Great Film overall

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This film falls short to deliver a Twilight Zoneesque feel. Unless you're a Jungian or are familiar with Fred Hoyle and anything psychological or science for that matter, then this film will pass over your head. Love the noir atmosphere but the characters aren't believable in telling a noir style story. Chase Masterson is incredibly talented and gorgeous,and makes an attempt to be Virgil and walk Kipleigh Brown through a scientific Dante's Inferno. If this film were a student project for an astrophysics class, then it would have succeeded. Unfortunately it was presented as an actual film at Cannes. As a lover of science fiction, especially Twilight Zone and Star Trek I delve into this film expecting for a great deal of human factor drama and a blend of 1950's murder mystery and suspense. Instead I received a puzzle with pieces that are missing. If you watch this film research Fred Hoyle or read October First Is Too Late or keep the Sixth Sense and Dante's Inferno in mind.

I had very low hopes for this movie, and it managed to fall below even those.Short form, if you've seen other films noir, you've seen this one, except done better. If you've seen a lot of film noir, you've seen everything in this one, because it seems to be little more than a visual mash-up of what's been done before.That in itself is bad enough, but the acting and the writing are atrocious. If you saw Super 8, at the end of the film you get the see the project film that all the kids are working on throughout the movie. "Yesterday was a Lie" is very slightly better than that. Given that the writer is also the director, and based on the fact that every performance is flat and fails to engage, I think the direction must also be at fault.There is philosophy to be found here. I would urge you to read up on mysticism and physics (particularly quantum mechanics) instead of spending your time on this movie. You'll learn a lot more, and in the end you will have spent your time more wisely.

I saw this together with "Conversation(s) with other women." Both try something ambitious with narrative structure, extending notions I call folding.Here we have something that starts with noir — and by that I mean noir in the popular sense: black and white photography, a hard-boiled detective, some voice-over and seedy settings. These are only accidentally associated with noir in my mind; the real core of noir is the creation of a world that has features we as viewers expect and to some extent control. This filmmaker understands this, so has used noir for his narrative experiment.The experiment revolves around a science fiction device: a notebook with some secrets of Quantum Interaction. The backstory has experiments that use repetitive number patterns to allow a researcher to start to bend time. Two lovers have faded in their love. She is a detective put on a case that leads them to this notebook. He engages in the experiment to recapture their love at the cost of his soul. The story is told from her POV, which involves non-linearity in three respects: what we see and understand, what she sees and understands, what is understandable (in the sense of the physics changing). This last is to the heart of noir, where the act of seeing changes the cosmos.Her cat is named Schrödinger. She has a doppelganger (her sexy female anima), played by a woman who dominates: she is a muse/teacher. She literally is the producer of the film, and she provides some competent moody songs. All of the actors are people we should know from various, mostly bad TeeVee, science fiction. It is all rather brilliant in the way it is conceived and worth seeing because of the ambition.The problems are many though. The actual narrative, those threads you weave out of the fragments you are given? It just is poorly done. This needs more power in the actors, the lines and the cinema. It references urges that can bend the world. Polanski does this and delivers. "Ninth Gate." There is no there here. You may not notice this because it is easy enough to supply that romantic urge: we all have it and have nurtured it in our movie experiences. We carry it into this project and can plug in, indirectly increasing the narrative effect.So that is not a lethal problem. The other problem may not bother you, but it worries me greatly.This experiment relies on some detailed explanations of the "science" involved. As with many popular-level notions, we have selections from the most accessible and attractive features of Jungian cosmology mixed in with common misconceptions of quantum physics. It plays the same role in this story that mentioning a recent meteorite has in zombie movies. You nod, agree that the explanation is plausible and move on to consume the narrative.The problem is both Jung and QI have possibilities that are much more powerful than those appropriated here. You can't start fire with water just because on screen it looks like gasoline. And you don't need all that folderol (good word) anyway. "Conversation(s) with other women" does much the same thing as here, but without the guff. Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

A love story for cerebral cineastes. A delight to watch after dinner with a philosophy professor friend and three glasses of wine, and it belongs right up there with your volumes of Wittgenstein. Upon more sober viewing, my analytic mind felt challenged. Actually, this reflects the film's purposeful plotting. Being a psychiatrist, let's see what I can offer. The film exemplifies Godard's maxim that all it takes to make a movie is a girl and a gun. In this case the lead female characters are two lovely blondes. Each so cleverly resembles the other that one is reminded of Discreet Object of Desire, the surrealist flick where two actresses played one character. But adding layers of complexity here, these twin-like actresses are also playing the left and right sides of the brain of the feminine anima of one male character. Got that? They all meet at the Pigeon Hole lounge. The first character is the young Hoyle, a feminine Bogart/Sam Spade analytic detective - the left brain. Like Sam she likes the gin and the story straight. The second is a sultry, un-named singer who has a familiarity with the poetics of T.S. Eliot - the brain's right. Her music is entrancing, her wit intuitive and nonlinear. Together, these two provide the counterpoint of Jung's anima to the male animus of the main character, Dudas. Whether Hoyle and her counterpart, Singer, convince us they are our anima is irrelevant as we so want them to be part of us. These lovelies draw us ever so seductively into imagining the dark recesses of our own beautiful unconscious, despite whatever misgivings. All we're here for is love, we are told. The shape of the universe is a relationship - functional or otherwise - whether with our inner parts or with our fellow beings. This makes for a strange little Jungian romp in luscious b&w footage. This is Lynch with an underlying premise. Somewhat like the film Pi, this low budget beauty was made at the cost of Pi (made at $60,000) times pi! First time director James Kerwin makes for a Jungian fortune teller taking us on a trip to disentangle or re-entangle our male and female halves. Kerwin is an urban shaman who shows us the conventional mind as a "surge suppressor". Our conscious minds filter small broken bits of time in a lame attempt to tell a story. Does it matter whether they "add up"? Beginning with some obvious allegory, the locks are broken off the allegorical unconscious and our character, curiously named Hoyle bravely walks into a poetic film noir journey to confront the Self. (Hoyle seems named after transcendental astronomer/physicist Fred Hoyle who was deeply intrigued by the "Anthropic Principle" of nature.) We begin with a look at Dali's surrealist masterpiece Persistence of Memory in a hallway. They meet Schrödinger's cat, the parable of which tells us there are opposite angles on everything and only by choosing do we arrives at any definitive perspective. Free Will is discussed. The film reveals a Jungian Fenestra Aeternitatus, a window to the eternal, that our characters need to navigate. A variety of other cutting edge consciousness theories are peppered throughout the film to spice the intellectual interest of the knowledgeable viewer, including pondering Planck's constant, a number describing the fundamental vibration at the Ground of Being. For those less informed, the film literally goes back to the psychiatrist to explain itself. Jung, we are told, said a man needs to project his animus onto the feminine anima in order to unlock the secrets of the universe. This is a film for men who are in need of seeing themselves and for women who want a deeper look into those men. What does a man see in himself as a woman? Hoyle goes into a dream within a dream (hasn't everyone had at least one of these?) to contact her animus, Dudas, who has a notebook of important thoughts or ideas. Meanwhile we are constantly asked, what if our theories, concepts of self, and common sense don't add up? And what does that tell us about our relationships? And what is the nature and consequence of the loss of "relationship"? The right-sided feminine asks the questions. Left-sided Hoyle tries to read the tea leaves, the pattern in the chaos. Hoyle and her doppelganger meet another aspect of their animus, a scientist who explains the nature of time and who feels these two sexy blondes are "better" and "better". They are also the choices that interface with reality. They will help us overcome our own guilt about our very existence and the broken promises to ourselves and to others. A deep understanding of time is seen in this film's Feynman diagram writ large in cinema. Physicist Feynman showed everything else might be one mind/particle bouncing backwards and forwards in time, appearing as each and all of us trying to make contact with every part of experience over eternity, the very fabric of time. This reach for the eternal is countered by the Shadow, the dark side, who delivers a bit of lead poisoning in the form of bullets. Death's shadow is a terrifying/exhilarating lockdown on the many-sided reality of now, it haunts our Selves. It occurs when we bring our stories to a halt. We need to let go of our life-text and grab onto our fuller selves, leaving our memories to be what they are and move on to script ourselves anew. This film is an ultimate romance with "The Other", a mix of the cosmos and the chaos, the order and the disorder, the male and the female. In this cocktail lounge of our emotions, letting go of our primordial selfishness lets our unconscious sing its own songs, reconciling the Self to itself. And pay attention to terrific music in here. Chase Masterson sings beautifully the lounge songs of our longing.