicably drawn together. Some of the symbolism involving The Sampler and who and how he watches I'm still working on, but I have a friend who is quite enthusiastic to discuss this at greater length. If you choose to follow Carruth down the (very enticing) rabbit hole, you too will want to join us. We'll keep trying until we find a really good one.

Blogorium Review: Indie Game - The Movie

 Here's a great example of a documentary that takes a subject I wouldn't normally be interested in (the developers of independent games) and making an engrossing film that I thoroughly enjoyed. I guess between The King of Kong and Indie Game: The Movie, maybe I should rethink the whole "why would I want to watch a movie about gaming?"

 I guess there's a built in assumption I have based on knowing how boring it is to watch someone else play video games (or for someone to watch you) that this would somehow translate into a cinematic experience. I know, it's short-sighted and ridiculous, but when I first heard about Indie Game: The Movie, my initial reaction was "eh." Positive reviews kept coming and when the opportunity arose, I said "why not" because I do like to try out movies I wouldn't normally gravitate towards*.

 Not knowing much about the world of independent game developers (to be honest, I haven't really played that many indie games), I came in with no real expectations about what directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky would be documenting. Indie Game: The Movie showcases four developers of three games - Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), Phil Fish (Fez), and Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, one of the most successful indie games ever.

 Team Meat is closing in on finishing their hotly anticipated game, with Refenes and McMillen working on either coast (Asheville and Santa Cruz) working feverishly to meet Microsoft's X-Box Live Arcade Game Feast promotion. The stress of taking the flash version of the gory, politically incorrect Super Meat Boy - which involves a skinless boy trying to save his bandage-covered girlfriend from and evil fetus in a jar - is wearing on Refenes, who is broke and has no social life to speak of. McMillen, the less socially inclined of the two, is nevertheless feeling the strain on his marriage as they reach the final stretch.

 Phil Lord's Fez, announced at the Independent Games Festival in 2008, is still trapped in a constant state of development four years later, and the anticipation towards his game is turning into open hostility. Lord and his one Polytron employee Renaud Bédard have torn down and rebuilt Fez from the ground three times, but the conceptually fascinating game - a 2D pixellated character discovers the world is actually 3D - requires hand designed textures and its open-ended levels are difficult to explain to the waiting masses. With his former partner threatening a lawsuit, Lord is wracked with anxiety about debuting the long-awaited demo for Fez at the Penny Arcade Expo, but with his booth set up an attendees lining up to play it for the first time, he faces another nightmare: the Fez demo has a number of "game killing" glitches, forcing him to restart the game while players stand aside.

 Blow, who created Braid in a burst of experimentation and included his "deepest flaws and vulnerabilities" in the game, was met with acclaim upon release in 2008, but it came at a cost to the designer. Despite the accolades, Blow felt that reviewers and players of Braid were missing the deeper messages and themes of the game, and in his attempts to defend his intentions, he was treated as someone with thin skin who looked down on his audience, tainting his experience and success.

 There's a small moment when McMillen and Refenes are voice chatting on Super Meat Boy's release day, and Edmund says something to the effect of "do you remember that game Braid?" and Tommy laughs and says "yes." While the overall conversation is about the possibility of beating its sales record, based on the section about the reaction to Braid (including screengrabs of people criticizing Blow), it did make me wonder if Team Meat shared that opinion as well. (Another interviewee jokes that Blow "must have something better than Name Alert" because of his supernatural ability to locate any time he's mentioned online and post a comment.)

 Indie Game: The Movie is less about the development of the games than it is the people who make them and what drives them to devote so much time and energy. There's surprisingly little footage of coding, and other than a section devoted to Lord's in-progress design of Fez's background textures, the film is more about the four developers and their games are in the background (albeit an ever looming background for Team Meat and Polytron). Edmund McMillen's story about one his earlier games, Aether, mirroring how he viewed life as a child and then discovering a drawing his grandmother kept that validates him is touching. Lord, introduced through footage of winning an award for Fez in its conceptual state and through online interviews when he was "hot," is quick to put a human face to the guy being lambasted for not delivering his game fast enough.

 While it shouldn't surprise anyone that people are unfairly maligned online by their "fanbase," it is nice of Pajot and Swirsky to show us what all that piling of feels like to someone trying their hardest to make concept reality, and not blithely ignoring them or leading them on. Fez did come out in April of 2012, by the way - the film was completed before its release.

 So Indie Game: The Movie, like The King of Kong, is successful because the people behind the games are so fascinating. I've never been much of a Donkey Kong player, nor do I have an X-Box, so I can't play Fez or Super Meat Boy from the XBLA, but I will probably look into Braid (it's available on the PSN), and I did try the demo for Warp, one of the games that plays during the closing credits. Indie Game: The Movie was made possible by Kickstarter, and it's a fine example of a independently funded film that gave me insight into a world I might otherwise have overlooked. It comes highly recommended by the Cap'n.



* Okay, so that hasn't been the case lately; I mean, let's look at every review since this summer started. Clearly I need to get back on track with what you wouldn't normally see.

Retro Review: Trees Lounge

This October, fifteen years will have passed since the first time I saw Trees Lounge, a movie I'm constantly surprised to find people have never heard of, let alone seen. I can understand that John and Jane Multiplex might not be aware of a 1996 indie film written, directed, and starring Steve Buscemi, but even most indie-heads seem to have totally missed the film. It's possible that the popularity of Trainspotting overshadowed Trees Lounge, but then again I might just link the two together because I saw them both around the same time at the same place. With the number of Steve Buscemi fans continuing to rise in the wake of Boardwalk Empire, maybe it's time to look back at his first (and arguably best) directorial effort.

Tommy Basilio (Buscemi) is a functioning alcoholic that can't seem to do anything right but drink. He loses his job as a mechanic for "borrowing" money from the register and losing all of it at Atlantic City, and his ex-girlfriend Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco) is with his boss Rob (Anthony LaPaglia). Tommy spends most of his time in Trees Lounge, a neighborhood dive bar populated by (barely) functioning alcoholics, where he entertains the locals and charms newcomers with his drinking games. When Uncle Al (Seymour Cassel), an ice cream truck driver, has a stroke and dies during his route, Tommy takes over driving, although he's hardly a worthy successor. Tommy does strike up a friendship with Debbie (Chloë Sevigny), Theresa's teenaged niece. Their relationship irks Debbie's father, Jerry (Daniel Baldwin), and is only compounded when Tommy takes it too far. Can he turn his life around, or is Tommy Basilio destined to become another slouching barfly?


 I wish I could remember how or why I knew that Trees Lounge existed in 11th grade: it was so early into the age of the internet that I can't imagine that it came from that direction. There's an off chance I saw a review in the local newspaper (which is, curiously enough, the only reason I knew Donnie Darko existed five years later), and I do know that I was on a serious Buscemi kick, having finished most of his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion (another movie that deserves to be better known than it is).

 Regardless of where I found out about Trees Lounge, I know exactly where I saw it: The Studio. I mention The Studio quite a bit; whenever I wax nostalgic about the concept of "grindhouse" theatres, that shoebox duplex of movies that weren't big enough for The Rialto and were too commercially unfriendly for The Colony (and believe it or not, there was a time when you could see Trainspotting with next to no one in The Studio, when people hadn't seen it and wouldn't for years). I saw Trees Lounge with a new-ish friend that transferred to the high school the Cap'n went to, one who shared an interest in "art house" cinema. Nobody else seemed that interested, and I guess that's been the story of Trees Lounge to this day.

 It really is a shame, because there's a lot to like about Trees Lounge: Buscemi's writing, directing, and particularly acting chops all serve the low-key story well, and he surrounds himself with great actors in smaller roles: Carol Kane, Seymour Cassel, Mimi Rogers, Debi Mazar, Michael Imperioli, Kevin Corrigan, Mark Boone Junior, and a brief appearance by Samuel L. Jackson, playing against the "type" he'd been cultivating while working with Tarantino. It's a film of small moments, of characters that hover in and out of the story, where the story is less important than the players.

 While I described the plot very nearly in full, Trees Lounge is more interested than your average "sad sack" alcoholic movie, even if it infrequently rises above a tone somewhere between downbeat and depressing. Buscemi is able to keep the character study engrossing because Tommy is such a likable loser; as an audience, we understand why people have trouble completely giving up on him, even though he seems to be incapable of keeping a good thing going. There's an easygoing charm in his performance, one that might surprise people used to Buscemi's twitchier, chatty performances in films like Fargo and Reservoir Dogs.

 Speaking of Reservoir Dogs, there's a moment early in the film where Tommy is driving around town, and he passes a familiar sight to fans of Tarantino's debut:

In the commentary for the long out-of-print "special edition," Buscemi insists that this was a coincidence and not intended to be a visual reference to the opening credits sequence from Reservoir Dogs. While I take him at his word, it struck us immediately in 1996 and continues to be a pretty big coincidence if you ask me.

 The out-of-print disc is, unfortunately, the only way to see Trees Lounge in widescreen, because when Lionsgate picked up the rights, they dumped the transfer and all of its extras for a pan-and-scan disc at a bargain bin price. The only upside to this was that when I finally - after years of unsuccessfully searching - found the first DVD, instead of paying $25, I only had to pay $7.99 since the updated retail price was lost on a bored employee at Coconuts. It may seem silly to have been so excited, but every now and then one feels that way when a movie goes overlooked for so long. Considering that it's better than subsequent Buscemi directorial efforts (Animal Factory, Lonesome Jim, and Interview), I'm hoping this review turns some of you on to a better slice of understated independent cinema. Think of it as proto-mumblecore, if that's what you're into.