...memory

It's strange. Reading a review of Upstream Color I remembered what I'd written about it on Planet Lucre seeing it earlier in the year in New York. Only: what I remember writing wasn't there at all! No gremlins, just, strange memory. And it seemed very apt for that film and following Seamus Heaney to write something about that. I remembered writing something like: one sort of wishes the director had made more clear a Manchurian Candidate conspiracy idea that very clearly still (and forever more) has relevance today. But mollified that view by saying that was simply not what the director had wanted to make. Instead it is a very, VERY strange film. And if you are tired of American indy films that tick all the 'value' boxes 3 times over then THIS is a film you are very unlikely to see ever again. Or indeed that will tick ANY box whatsoever. The New Yorker review does an excellent job of exploring the Thoreau/Emerson/Hawthorne world that clearly influenced if not guided director Shane Carruth and has very sadly been watered down by educators into some pasturised/saccherine 'wholeness' intake for mass American consumption. Nature with a life-long expiration date.