She chooses to watch shows in which characters address each other with full names and say their intentions out loud. My brain hurts.
Below is not a spoiler, but I like to avoid reading anything about a good film before watching it, and I recommend to do the same here. You like it or you don’t.
This film has no staged speech that tries to explain anything. The little dialogue that it has is what would naturally arise given the situation. For the same reason, most characters have no names or no full names. No situation in which they would formally introduce themselves takes place.
Do I fully understand it immediately, or even after watching it once? No. Does it mean I dislike it? Rather the opposite. Actually, I enjoy being treated as an adult who can make conclusions without having given any pre-digested explanation.
And agreed on not being spoon fed.
A prime example to the contrary was when in the Joker, spoiler alert, they had a recap showing his delusion. The movie would have been so much better if they had cut that entire segment, and just have the neighbor female act all surprised and weirded out like she did when he entered the apartment.
Upstream Color was a great movie as well, it's a shame what happened between Carruth and Amy Seimetz.
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.
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.
Stanley Kubrick did something similar in `2001: A Space Odyssey`. In a scene where staff were being transported in a taxi... on the moon... 100% of the dialog is meaningless. They're discussing the merits of this or that sandwich, not how wonderful the Earth looks from space, or overcoming technical challenges.
It's so refreshing to be living in an environment vs being spoon fed.
Even better is very old or even silent movies ("M" is fantastic: modern-ish thriller from 1931 where sound is a character; Metropolis)
Also dialog-less movies: `Koyaanisqatsi` is incredibly beautiful and has a specific plot, even if there's no understandable dialog nor words.
In theaters _right now_ is `Flow`. No dialog, and no _human_ characters! It's all animated cats and dogs and other animals. It's startling how directly the characters transmit their goals and agenda and emotions.