[soulofmischief]

If you enjoyed Upstream Color, I highly recommend checking out Carruth's previous project, Primer, if you haven't already. It's a movie that takes a dozen rewatches to make full sense of. Natural dialogue, organic cinematography, and no hand-holding.

Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.

[strogonoff]

Seen Primer first, though it’s 100% due a rewatch. I think it lacks certain poetry that Upstream Color has.

I don’t know if we should denounce the art if the artist turns out to be a bad person in some ways, previously had some thoughts about it but forgot what they were. Maybe the answer is “we should if we know about it”. However, no person is unchanging, and by that logic the person who creates the art is not the same entity as the person who does bad things, unless it happens in close enough proximity or relation to each other.

[soulofmischief]

I do generally separate the art from the artist, it just sucks given that Seimetz starred in Upstream Color, which is definitely proximal.

For example, I recently watched It Ends with Us, a book-turned-movie about a woman, played by Blake Lively, dealing with physical and sexual abuse from her boyfriend, played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the movie. Well, it just came out that he and other staff sexually harassed her constantly throughout the filming of the movie. That would make any rewatch significantly more difficult for me, as I know that Lively did not enjoy the process and that the director, someone with power over her, treated her as such.

Personal issues aside, Carruth ultimately had a professional responsibility to Seimetz which he broke, and his subsequent behavior and general rejection of the Hollywood apparatus means we likely won't get any more films from him.

However, I don't want to derail the discussion away from Upstream Color or Carruth's other work. Just mentioned that because it saddened me.