Upstream Colour - weird, very weird

Settled in at my new lodgings in Leamington last week catching up on a couple of films that have been around for a while now without me having the chance to see them.  The first was Upstream Colour - written by and starring Shane Carruth, he of minor indy fame for his low-budget science fiction puzzler Primer.  I loved Primer.  It has a feel to it that makes it look like real science at work in the real world of an amateur scientist's garage.  Even though it was filled with pseudo-science, it was realistic-sounding pseudo-science, and crucially made use of the scientific method.  Hence my excitement about Upstream Colour.

With Primer Carruth created characters confused by the world they find themselves creating, with his new film, the same writer creates a world that audiences will find confusing and unsettling.  The film opens with a series of sequences in which a man (later credited as The Thief) cultivates plants that host small maggots, he then conspires to infect a woman (Kris) with one of the worms, which immediately puts her in a hypnotic trance under his command.  After he steals money from her, she is delivered to another man, a pig farmer credited as The Sampler.  Some kind of surgical procedure happens and she is then returned to the world, apparently back to normal but aware that she has lost some time.  The film then continues, marrying up the lives of Kris and the pig with whom she shared time on the operating table.  Kris then meets Jeff (played by Carruth), and their lives become intertwined and parallel the lives of the pigs in the farm.  It soon becomes clear (ish) that their lives are deeply connected, perhaps the fact they met has little to do with chance?

Upstream Colour is even more oblique than Primer.  I don't really know how that's possible, but it would take someone like Carruth to out-oblique his own work.  At least Primer was only a time travel story with a narrative that was impossible to understand - demonstrating the potential reality of non-linear causality.  Upstream Colour is a much more abstract experience that defies any real attempt to categorise it.  You can interpret it as a story about the cycle of life, or how much of humanity lives its life in willful ignorance of powerful controlling elites, or the nature of love and the human condition.  You could even interpret the film as an entirely straight science fiction story, in which some unknown being (the worm) uses humans and pigs to perpetuate itself.  Probably it's all of this, and none of it.  Most likely Carruth is encouraging the audience to find its own meaning where it can, in the best tradition of cinema-as-art.

If you have a spare 2 hours and fancy a bit of abstract art cinema, then maybe give this a go.  But otherwise it's probably a little too out there for its own good.  Big up to Carruth though for making cinema like this, which more than anything else it is, is an exercise in creating wonderful images and then asking an audience to absorb them.  And what is that, if not art?

Star Wars 7 - just relief

Well here it is.  The most anticipated and critic proof film of all time (except perhaps the last Star Wars film) finally arrived across the world 3 weeks ago.  I gave the crowds a chance to die away and studiously avoided spoilers online, before walking down to the Camberley Vue on a wet and windy Wednesday afternoon in late December.  All I ever wanted for Xmas was a good Star Wars film.  No bad dialogue, no soulless CGI sets, no over-animated sword fights, no child actors that can't act, no convoluted and illogical plots, no horribly ham-fisted love interests and DEFINITELY NO FUCKING JAR JAR BINKS!  Just an adventure film about good v evil set in space, that's all we want.

It was therefore with slowly-unraveling relief that I left the cinema a happy bunny that damp Wednesday evening last week, because the latest Star Wars is not a terrible film.  In fact, it might even have been quite a good film.  Plot-wise this fast-forwards 30 years from the original trilogy, to a time in which our original heroes are suitably aged and there is space for a new younger generation to take over.  The 'First Order' are the bad guys this time, complete with totalitarian rallies and black robes, they're every bit the part a bunch of ludicrous bad guys.  When they try to get some plans for the Resistance base (don't ask where these plans come from - 'tis a maguffin) one of the storm-troopers has a turn of conscience and flees.  A bunch of cool stuff happens and then there's and EVEN BIGGER Death Star type thing threatening all that is good and lovely and Jedi.  Well it isn't called the Death Star, but this is Star Wars - so of course it's a Death Star.  Anyway - you know how it's going to end - this is Star Wars after all.

The stuff that's good here is the stuff that made Star Wars good in the first place.  The plot is simple and engaging.  Action sequences aren't headache-inducing.  Harrison Ford is really well cast.  There is meaning in small moments.  The new characters that are introduced are done so with the potential for many layers.  We have a new Jedi with a past hinted at.  We have a rebellious Storm Trooper with alluded-to motivations.  Best of all we have a bad guy in Kylo Ren who is frightened of his own good side, a great twist on the conventional Star Wars fall from light.  The future is bright in this one.

This is a film that should please everyone.  There's plenty for the fanboys, but also plenty for people who only know of Star Wars the brand.  It's not all rosy though, there are some downers mainly regarding the world that has been built for this sequel.  Star Wars was never the best at world-building, but in the original trilogy it was clear that there was a rebellion against the Galactic Empire. Now that Empire has been replaced by some sort of Republic, but for some reason there's still a Resistance militia that looks exactly like the old Rebels.  Shouldn't they have disbanded or at the very least become the Republic's army?  And what exactly did the Rebels of Return of the Jedi 'win' if this First Order crowd are running around looking exactly like the old Empire and building Death Stars?  Sounds like they didn't do a very good job of dismantling the old Empire!  Then there are the plot contrivances, too many to list here, and each of which some fanboy will no-doubt attempt to invoke "the will of the force" or some such crap to explain it.  No matter.  Accuracy of timeline and coherence of plot was never Star Wars' strong point.  After all, this stuff isn't really science fiction, it's an adventure film set in space.

Looking forwards now, one wonders what the next Star Wars film holds.  The eighth installment is already in production, and since episode 7 held so closely to the plot of the original one wonders if episode 8 will largely parallel The Empire Strikes Back.  I very much hope this isn't the case, and that the next film will tell a new story exploring the potential of these new characters.  Abrams screwed up the Star Trek reboot by turning it into an action film, surely the same can't be possible with Star Wars - which is already a Western in space.

And so it came to pass that in the winter of 2015, the one known as J J Abrams did save the world's most recognisable and best-loved science fiction film franchise.  Star Wars 7 has the same problems that befall many an action film in space, but these are largely the same problems that George Lucas' original had.  This is a film that did exactly what it needed to do, it rescued the Star Wars franchise from death-by-prequels and returned it to what the original film envisioned.  As more and more days pass between my watching of Star Wars 7 and today, I am slowly coming to the rather wondrous conclusion that I might actually have really enjoyed it - a lot.  Roll on episode 8.