Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

6/10
Shane Carruth's first feature, Primer, gets talked about a lot in "must see messed-up movie" discussions, but I haven't gotten around to watching it yet. Primer came out almost 10 years ago and this is Carruth's first movie since, in which he directs, stars, produces, edits, and composes the score for - and probably some other things in there too. I don't know if Carruth has been working constantly on Upstream Color in the years since Primer but it's clearly a labor of love and no doubt took a hell of a lot of work to put together, and as a standalone achievement of independent cinema, it's very impressive.
As a movie, I was a little more underwhelmed, especially given the heavy critical acclaim it's getting. I started out quite enamored with it but found my interest waning as the story went on. Despite the movie's experimental, non-linear style, it feels less like an aesthetic choice to complement the happenings on screen and more like a device to mask what's actually a pretty straight-forward (although certainly bizarre) plot. I checked Wikipedia after to see if I was missing some grand metaphor or something that would really make everything click together and it wasn't the case, there was just less to the eye than I thought there was. Or would be.
I felt like Carruth was channeling Terrence Malick pretty heavily, which is a dangerous thing for anyone to attempt, but he pulls it off well - the whole movie has a dreamy, surrealist atmosphere (aided in large part by the score, which fits perfectly) that could certainly feel a lot more clunky in the hands of a less deft filmmaker.
I didn't really love Upstream Color but I'm glad it exists and I'm glad Shane Carruth exists and hopefully he keeps making movies like this because, if nothing else, he's certainly an interesting voice and I'm sure I'll see eye-to-eye with him sooner or later. Maybe even as soon as Primer, which I'll now have to investigate.

Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 2013)

6.5/10
Don Jon is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut. He also produced it, wrote it, and stars in it. All that considered, it's a pretty good effort. It's very watchable, never boring, and the acting is excellent - the Italian Jersey accents sound a little forced at first, but the cast pulls them and the roles off. It's a movie about a guy named Jon, addicted to porn, and his relationship with Barbara, addicted to romantic comedies. It's a clever premise that lays a lot of ground for an exploration into male and female sexuality and the role pornography (and movies, and the media, and commercials) plays in our expectations from the opposite sex, ourselves, and how it affects the rest of our life. Regrettably, Gordon-Levitt avoids most of the heavy questions and, despite lampooning the airiness and unreality of porn and rom-coms, opts for a painfully hackneyed resolution himself.
Maybe I set my own expectations too high in wanting JGL to dig deeper than he did. I respect him for trying to make a movie that takes risks, but I feel like he only did half the job. In the end it seems like he had less to say on the subject than I thought he would, which was the most disappointing thing.

Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, 2012)

8/10
I don't know much about Jem Cohen, writer/director of Museum Hours, but I understand he was/is primarily a visual artist. I'm not sure if this is his first feature film, but I think it is. Museum Hours obviously owes a lot to Cohen's art background, being mostly set in a museum, featuring long takes of the art within and the landscape outside, and even including a lengthy diatribe centering around the museum's Breughel paintings. You would expect such a film, especially from an inexperienced feature film maker, to be exceedingly dry. Museum Hours is slow, but not dry at all. It feels very alive, treating not only its subjects (museum guard Johann and fish-out-of-water Anne) very humanely but the art as well. It manages to be mature, philosophical and slow, but it's never boring. Cohen engages the audience instead of lecturing them. I found a quote on his Wikipedia page where he says "art is something people do like breathing" and his movie represents that philosophy very well, free from pretension. I found it inspiring and enjoyed it very much.

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen, 2013)

8/10
Woody Allen's last two movies were pretty fluff affairs - To Rome with Love was the instantly forgettable kind and Midnight in Paris was the excellent, Oscar-nominated kind. Based on that alone I wasn't totally prepared for Blue Jasmine, one of most nuanced, complex, and, well, depressing Allen movies in years. Everything you've heard about Cate Blanchett's performance is true and she could end up with the Oscar for it, but the cast as a whole is incredibly strong. It's to Allen's credit that Blanchett's Jasmine is so oblivious, ignorant, and downright unlikeable when you get down to it...yet you also manage to feel a considerable amount of empathy and pity for her. A very complex "anti-heroine" that I'll still be thinking about for a while afterwards.

The Words (Brian Klugman & Lee Sternthal, 2012)

3/10
I think this came out last year, and seemed mildly interesting from the trailer, but it got terrible reviews. It was on TV the other day so I watched it, and it deserves all the terrible reviews it got. It uses a three-layered approach (Dennis Quaid/Olivia Wilde tell a story about Bradley Cooper/Jeremy Irons telling a story about...two actors I didn't recognize telling a story) to say absolutely nothing interesting, and the film itself is a total bore. I'll give 3 points for the cast, who all deserved much better than this.