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Yeap; adored it as well and i can REALLY NOT understand the people who carry negative views on it; how's that frigging impossible?

Oh; i got it; he must be one of those guys that get an erection by watching Rambo blowing things up

I can't find enough negative things to say about the utter pretentious bollocks that is The Fountain.
Try and break it down and it makes no sense on any level. I noticed that even people who liked it seem unable to actually give a plot summary...which is quite right as the "plot"(for want of a better term) has holes big enough to fly a starship through. But then of course the defense then is that it's "an experience".
Well OK. That's an opinion.
Mine is that it's lazy and boring film making, without the beginning of an inkling of the possiblity of any orginal or indeed coherent thought behind it. A bunch of seemingly related "heavy" imagery, with a lot of cliched (semi-)religious symbolism mixed in stopped being hip after 1973.

The film is a con job.
And a very poorly executed one.

At least the -equally execreable- Blueberry had the guts to admit it was just trying to portray a peyote trip.

Time for another report...

That repeat screening of THERE WILL BE BLOOD still hasn't happened, and sadly it may not. I go through phases of going to the cinema, and it's a rare film that gets a second cinema viewing out of me. (As demonstration: one of my favourite films ever, THE NEW WORLD, only got one viewing from me, as life was busy. Admittedly it only played for 2 weeks, but I still feel bad about this.)

I've also not been to see LUST, CAUTION in the cinema, which is also a shame, and proof to me that if I see a film on DVD, no matter how much I like it, I will not go and see it in the cinema. The last time this happened was Wong Kar Wai's superlative 2046, a film that demanded a cinema viewing, but which I'd already seen 4 times on DVD by the time it came out in Sydney. So it was for LUST, CAUTION, which was available on DVD in Sydney's Chinatown once the film had its Taiwanese release last November.

I hope to see DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, and friends tell me good things about JUNO... but who knows.

DVD is where it's all happening for me at the moment.

SOLARIS (Tarkovsky) - a re-viewing. The first time I saw this, I was a bit bored, and thought the Soderbergh version a brisker tour through essentially the same material. I think this was just a bad reaction to Tarkovsky's very deliberate style, because once I knew what I was in for, this film became the most rivetting thing I'd seen this year. The ending sequence is a great end for a film. I think the emotional material this one traverses makes it the film that many think THE FOUNTAIN to be. But the music is more abrasive and dissonant, the whole construction stylised, but more austere. It feels perfect, and I can't believe I didn't react so positively to my first viewing.

For this reason, I don't feel too bad that I fell asleep in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD more than once. Clearly the abrasive wit of PROVIDENCE is not what this Alan Renais film is about, but the film is about something. I will save a second viewing for a time when I haven't had a couple of glasses of white wine. Extraordinary style drives this film, and it's in everything. Much like Wong Kar Wai's ASHES OF TIME, I don't really know what it's about, but it seems to be about 'eternal return', a subject Wong approached hauntingly in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE.

Tarkovsky was up to bat again with THE MIRROR. This is a much shorter film than SOLARIS. I can't say I 'got' it the first time, but I was getting an idea when it ended. There's some starting sequences in this, and clearly it all means something. As with SOLARIS and IVAN's CHILDHOOD, I suspect a second viewing will illuminate much. This is the real head-spinning cinema, and just to dig my heels into FOUNTAIN again, I imagine many who were taken with the lightshow symbolism of that film would find this would really test whether they believe in film-making as an art.

Orson Welles' THE TRIAL so perfectly captures Kafka in its use of locations for sets that it's easy to forgive the way the film wanders from the story of Kafka's devastating book. Welles made his own take on Kafka here, and the long flirtation scenes of Anthony Perkins (good casting!) with the various 'sirens' (Romy Schneider, Elsa Marinelli and Jeanne Moreau) are worth having, even if they distract from the arcane workings of the Kafka's absurd court. The award for most 'doorways' in a film goes to this one. For anyone who has seen Peter Weir's deadly-serious GALLIPOLI, the use of Albinoni's 'Adagio' is mordently funny.

Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451 is not a successful film, but its moving final scene does some serious work at recovering ground. Clearly a great many things were intended with this film, but the cracks show, and only Herrmann and Christie come out untainted by association. A serious piece of science fiction is being taken very seriously here, and it clearly deserves it landmark sci-fi film label, but like some others on that list, this one doesn't really dramatically work. Embarrassing confession: I didn't realise Julie Christie played the wife as well as the neighbour until listening to her commentary.

Also recently:
- HOLLOW MAN - Verhoeven's voyeurism FINALLY feels like it is justified by the story! A very good film, albeit with the usual kill-everyone style ending.
- TORA TORA TORA - The number of times better than PEARL HARBOUR this is is equal to the number of lengths of my thumb it would take to measure the cirumference of the earth at the equator. Now imagine if Kurosawa had directed it, and the American section was given a bit more life, how good this could be.

Well, those are my favourite kinds of films. Screw the actions, I want pure audiovisual symbolism that the audience needs to decipher for itself! It's particularly engaging when this sort of art approach is applied within a more or less mainstream Hollywood narrative - a crash of styles (for example, should we take this at face value as there IS a story being told or should we eschew it in favour of something mythic on another level, outside and beyond the story?).

Pfff, I had this huge post all written up in my head on the the plethora of symbols and "mystic" issues in The Fountain, and how, if you mix 'em together enough with enough sound and fury, many of the audience will indeed "find their own truth" in the film (which is basically saying that there IS no common ground for any meaningful discussion, and a serious cop-out for any serious director), but Franz eloquently (and quite a bit more succinctly than I would have done) beat me to it.

I agree with every single point he makes.
(and the Earth doth shake on its vestiges... )

3:10 To Yuma - I really like it! I just wish there were more action sequences, or the ones in there were longer. The dialogue bits were great, don't get me wrong, but westerns should have more gun fights and chases!

Beltrami's score was ok. It at least made me giggle when he used his ''motif'' that appears in nearly all his scores, only this time orchestrated on guitars instead of a horde of percussion. Don't think I'll buy the score though.

Slight confession. One thing that proved to be quite a definitive moment for me in THE FOUNTAIN...

(SPOILER)
At a moment near the end, the Conquistador approaches the Tree of Life. When sap from the tree hits the ground, flowers sprout. He drinks the sap greedily. I joked to my companion in the cinema that it would be funny if instead of eternal life, the Conquistador started sprouting flowers. Unfortunately the film's humourless pursuit of that idea proved to be very funny indeed, and we were both laughing at the worst possible time.

SPOILER!



I agree that it's kind of an awkward moment, unintentionally funny (and when I discussed this scene with my friend afterwards, we laughed a bit too). But it makes SENSE. Tomas commits a mortal sin (greed) and is punished by death...but a type of death that is life. Rebirth.

Oh, I completely agree on principle.
But the thing that worries me with this film is its shotgun approach: just throw enough poly-interpretable "heavy subjects" at the audience and see what sticks.




You know me better than that (I would hope. ).
What I'm saying is that this particular film isn't a proper feature film due to its incoherency, it's selfindulgence and its lack of focus, nor is it a proper work of art (even though it has a certain elitist sensibility that is found in some modern art appreciation) as it doesn't meet what I would consider even the most basic of standards for a proper work of art.

Yeah, I realize full well that this is pretty much an open invitation for an interminable debate on what exactly constitutes art, but -while I always welcome any conversation that has the potential for new insights- that's not really my intent here. I am making a far more basic point: this film was offered to popular cinemas all over the globe, and not to any museum or exhibition. Hence my making the distinction: the film offers a lot that might be construed as art, but purports to be popular (even though its director has a history of mocking and deriding any of the audience "not getting it" ).



Yes, I understand perfectly what you mean,a dn I'm not contesting it at all.
In fact, that whole infinite symbolic diversity in infinite combinations (plastic kudos to the first one getting the terribly anoraky popular reference here) is pretty much my gripe against it!

It's interesting to me to see that you (and apparently a great many others) get a lot out of this film.
Which makes it all the more sad that in my opinion at the end of the day you can't really have a proper discussion on this film as there is -as I said earlier- no actual common ground work from!
The best we can do is to have a conversation where mutual points of view are explained.

You argue most convincingly in the film's favour, and I can find no fault or issue with your reasoning or interpretation. I on the other hand would like to think I argue as convincingly against its merits, and I don't think my interpretation is "wrong" (or due to misperception) per se either.

This alone makes it a poor film in my opinion.
But I'm perfectly happy to accept that that may be exactly what any other might be looking for.

BE WARNED: SPOILERS ARE IN THE FOLLOWING TEXT!

You all seem to be seeking the 'meaning' of the film within the climax, the final moments of Hugh growing weeds and ascending up to heaven, and are, thus, not finding any. For me, the message I got from it lies within the modern world. It's a simple tale of a man's obsession with eternal life (with the fear of death as his motivation) and thus forgetting to spend the time with the living, his dying wife. Izzy tries to tell him this with her novel, not getting through to him with normal conversation. It's Tommy, in fact, who ends the novel, finishes it, and in doing so, finally realises what his wife was trying to tell him (it's his epiphany, made visual in that climactic sequence). The sequences '1000 years in the future' is his struggle with his shame that he didn't want to be with his wife, when she needed him the most. When you look at it that way, with the present as the story's arch and everything surrounding it as a symbolic elaboration, almost every hole on the 'to fill' checklist seem to have been checked. And, if not, isn't 2001: A Space Odyssey also generally perceived as a masterpiece? Well, explain that.

YOU CAN CARRY ON, THE SPOILERS HAVE ENDED

Sure, there are other ways to look at it, and many will see many scenes as just that - pollution. And of course there are many things to it. But to me, when you should ask me about the message (and when people are claiming there isn't any), then that is it. It's also the clearest message of all and one that can be discussed right after seeing the movie.

Oh, I would definitely agree that 2001 is a much better and rewarding film than THE FOUNTAIN on most accounts!

Pawel, that was probably the best and fairest description of the score that I've heard yet.