Any colour you like

The subject of this post is, of course, the eighth track off of Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of the Moon, one of my favorite (or favourite) albums of all time. It's more like a transitional track than an easily extractable song -- in fact, I had to play it just to be sure I knew which one it was (and it's playing as I type these words).

That doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. The germane aspect of the song is that it was spelled with a "u" in the word "color," the way Brits and Australians spell it, because Pink Floyd are Brits.

Australians don't always spell it that way, apparently.

I've started to notice a real inconsistency as to whether words in titles are given their correct Australian spelling or not when released here.

I saw the latest example of this when going through an email from one of the local video dispensing kiosk companies offering a two-for-one sale this holiday weekend (it's "Cup Day" in Melbourne, a day off from work in honor, or honour, of a horse race). One of the films offered was Fast Color, spelled just like that. As you see in the screen shot above.

As a side note, this is movie I've been looking forward to for quite some time. In my Letterboxd watchlist, which I use to house current year releases I'm looking forward to seeing, it's the oldest title on there, as I first heard about it in 2018 and expected it to be a current year release then. I always like Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and I believe this movie finds her as some kind of indie movie superhero.

Usually -- or maybe, more often than not -- Australians would change the spelling from Color to Colour. A prime example would be the Hollywood movie Neighbors, which here is called Bad Neighbours. As discussed in this post, it acquired the "bad" at the front of the title to distinguish it from a popular local soap opera. And while they were in there anyway, they fixed up the pesky American spelling on the second word.

It's the "while they were in there" part that may actually speak to how this gets handled from a marketing perspective. Fast Color took a rather circuitous route to the cinemas after its festival debuts, taking more than a year to open after premiering at South by Southwest, and in fact did not get there at all in Australia. Because there was no poster to hang in Australian (or perhaps more to the point, British) cinemas, there was no reason to go beyond the existing promotional materials for the movie, I suspect.

That said, on IMDB, it shows Fast Colour as an a.k.a. for Fast Color in Australia, among other countries. Maybe that was just someone at IMDB with a knowledge of how these things work, going through and trying to be helpful.

But even if I have correctly surmised the reason no promotional materials exist with local spellings, it's not quite as clear cut as all that. We need to look no further than the movie I rewatched Friday night, Upstream Color, for an example of how the same exact word was handled differently seven years ago.

Below I have an Australian poster for Upstream Color. You can tell it's Australian because of the telltale blue ratings icon in the lower left hand corner, and also that it is claimed by local distributor Palace Films on the right:

It surely played in the theaters here, though that was just before I got here. The distributors still could have been trying to save money on the promotional materials and just gone with existing ones, except that existing materials do exist with the title as Upstream Colour:

So maybe there's evidence not just of being lazy or saving money, but of actively being okay with assimilating to American culture, in a way the British are largely still resisting. And maybe it goes back at least as far as 2013.

I jokingly like to credit my arrival in Australia with the local popularization of Halloween. When my wife was growing up, kids never trick-or-treated. My kids have gone every year they've been here, but even in those first few years, 2013 and 2014, our neighbors (or neighbours) had no idea how to handle trick-or-treaters. Even now you don't approach a house unless it has decorations of some sort outside, but back then, some were just dipping their toe in the water and would hang an orange balloon outside to indicate they were participating. My wife and I joke about the one house who had participated but then regretted it, and acted as though we were invading marauders, telling us that she had already haphazardly handed out sleeves of cookies and other random broadly defined treats and now had been picked clean. There was a panic in her eyes indicating she expected a real trick to befall her if we left unsated.

Since then, the popularity has exploded in our neighborhood (or neighbourhood), such that we probably saw 300 different trick-or-treaters in our six block radius alone. Some Australians still resent this move toward Americanization, though. My wife saw a father picking up his daughter at school that day and saying to her "We are not going trick-or-treating! That's American and we are not in America!" (The holiday actually has its origins in Scotland.)

Maybe Fast Color is another small example of that. The prevalence of Microsoft and its American-written error messages and menu items is already turning the local S's into Z's (or zeds) among the younger generation, and I'd think that maybe the (superfluous) U's are the next to go.

Hey, if we no longer have the monoculture of experiencing the same limited number of TV shows, movies and music, maybe at least we can all spell things the same way.

Filmmakers who have to wait

There's a price to be paid for making crazy, brilliant films and doing whatever you want in them.

Sometimes you have to wait for your next project.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

When I watched Upstream Color for the third time (but first in six years) on Friday night, I was inclined to wonder when we would be getting our next film from its director (and writer, and producer, and editor, and DP, and composer, and star), Shane Carruth.

But it's not going to be any time soon. See, Shane Carruth is a filmmaker who has to wait.

He had to wait nine years between his debut film, Primer, and Upstream, despite some high praise (though not by me) and a cult following for the former. It came out in 2004 and Upstream wasn't until 2013. It's not yet been another nine years, so maybe that's why his third feature has not yet been forthcoming.

It's easy to see why a studio or other investor would not take a risk on Carruth. His immense respect for his audience means that he doesn't spoon feed them anything, meaning they have to make what they will of opaque stories that are more like poetry than narrative filmmaking. And what gorgeous poetry, at least in the case of Upstream, which looks about as good as any film I've ever seen -- and a big step forward from his understandably grungy origins in Primer.

So I convinced myself that Carruth shot himself in the foot for future funding efforts when he made Upstream, but that should have only been the case if the reviews for the movie were tepid. A stroll through its Wikipedia page reminded me how rapturously the movie was received, how effusive (most) critics were in their praise. They may not have known what to make of it any better than most of us, but they knew it was something singularly enthralling. And how often can you say that about any movie?

Carruth has had other work since Upstream, but no features in which he sat in the director's chair -- only a single episode of a TV show I've never heard of called Breakthrough. This could be some kind of self-imposed hiatus, but I doubt it. I have to figure that a guy like Carruth, reaching an inarguable peak in his command of the language of cinema, would have had other inscrutable stories bursting forth from him. Heck, if you're Carruth, you don't even need a story. All you need are dreamy story fragments that you can sequence in such a way as to deliver us another singular experience.

It hasn't happened yet. And I see no future feature in pre-production on IMDB.

In doing a little deeper googling (er, in googling at all) I have discovered that he was preparing work on something called The Modern Ocean, which was to have had a star-studded cast, but that it was shelved. Maybe he shelved it, and maybe that was a good thing. I'm not sure "star-studded" is a good look for Carruth. He apparently was also working on something ages ago called A Topiary, but this was even before Upstream.

I'd like to think he's just following his own iconoclastic path, but I have to think that if someone gave him some money he'd make something quick smart. But even in the face of overwhelming critical acclaim, investors are gun shy if they know they just won't make any money on it.

I thought of another guy in a similar boat who also had a movie in 2013 ... and before that a movie in 2004.

Jonathan Glazer did not impress me with his debut film, much like Carruth in that sense. I couldn't understand the praise for 2000's Sexy Beast, which I found laughable in parts, and not the parts it (may have) wanted me to laugh at.

But after that, forget about it. I was mesmerized by 2004's Birth, which I saw twice, and even more so by 2013's Under the Skin, which I have now seen four times. That makes it one of the highest total number of viewings of any movie this decade. I only watched it a couple months ago most recently, and if someone wanted to put it on again tomorrow night, I'd be down for that.

But these are not financial winners. They leave regular moviegoers scratching their heads. Sure, the promise of nude scenes from Scarlett Johansson undoubtedly goosed the box office of the latter film, but it still made only $2.6 million in the U.S., and only twice that worldwide. That's nothing, especially since it cost $13 million to make.

But oh the reviews. They were breathless in some quarters, including this one.

Jonathan Glazer will not have to wait as long as Shane Carruth. Next year he's scheduled to release a film with a truly great title: Untitled Jonathan Glazer Project. That'll jump right off the marquees.

The Wikipedia page for the movie is only a placeholder, and the IMDB page has little more than that, nary even a star attached, and only "Plot unknown" to describe anything about the movie. It does tell us that Glazer is both writer and director.

"Plot unknown" could be the description of these directors' films even after they've been released, and that's why I love them. I don't love all abstract films that have lost their moorings from reality, but I love the films of Shane Carruth and Jonathan Glazer -- after they got their first misfire out of the way, anyway.

But to keep nourishing that love, it is I who will have to wait.

On lyricism and the poetic simpleton

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless (he'll probably call himself out in the comments section anyway) gave me a sort of challenge when he learned that I was finally going to see Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which he'd recommended to me several months ago.

(In my defense, the movie only came out in Australia this past Thursday.)

"So tomorrow we find out if it's lyrical filmmaking or Malick you object to," he wrote in an email to me.

He actually wrote "languid filmmaking" rather than "lyrical filmmaking," but I remembered it as "lyrical" in my head as I was watching the movie.

He's right to characterize my tastes that way, but I guess I took some umbrage at the fairly neutral and thoroughly accurate comment. I have objected to some of Terrence Malick's films, in some cases vociferously (The Thin Red Line) and in some cases bemusedly with moderate affection (The Tree of Life). I'm not a Malick champion, that's for sure.

Yet I do feel like it's not just a personal preference thing, like there's something lacking in me that makes me like Malickian movies less than most people -- most discerning people, who are the only ones I really care about when comparing my movie tastes to theirs. Why don't I like Malick's brand of visual poetry a little more than I do?

Ain't Them Bodies Saints was possibly going to provide some kind of answer to this, though I didn't even know that it warranted the comparison to Malick until my friend wrote the email in question.

Of course, I should have known. The title is like something William Faulkner might have come up with, establishing it pretty well as Southern Gothic. And most Southern Gothic is lyrical or languid or whatever term you might use.

Then there's the fact that Casey Affleck spends the trailer talking just above a whisper about his vows to find his love (Rooney Mara) again. It's actually his regular speaking voice, but the "just above a whisper" comment is meant to make the comparison to the work of Malick, whose everpresent voiceovers are marked by their whispery quality.

It's Affleck's work that made me realize what it is I don't really care for in movies like this:

Uneducated low-level criminals from the South who speak in a string of childlike platitudes about love and destiny, whose simplistic construction gives them a wisdom and authenticity that could never be managed by a skilled wordsmith.

Since you might guess from the previous sentence that I am, or consider myself to be, such a wordsmith, you might not be surprised that I find myself in opposition to such characters.

So it's not the lyrical, languid world of a Terrence Malick film that really bothers me. It's the characters who populate it.

Since some plot description of David Lowery's acclaimed new(ish) film is probably now warranted, I'll tell you that it's set a bit in the Bonnie & Clyde world of Malick's masterpiece Badlands. (See, I do think some Malick films are masterpieces.) Affleck and Mara are young lovers or spouses (it's not quite clear) who have just discovered they're expecting a child. They're trying to make a life for themselves and their child through armed robbery, but that career is cut abruptly short during a shootout with police where their accomplice is killed and an officer is wounded. Although Mara's Ruth took the shot that wounded the officer, Affleck's Bob claims responsibility and is sent away for a long prison sentence. It's at this point when he starts doing VO of the letters he writes to Ruth, promising such things as "Each day I will awaken thinking it's the day I will see you again, and one day that will be true."

Puh-leeze.

Okay, it's a nice thought. I wish I'd come up with it. But the thing is, I can't come up with a thought like that because I'm an Ivy League graduate who would write it and re-write it until all its enviable sense of spontaneity was gone. I'd obsess over it until I killed it.

Not Bob Muldoon. Because Bob is an uneducated low-level criminal from the South (Texas in this case), his emotions are simple and pure and vivid. When adults try to draw children's drawings, they can't make it look right. But Bob's heart and his words of love for Ruth are a child's drawing that comes naturally to him, because he's at that state of emotional evolution.

I'm not picking on Ain't Them Bodies Saints in particular. I'm only picking on it because we've seen this so many times before. The first few times, it felt sort of fresh. This tragic fellow has a quick temper and he hurts people accidentally and he does the wrong things, but his quivering words of love are as pure as a baby's tears. He loves his girl and would do anything to be with her, and that's all there is to that. But by time number, I don't know, 47, I felt I'd seen this story before.

I could never be such a romantic hero in such a Faulknerian, Malickian story. As me, Vance, I'd be overthinking everything, so I'd never have the quick temper, nor hurt people accidentally, nor do the wrong things to begin with. (Oh, I'd do wrong things, but it'd be like plagiarizing a paper in school, not robbing a liquor store.) The romance of the situation is dependent on how little is calculated and calibrated about the thoughts and speech. Everything is "from the heart," not "from the brain."

It occurs to me that these sentiments are similar to some I expressed when I was struggling with why I didn't connect with Drive the way some people do/did. Here's a link to that piece if you want to read it. In that case it was more the strong silent type than the child-poet, but in both cases, it's characters who are essentially different than I am.

I wonder why we, as an audience, get so much more out of love stories between simple folk than love stories between university professors. At this point, we don't even get the opportunity to see love stories between university professors, so uninteresting is their love. Those eggheads aren't spontaneous or reckless or dangerous. Therefore, they're not romantic.

There must also be some kind of sense of superiority going on here. I think we need to look down on Bob and Ruth as children, of a sort -- our intellectual inferiors. We can examine their love as though it were the love of two lemurs in a zoo. There's something feral and elemental and basic about it. Advanced love is too hard for us to process in a pastime designed as escapism, since most likely we're dealing with some fucked up version of advanced love in our own lives, where people give each other the silent treatment for reasons they don't even remember, and no one gets involved in shootouts.

But back to this issue of the lyrical or languid style of filmmaking that Malick and David Lowery have in common. (You'd say Lowery is ripping Malick off, except that it's too well-made to really deliver that kind of indictment.) Another 2013 film disabused me of the notion that I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse the style of filmmaking Malick has made his calling card at least since The Thin Red Line. It has the photographic beauty of a Malick film, and if anything, it makes even less sense.

That film is Upstream Color, and I've already seen it twice.

I wasn't a fan of Shane Carruth's debut feature, Primer, but I ate up his sophomore film with a big spoon. Even though most of the time I had to rely on flimsy half theories of what was even going on.

Could it be a coincidence that these characters are modern, intellectual northerners?

I mean, we're not talking about brainiacs or anything, but Kris and Jeff are both denizens of a large, bustling city. No one talks about how close they are to seeing or touching each other. If they talk about anything at all, it's weird conspiracy theory shit that doesn't even make sense to them.

And I discovered while watching Upstream Color that I didn't need to know what was going on at all, as long as I felt like I dug how it was going on. In fact, I simply luxuriated in being immersed in an experience that was unlike any I had ever had.

Unlike in Ain't Them Bodies Saints, a tale as old as William Faulkner.

I can't leave this topic behind without acknowledging a certain hypocrisy in what I've just written. I say that these characters ring a little false to me, but the fact of the matter is, one of my very favorite movies of all time features a tragic relationship between two poetic simpletons. That movie is Raising Arizona, and Nicolas Cage's voiceover is just about the shining example of everything I'm railing against here.

But that just adds strength to my claim that it's all about the timing. That was 1987, when I hadn't already seen these characters so many times before. And, that was a comedy, in addition to the tragic romance. There was barely any languidness or lyricism to be seen.

So I can answer my friend as follows: It's not languid filmmaking, nor lyrical filmmaking, nor Terrence Malick I object to.

I object to these characters who can't find the words, who always find the perfect words.