davilopes-cine

This episode has a very interesting premise that could have been much better if they trusted that the situation in the office was enough to sustain the entirety of the narrative. It should have started in tthat situation and progressed with the exposition from their dialogue alone. Unfortunately, the execution laves to be desired, with a lot of sappy melodrama.

I don't know what was going on but Judy Davis was not at her best here. She overacts. A lot. It probably doesn't help that her makeup makes her look like she escape a mental asylum.

Sam Waterston gives a powerful performance, but there's only so much he can do to save this episode.

When watching *Upstream Color*, my first impulse was to allow myself to engage with an unconventional experience. That might be a nebulous journey, but I was sure it would be a worthy one. I am a big fan of *Primer*, which is, to me, a time-travel masterpiece. My expectations were high. The cinematography was pleasing enough, and Shane Carruth's dialogue remains spot on, saying very little in terms of explicit information while conveying a series of disturbing emotional states. All filmmakers must choose how much information to give the audience, how that information is dispensed, and when. Here, the choice was to hold on to it until the very end. Sure, *technically*, it is possible to understand the movie solely by watching it if the viewer happens to know all the same scientific and philosophical references at display here. If that is not your case, well, you better enjoy macro shots of teeny tiny stuff, muted colors, slow motion, moody music, lens glare, and other pretty stuff that will do very little to clarify what the hell is going on.

Maybe that is just me, but this movie is so obscure that I only realized there were two main male characters when I looked it up online afterward. That is because they barely show the "Thief's" face, who, just like Shane Carruth (who portrays one of the main characters) happens to be (in the movie) a fairly generic adult male. So I spent the entire film thinking that Kris' romantic interest was an abuser. I ended up creating a convoluted theory involving the parasite using him to commit crimes and then leaving. That is precisely the kind of thing that a little information would prevent.

I am not saying everything should always be entirely clear in a movie, as I do appreciate a correct amount of redirection and vagueness without which most mind-bending narratives are impossible. But there is something incredibly lazy about removing exposition from a screenplay, or, as is this case here, making it so vague and "poetic" that you risk losing the audience entirely.

And the thing is, I watched an explanation on YouTube, and the whole thing is needlessly complex. Sure, it's "super smart", but, if you don't expose those cool ideas to the audience, then what is the point? Even something like *2001: A Space Odyssey* provides way more information than *Upstream Color* does, because how would I ever feel unease and threatened by the computer "Dave" if I didn't have a clue of how it functions? Mystery is a delicate balance, and choosing all of its parts it unsolvable indicates poor craftsmanship.

A little more usable exposition would do wonders for this film. It might make it even more disturbing and exoteric. The convoluted way it communicates the basic facts of the story gives it an unearned air of sophistication. The biological science fiction at its core is not exactly challenging or complex, just needlessly long, like a chain of paper dolls that is too long to sustain its own weight.

This movie is so bad it's hard to talk about it. The story is a jumbled mess with no direction whatsoever. Things just happen to protagonist that merely reacts. Not a single joke in the entire film works. This is an unfunny comedy, and, for that, it deserves a zero.