Yesterday Was a Lie

Oh boy, oh boy! I should have been more careful when choosing what movie to watch. Truth to be said, I 'fell' for some excellent reviews of this film, and only 'post-factum' while trying to understand why I disliked it so much I discovered that all the people who on the Message Board who wrote rapturous messages of how great that film was wrote only one post each throughout all their membership 'carrier' at the IMDb and, besides, there's a suspiciously large amount of '10' votes which is very rare even for Oscar-awarded masterpieces that even though usually have the majority of good votes spread in the 8 to 10 range, but almost never only '10s'. Which inevitably lead me to the conclusion that most of the good votes for that film were fake.

I believe that any film-maker should have enough self-respect rather than ask from his friends, colleagues, etc. and even voting by himself under different user names for the movie that he himself considers to be bad, otherwise, why should he bother to making such charade?

Me and my wife were expecting some 'brainy' movie with interesting ideas, since we both love science fiction and interesting non- standard approach. That's why we also love David Lynch. It seems to me that the film maker tried to emulate David Lynch, but failed miserably, since despite good camera work the script was pretty amateurish and convoluted. Even two attractive lead actresses could not save the film, even though, as some consolation for the wasted time, it was pleasant to watch them. Some of the background music was clearly 'borrowed' from Pink Floyd's Shine on You Crazy Diamond.

This being said, I want to wish James Kerwin success in his future endeavors. He haven't done any serious work so far so any beginning is not easy. Along with that I have just one request: please, no more fake reviews, OK? Have some self-respect, man!

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.

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.

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.

(OK -- forget they met on Star Trek.)

This is a strange movie.., maybe not in the usual sense, like a Dark City, or Bladerunner or even a host of mediocre, time-bending, sci-fi films like The Fare.., possibly because this film's primary purpose was not actually to be a movie in the first place.....imho. (stay with me)

I see James Kerwin as a remarkably talented fellow. But like the movie's male lead, Dudas.., some femme fatale broke his heart. And, at the point where his world was crumbling and time had stopped.., Kerwin had a choice to either join a MGTOW forum on YouTube (swear off wimmen for good).. or use his anguish to make a film-noir adaptation of his painful odyssey.., possibly with the hidden, albeit semi-predictable agenda of winning HER back. He chose the latter., foolish boy.

And you could say he really put his heart into it - striving, it would seem, for actual cinematic excellence (trial by theater), and revealing himself to be a sort of vanishing old-school Hollywood type, nostalgic of course, and aiming for production effects from the glory days of Hollywood, as opposed to the current, cold, calculating Cyclops of Baloneywood, bent on agenda-driven, formulaic films and even more formulaic propaganda. One might even call him a rebel (ergo of no use to the Masons).., perhaps accounting for his having only made this one solitary movie, despite his obvious skills and passion.

Dare I say, because catharsis and solace for Kerwin's broken heart were the raison detre of this film, several commonplace areas of production might have been slightly neglected - say, plot.. being the foremost. While some reviewers contend there actually is a plot.., I would not go THAT far. Furthermore, the absence of plot didn't really bother me. Besides which, I HAD been warned.., by an opening credit for one of the production companies, which boldly claimed it produced "intelligent films". So, no surprises.

I never really felt like the film was about telling a story anyway. Dare I suggest.., (for me) it was a kind of a (serene) visual and emotional hypnosis, where I was compelled to enter their world, by dint of the actors' commitment to the whole experience. In other words, Kerwin yet again expressed his unique values by selecting actors who were also "old school" -- drawn to acting, not to escape reality by treading the boards.., but to either escape the general phoniness of the "real" world, or perhaps their own personal sense of Unreality -- people who had perhaps always struggled to find their true inner identity, as might often be thought the case with individuals tortured by gender-identity issues.. or who merely longed to be some best, most beautiful version of themselves. (Think Melanie Griffith.., who exultantly "found herself in Forever Lulu.. (imho).

Take Chase Masterson for example - who, if you soberly peruse web images and so forth, might come across as bat-suit crazy.. and not even terribly attractive (or even female); but somehow Chase was absolutely dazzling, as if he/she'd matriculated from a life of endless beaus and beauty pageants, and had been literally carried from Edina to Hollywood.. on the shoulders of her worshipful admirers and understudies. She finally caught it!!

Kenleigh Brown.., well, unless simply a very adept switch-hitter.. was possibly more the former circumstance, tortured by his/her inner anima longing to be female.., but instead of projecting it onto some teenage inamorato, decided to BECOME said anima.., nevermind the Kirk Douglas chin or masculine brow ridges. (These are things you pick up being MGTOW.) Her acting, as well, was a bit ambivalent, and things did get off to a rather slow start.., but, imho, once the actors started trusting each other (getting comfortable with their collective schizophrenia).., some of Kenleigh's acting moments were astonishing and quite beautiful.., almost as if knowing their film tribute to this classic vision of Acting might be the last vestige of a dying art. (Wrap it up, buddy.)

Throw in a lot of semi-intriguing vocabulary from the world of arcane psychology and basically irrelevant metaphysics and pseudoscience.. (which the viewer cannot question, lest they appear stupid).., and voila - an 'omage to the naive and floundering past.. and all bittersweet human glories unattainable - electrically-crackling, star-crossed romance and abiding love, where wimmen are not fickle and hypergamous, or seeking self gratification by a juggernaut process of trial and error, where eviscerating collateral damage is NOT a given.

In short.., if you like antiques and/or at least drive a PT Cruiser, you'll probably enjoy this film.. despite its lack of plot or utile wisdom.., though a couple Manhattans ahead of time probably wouldn't hurt. AND, ere parting.. with a painfully slow shuffle about the dance floor -- I can't and shouldn't omit fierce kudos to (now deceased) Mik Scriba, who played Hoyle's somewhat inexplicable but uncondescending sidekick. Very endearing.

cheers!!😇 (I am not entirely discounting the possibility that they serve Manhattans in heaven.)