Upstream Color… I don't know how best to describe Upstream Color, except that it is what it shows, a deceptive takeover of the mind which is hypnotically engrossing.  The decidedly symbolic narrative is a fusion of music, image, and word into a shockingly beautiful and moving shared experience.
 
Only a filmmaker with total confidence in his ability would follow the low key science fiction indie Primer with something so ambitious and esoteric.  But Upstream Color's daring also makes it nearly impossible to describe, a common reaction among critics which for once isn't merely hype.
 
Those preferring more lucid entertainment may conclude that it's all a bunch of pretentious mysticism, and one really can't argue that it isn't--as with anything so experimentally abstract, the sole proof is one's reaction to it.  We are either affected by the patterns or we are not.  This movie took over my thoughts.
 
The best way to approach Upstream Color is without narrative preconception (as in Primer's dense tangle of time travel paths).  It is not really a narrative to be solved, and it can only loosely be called "science fiction" or "a thriller".  A surprisingly emotional venture for Carruth, it should attract a lot of new fans.   

What the fuck is Chechnya anyway?… Get the scoop at My Posting Career.   

Boston Marathon Bombed… Sensitive, considerate, and not at all "too soon" commentary at My Posting Career.   

Roger Ebert dead at last… Finally, the chinless freak who most embodied empty, middlebrow film consumption is dead.

More could be said about why Roger Ebert is a sharp declension from the peak of film criticism represented by John Simon or even Pauline Kael, but it's enough to list the names of contemporary critics who all follow the shallow Ebert furrow of "reviewspeak":  David Edelstein, Dana Stevens, Owen Gleiberman, Peter Travers, or any of the mostly Jewish crowd that has commercialized film reviewing so that it's little more than a condiment to be added at the concession stand.  Nothing too challenging, please, just let me know the thumbs status, and whether or not these adjectives apply:  moving, frenetic, slick, entertaining, singular, beautiful, hilarious, thrill-ride.  Words as empty calories.  But perhaps a better metaphor is words as anal lube intended to grease the lining for more film product.
 

More at My Posting Career.   

The Suburbs… The problem with suburbia isn't sterility (it's where whites moved to have families, so that's an inapt complaint), it is rootlessness.  Suburban communities lack a strong identity because they are "propositional"--people live there for the sake of convenience, not because they and their extended family are rooted there.  Each suburban family is isolate, there is no root system to keep them in place the way there is in a traditional town made up of family networks.
 
It is a community without community--superficial ties and memberships take the place of those deeper and more resilient family networks and histories.  Because the population is in flux, history is limited to the mean longevity of residence.  Thus community morality is in flux, always dependent upon the current composition, with very little influence in favor of continuity and heritage.
 
This is not the complaint that liberals have with the suburbs, of course.  Liberals betray little interest in sociological causes.  They scorn the suburbs because they are safe and sheltering.  The "vibrancy" of the city (as the liberal observes from his whitopia residential zone or gentrified satellite) is what is lacking in the suburbs, he thinks.  The liberal would be happy only with a city plan that completely eliminated families.  This gives a hint to his suicidal nihilism.  The nihilism is independent of his fake sympathy with urban minorities--his nihilism would have existed anyway, as a product of materialism and anonymity.

More at My Posting Career.   

World War Zombie… I always wanted to read Hackett's The Third World War but never got around to it.  Consciously or unconsciously, World War Z seems to be modeled after it, except instead of being written by a general with extensive knowledge of the subject it is written by the nerdy son of a crass Jewish comedian, who researched his comic-book-minus-pictures by playing tourist on daddy's dime.  Max Brooks is a "citizen of the world" much like typhus is a "citizen of nature".
 
But as pulse of the culture the apocalyptic fantasy is worth tracking.  Much as the surfeit of devil and demon possession movies in the 70s seemed to be a reaction to growing amorality and a fear of religion's withdrawal (really expulsion) from everyday life, these visions of mass doom betray the preoccupations of at least a portion of the public.  While the original living dead movies echoed cold war insecurity and nuclear paranoia, the new wave focuses on aggression, violence, and personal survival.  Of course the hero will give lip service to the idea of humanity coming together, but the story's conceit always betrays it.  Saving humanity is merely a tacked on justification for the frisson of watching millions or billions of people dying while feeling nothing (or feeling thrills of excitement, although nothing in the trailers looks very exciting--more like Transformers Z).
 
Of course part of the reason we feel a thrill is that we have been shielded from misery on a large scale, or even a small scale.  It's all abstract, like a porn fantasy.  The trailer to WWZ is filled with huge scale massacres, but there is no human element, it is all an empty CGI cartoon.  As people leap to their death to get on a helicopter that is taking off one feels nothing.  Compare this to shots of people leaping from the World Trade Center buildings.  In the latter, one is forced to reflect on the meaning of life, in the former there is no reflection, it is on to the next exaggerated thrill.  The movie must keep masturbating.

More at My Posting Career.