Upstream Color

UPSTREAM COLOR        C+                       

USA  (96 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Shane Carruth

Despite all the hoopla about this film, and more particularly the filmmaker, this is not a marked improvement over his earlier film PRIMER (2004), one of the low budget marvels of the last decade.  Waiting 9-years to make his eagerly awaited second film, there is a cult audience clamoring for something implicitly deep and complex from this film, perhaps another sci-fi puzzle film, but they won’t find it.  Instead it’s simply an obscure, largely experimental piece that attempts to be more than it is, as whatever narrative there is remains obfuscated by a sketchy design that remains elusive at best.  The problem is whatever themes or subject matter he is attempting to explore just never rise to the level of interest, as characters nearly sleepwalk through their roles, never generating any relevant dramatic connection.  Before he was a film director, Carruth was a math major, becoming a computer programmer developing flight simulating software.  As his two films suggest, guys heavily into science don’t always make the best communicators.  In fact, one might think there is a pervading style of filmmaking where at least part of what it’s about is the difficulty in communicating, for instance teen angst films, or Heath Ledger in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005), where he takes the hesitant and inarcticulate nature of a young cowboy to an artform, or the many variations of supposedly naturalistic dialogue from low-budget Duplass brothers or Andrew Bujalski mumblecore movies, a fringe movement about post-college or early adult white people with problems that never really connected with mainstream audiences, as they’re not really about much of anything.  Damned if that doesn’t plague this picture as well, where its intentional ambiguity remains a puzzle not worth exploring.  Even if there is a coherent story here, the question is what difference does it make?  How does a film like this have any relevance in our lives?  Wanting this to be about something, like say the enveloping fear and paranoia of THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), is not the same as making a profoundly affecting film, where the underlying focus sticks with you for days and weeks afterwards, perhaps even a lifetime.  Interest in this film fades quickly.

As best as one can determine, there are two opposing wavelengths occurring here, where one is a high degree of sensitivity and thought, where you’re able to sense things others don’t see or hear, almost like an autistic sensory level, where one’s capacity to reflect upon altered states of existence, or a unique “otherness,” may be completely mystifying to some, but certainly early on we see many gathered together, including at various times both Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth) drinking what is believed to be a special (parasite infected) purified water, something to help achieve a state of wellness, where one hopes to feel better than at any other point in one’s life.  The downside is the sacrifice or price paid to achieve this sense of heightened elevation, real or imagined, where you have no memory of what happened and leave yourself open to unscrupulous operators, achieving a near hypnotic state like a cult brainwashing effect where people can take advantage of your vulnerability and steal all your money, leaving you paranoid and in fear, but also angry and demoralized by the entire process afterwards.  But at least initially you want to believe, like the strange Russian sci-fi film Target (Mishen) (2011) that promises everlasting youth, only to ask yourself later, but at what price?  Unknown to each other at the outset, Kris and Jeff are mysteriously drawn to one another, perhaps unknowing why, though Kris is so incommunicative and unapproachable that one has to wonder what’s the attraction?  She wears an enormous large-sized headset at all times in public, listening to who knows what, but obviously to keep other people away.  Nonetheless Jeff persists, as if by supernatural calling, where he believes they are drawn to one another, perhaps to help one another understand what they’ve mutually forgotten, helping each other piece together missing memories, even though they barely talk.  This leads to an intimate relationship, as if by osmosis, where it’s certainly not their unbelievably poor communication skills, where they talk over each other’s words and ignore one another with regularity.  What changes is Kris gets pregnant, or at least thinks she does, as her conscious existence is seemingly tracked by the parasite she swallowed, which ends up at a pig farm.  It’s actually Kris’s pig that gets pregnant, unbeknownst to her, where Kris grows irate when they take the little piglets away. 

There is no explanation for this transference of human consciousness, which goes through yet a third life cycle when the pig farmer wraps several chosen pigs in a sack and drowns them in the river, where the parasite passes through their bodies in a bluish fluid that is released upstream causing exotic orchids to grow.  From these orchids is extracted the original parasite that begins this strange life cycle all over again.  What is certainly bizarre is the state of inexplicable anger mixed with utter indifference by the humans used as guinea pigs, where they do not seem to be in control of their own human faculties, still affected long after the parasites have left their own bodies.  Now if aliens had passed through these bodies, like the high powered, heavy metal infused THE HIDDEN (1987), an over the top, sci-fi story that packs a punch, then you’ve got something to generate interest for decades to come.  But in this dreamy saga of lost souls, roaming the earth in a state of listless apathy, where the true meaning of their lives is apparently stolen by a series of unscrupulous business transactions which happens to block the ethereal wavelengths.  When Kris takes to swimming, spouting gibberish poolside as she dives for stones on the bottom of the pool, Jeff is able to decipher her apparent mad ramblings as quotations from Thoreau’s Walden, of all things, a springboard to freedom if ever there was such a thing.  If it wasn’t so goofy, it might actually be entertaining, but it’s not, as the entire film is cast in such a darkly somber mood, as if the whole thing was the invention of rabid conspiracy theorists who see the end of the world near through genetic mutation.  Damn the scientists and mega corporations for spreading toxic poisons throughout the world altering the face of humanity.  The best thing in the film is easily the atmospheric score written by Carruth, who writes, directs, edits, acts, composes the music, and self produces his own film, an ambitious compilation of responsibilities for what is ultimately a dreadfully impersonal, drearily sad reflection of the human condition in the modern age, where swindlers and snake oil salesmen, aka the capitalist conglomerate enterprises maintain a greedy, monopolistic control over an easily hoodwinked populace looking for a quick and easy fix.  The idea of violating the natural order of things is nothing new, hardly revelatory, and never digs deep enough to matter.  Not sure what the characters are listening to on their giant headsets, apparently tuning out the rest of the world, and the audience with them. 

Doctored

 Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski






DOCTORED               C                    

USA  (100 mi)  2012  d:  Bobby Sheehan                     Official site

This is a follow up subject wise to other documentaries like Burzynski (2010), which are like cries from the wilderness, literally pleas to the American public to reconsider their course of standard medical treatment, as doctors, whether well-intentioned or not, have become joined at the hip to the pharmaceutical industry, so much so that their end goal after a patient examination is usually what drug(s) to prescribe, usually long term with refills, as if this is what the patient wants to hear.  While this documentary is largely one-sided, most likely financed by chiropractors, it initially explores how chiropractors can often remedy the physical effects of excessive drug use on the human body, literally bringing a body back to its natural health.  Historically, however, they are seen as “quack” treatment by the American Medical Association that prefers to set the standards for the industry, and doesn’t take well to outsiders who don’t walk to the beat of their drum.  Repeatedly those that practice alternative medicines hear this same label, but they exist largely because patients are dissatisfied with a life of living with pain, or being sent home to die from some incurable disease, refusing to accept this is how they’ll be forced to spend the rest of their lives, where they’re desperately seeking another choice.  Some of the time, the key word being some, the results are miraculous, despite examining the debilitating effects of chronic pain, frozen shoulder syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, autism, and cancer, where at least sometimes the body can heal itself if given the right impetus.  Nonetheless, alternative medicine is often not covered by major insurance companies, including Medicare or Medicaid, where only a limited amount of services pass government scrutiny, while the rest is still considered experimental medicine. 

Some of the facts presented suggest some children are mandated to take as many as 26 different immunizations despite the potential health risks to a small percentage, but when such large numbers are required to comply with the requirements, these numbers add up, as it’s not just a few children that suffer adverse affects.  A separate court system has been implemented just for these specific cases, as you cannot sue the government for requiring immunizations, which have easily saved millions of lives, but they’ve also damaged quite a few who have been paid billions as compensation for the adverse effects.  No numbers or statistics were provided, only that the risk is often never explained to the families.  When examining the history of large pharmaceutical companies, they pay out whopping fines as well due to adverse health effects, including deaths, some payouts in the billions of dollars, which is considered the cost of doing business, as they are making gargantuan profits, where the government refuses to shut them down as they also provide so many other needed medicines.  Much of this plays out like the cigarette manufacturing business, where for decades the nation was in denial over the health risks, where one of the worse offenses was the way the industry targeted youth as the next generation of cigarette smokers.  In much the same way, the pharmaceutical industry is also targeting children, where certain psychiatric medicine led to inexplicable suicides in young children, where they were used as guinea pigs, taking medicine where no one really knew the risks involved until it was too late, sounding very much like the use of lobotomies of the 40’s and 50’s, or thalidomide in the 60’s.  In the 70’s and 80’s the preferred psychiatric medication was Valium and Xanax, where researchers later discovered the depressed effect they have on the brain, making them the most misused prescription drugs on the market.  The suggestion here is that to pharmaceutical companies, doctors are simply suppliers, or “whores” as they are called in the industry, where their aim is to find compliant practitioners to partner their drugs to patients on a permanent basis in order to make huge profits, irrespective of the potential ill effects they have on humans, where the kind of damage they can inflict just from reading the labels often sounds absolutely ridiculous.  

The film improves greatly when they put a human face onscreen that people recognize, such as John Stockton of the Utah Jazz, whose quick recovery from ankle sprains was due to his team’s chosen chiropractor, who also significantly reduced the team number of games missed from aggravated injuries, as he was able to get these high flying athletes to play pain free.  Olympic skier Picabo Street was also able to recover quickly after a potentially career ending knee injury using the work of a chiropractor, who uses a less invasive procedure, taking a more holistic approach to the human body and how it can best recover.  Perhaps the star of the film is a PhD biochemist Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the target of multiple harassing lawsuits to discredit his findings, who has won one of the largest legal battles with the Food & Drug Administration in U.S. history, a 14-year journey to obtain FDA approved clinical trials for a cancer fighting treatment known as antineoplaston therapy.  Despite industry claims that his groundbreaking treatment is unproven, Burzynski is the only scientist in history to have cured a childhood inoperable brainstem glioma.  Among the most effective screen characters was an Inuit Alaskan Iditarod announcer whose family had a history of lupus, where her mother eventually committed suicide, yet after considerable effort in diagnosing her own illness, she discovered it may be the presence of Lyme disease instead, which through the help of natural health practitioners could be successfully extracted from her system.  Another mother’s infant child was born prematurely but survived, but the family refused to give such a small child Phenobarbital for potential seizures, using the hand healing methods of chiropractics instead which seems to have jump started his brain, making him a much more active and intelligent kid.  While there’s never any attempt to offer a differing point of view, and often there’s little follow up on featured patients, the film also makes an overreaching attempt to tackle genetic modification in the food industry, suggesting there are benefits to eating organic, but they tackle on too much unsubstantiated information at the end which only undermines the credibility of the entire film.  Overall, while common sense suggests patients should integrate a whole body approach to health, including trying the benefits of alternative medicine, the film does play like a chiropractic infomercial.