Smallclone100 Baffling. Extraordinary. Pigs. Barely any dialogue. Beautiful looking. Directed by Shane Carruth (Primer), It's very challenging - so much so that I'm not even sure repeat viewings will shed any more light on it. It's definitely one for cinema purists who like to watch cerebral movies. In that respect it's more of an experience than a movie aligned with Terence Malick and Darren Aronofsky material. What's it about? The cycle of life? genetics? religion? morality? ethics? Probably all these things. What's clear is that Shane Carruth operates on a level that is different to most of us!

alfCycle I love a good mind bending film with a non-conventional narrative structure. Films that challenge the viewer to figure out what exactly is going on and what it all actually means or represents. It's not enough for the movie to just be odd and confusing. The real test for these types of films is whether I feel engaged and intrigued by what I am watching. This film definitely captured my attention and held it from start to finish. The closest comparison I can think of would be David Lynch films, which I am a huge fan of. If anything, Upstream Color has a more straight forward narrative than the more surreal Lynch films like Inland Empire or Lost Highway. You can go through the movie and follow what is happening, for the most part, while piecing together what it all means. At the end of the film, you will want to go through the movie in your head to form a conclusion about what exactly happened and how you interpret the film, both narratively and thematically. If you go into a movie expecting it to spell everything out and come to a gift wrapped conclusion, you probably won't enjoy this film. If you like movies that require the viewer to draw their own conclusions, this film might be right for you.8/10...but that's just like, my opinion, man# Of Times Watched: Once

kalawaysimo I decided to give this a watch after seeing a reviewer on YouTube recommending this. The idea is intriguing but the execution didn't really deliver. It's not a bad movie nor a good movie. It's hard to feel for the characters because they lack depth. They maybe suffering from what have happened to them, but it's hard to feel sorry because you don't really know anything about the characters aside from their mental dilemmas. The movie is stylish but it's also bland. The only good thing about this movie is the soundtrack. All in all, i think this is a pretentious movie. It kinda failed to showcase it's intelligence due to shallow characters and bland style of filmmaking.

zanmorrow I'm not averse to complicated films but I didn't understand this. It dealt with drugs (a hallucinogenic worm inserted in the bloodstream). A woman seems to be brainwashed under this spell. She meets a man, not sure if this was planned or random. He is also lost but it's unclear if he's also had the worm. There is a man who looks like a geography teacher behind all this. He's also a pig farmer and some kind of sound engineer. Somehow the lives of the man and woman (Chris and Jeff) are linked to what's happening to the pigs. They figure this out using random memory fragments. They find the farm and Chris murders the pig farmer and finds his scientific research files. At the end Chris and Jeff and others who have had the worm (all linked by the book 'Walden' for some reason) come to the farm, find the pig linked to them, set them free, paint the walls... cuddle the pigs. One of the more annoying things in this pretensions film were voice overs in scenes when the characters were taking, voice overs of their own speech. There were some nice scenes on a train which were reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine, in fact this film made me want to watch that one again. Really not worth the time.