New Review Up: The Fountain

[urbpan]

In this installment of Solylent Screen, I endured The Fountain, a piece of New Age claptrap about mortality and spirituality, starring Hugh Jackman as a successful conquistador, cancer researcher, and soap-bubble dwelling space Buddhist. If you liked and/or understood this attractive yet incomprehensible heiroglyph of a movie, please tell me wtf and/or why.

Comments

[candent.livejournal.com]

Did you do a review of Pan's Labyrinth?

[perigee.livejournal.com]

Dude, if you want more newage (pronounced like "sewage") claptrap, try "What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?" which is a "documentary" that is really a mockumentary that the participants largely don't know as such. There's even a 30,000 year old (I think) cast member (Ramtha). It's a laugh riot.

[interfecta.livejournal.com]

Oh come now, Jef. Everybody knows there are never enough attractive postmodern films that allow the design to overshadow the plot.
/snark

Actually, my major was in theatrical design, so I'm always happy to sit through something where the plot is incomprehensible enough to let me ignore it and pay attention to set dressing, costume, sound design, etc (provided they can make up for a lack of plot!). I have no idea what it's about either. I'm none too concerned.... both my grandfathers died of cancer, my maternal one in December, so I will not be watching it again anytime soon.

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

Glah, that sounds pretty dire.

[rudezombie.livejournal.com]

I'm glad somebody else hated that bombastic overhyped piece of crap. Seriously Aronofsky, we get it.. Hugh Jackman is coming to terms with death.. We don't need three separate narratives ramming this down our throats repeatedly for two hours, especially when two of them are just extended metaphors.

I reeeeally hate using the word pretentious.. but that's exactly what this movie was. Pretentious fluff when it had absolutely no right or reason to be.

[ms-cantrell.livejournal.com]

loathed that movie. wtf was the point? what? maybe two story lines, but three? no. and because i thought i must be missing something (all the smart people who loved it made me nervous), i watched it last week, too, and still loathed it.

[izzy23.livejournal.com]

I hated, hated, HATED that movie. Even the parts that might have been pretty to look at if the script and direction (it must have been the direction--I know the totally unsympathetic wooden manequins in the lead roles are actually fairly decent actors in other contexts) had not been so unutterably horrible were just fouled by the overall offensive badness.

[medusasowl.livejournal.com]

It was very pretty, but yeah... wtf. I think I gave it an extra star for the pretty because I always want to give the artists behind the scenes props for beautiful work. It was very disjointed and confusing and in the end I don't even know what they were trying to say, even as somebody with an Eastern faith. :P What Dreams May Come is MUCH better.

well...

[v1-skylark.livejournal.com]

I thought it was very pretty and an awesomely subversive deconstruction of how we deal with death, but I'll accept the possibility that the latter wasn't what the filmmakers intended and they really did fill the whole film with new age claptrap for its own reasons alone.

However, if you recognize that the Conquistador and Space Bubble stories exist only within the book and then look at them as reflective of the two characters that are writing them, suddenly what seems extreme and even farcical begins to reveal and comment upon threads within our collective approaches to death, life, the universe and everything. There are no shortage of cues in the film to do this, the conversation in the museum is especially key --- it's saying "look at why Izzi is writing the Conquistador story the way she is writing it." And if we're doing that, then it follows to take the same lens to the parts written by Tommy. The Fountain isn't trying to sell the New Age claptrap, it's trying to trace where that thread is coming from, how it relates to the Old Age claptrap, and what it tells us or at least what it makes us feel about ourselves as social, spiritual and, yes, mortal beings.

Undoubtedly flawed, the whole project could be argued to have overreached itself rather severely (except of course in the visuals, which are some of the greatest ever committed to film despite/thanks to their very non-digital techniques), but it's not inscrutable or just a bunch of flakey alt-religious bunk. You may have to "read" the film as well as watch it to catch it all, but there is something coherent being presented there if you're patient.

And, no, I'm not an English or Philosophy major. Also, I haven't seen the new Die Hard yet, but I'll no doubt enjoy it when I do.