darren aronofsky

  • This blog has been following Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler since it was announced, and now it's just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. I still have no idea what the tone of the film will be like, but it looks like Aronofsky is back on his feet after the critical failure of The Fountain. (0) #
    9/8/2008
  • The making of Darren Aronofsky's next film, The Wrestler, keeps getting more interesting, to the point where I can't imagine what to expect: Aronofsky blogs that Slash participated in the recording of Clint Mansell's score. (Mansell did the music for Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, the last of which with Mogwai.) (0) #
    8/8/2008

The Ending of The Fountain

The Fountain

Expect to see spoilers below:

I went in to The Fountain expecting a blow-your-mind thinkfilm in the manner of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but got a small and precise film instead. This isn't a bad thing -- it's just not what I expected. (Although visually the movie was large in scope and quite beautiful.) Death is such a huge subject to tackle, and rather than go for a Babel/Traffic/Syriana-type story -- all the rage these days -- covering fear of Death in all its permutations, or even for a symbolic approach like Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal, director Darren Aronofsky strips down the philosophical side of things and simply observes how two or three basic characters accept, deny, fight against, and embrace Death. As far as that goes, The Fountain is a minor accomplishment.

In the Las Vegas Weekly, local reviewer Josh Bell called The Fountain a "feature-length fortune cookie" -- peel back some of the dismissive contempt and I might agree. But take this indelible (and inedible) quote from the philosopher Spinoza, whose outlook on death as summarized by Bertrand Russell I find to be quite useful: "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life." Russell then goes on to say:

It is only death in general that should be so treated; death of any particular disease should, if possible, be averted by submitting to medical care. What should, even in this case, be avoided, is a certain kind of anxiety or terror; the necessary measures should be taken calmly, and our thoughts should, as far as possible, be then directed to other matters. The same considerations apply to all other purely personal misfortunes.

What's tragic about The Fountain is that Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman) directs his thoughts toward death entirely for hundreds of years (if you accept the sci-fi interpretation of the film, which Aronofsky seems to have intended), and only after a final, desperate moment does he assume the lotus position and embrace death. His wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz), on the other hand, has no such problems and is a Spinoza follower all the way. Her problem is with convincing her husband to feel the same way, and her eponymous fable about the conquistador Tomas is her modus operandi. A simple morality play, perhaps, and maybe its message sounds clichéd in the telling, but as David Foster Wallace is always at pains to make clear, that shouldn't take away from its veracity nor its sincerity.

Mon, 12/11/2006 - 3:40pm
  • Wired magazine has a profile on The Fountain and Darren Aronofsky's six year journey to make it. To keep the budget down and cultivate a novel sci-fi look, they hired a team which uses microscopic video of particles in liquid to create the special effects:
    Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks' technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. "When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you're looking at infinity," he says. "That's because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space." The microzoom optical bench furnished Aronofsky's film with something neither a computer nor an old-fashioned matte painter could deliver – chaos, in all its ultra high-definition fractal glory.
    (0) #
    11/2/2006
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