Revisiting THE FOUNTAIN

[jo]

There is much love for THE FOUNTAIN from film buffs --

[jo]

[jo]

And he really did, if you check his profile and some of his tweets!

Darren Aronofsky and Hugh Jackman will be very pleased that their work has inspired this man's calling!

[jo]

Now a choice on internet TV --

www.channel24.co.za/Movies/News/7-movies-youll-either-love-or-hate-on-internet-tv-20180824

7. The Fountain (Amazon Prime)

Another Darren Aronofsky mindbender, this one from 2006. Hugh Jackman plays a man who goes on an odyssey in three different time periods over a thousand years looking for a way to cheat death. In the 15th Century, he’s searching for the Fountain of Youth to cure Queen Isabel (Rachel Weisz). In the present day, he’s a scientist looking for a cure for his wife Izzi. And in the year 2500, he journeys to the heart of a star to find the Tree of Life. Sound crazy? It is. The Fountain was booed at the Venice Film Festival by critics and it tanked at the box office. But it’s also attracted a fan base that has grown with time, turning it into something of a cult classic. Empire says, “this simple fable about love and death makes a virtue of its flaws and emerges as one of the most moving and thought-provoking films of the year” while The Guardian called it “time-travelling kabbalistic balderdash”. So - which is it? Decide for yourself by streaming it this weekend.

[jo]

It looks like these could be deleted scenes from the movie? Or are they part of the Extra Features? Warner Bros deliberately did not allow a production of the Director's Commentary but Darren Aronofsky did a podcast-like one and uploaded it.

[mamaleh]

Those do seem like deleted scenes. Oh, that haunting Clint Mansell score!

Ellen

[njr]

Seems like a lot of work just to get high! 😂

[jo]

Contrary to what many think as the real-life story of the movie ( the Tommy part, who suffers from his wife's death), Aronofsky has said that it is the story of the Astronaut travelling in space which is the real story! So, " LIFE ON A SHIP" was meant to highlight that Tom travelling in his unusual space ship is the basis from which the story of Tomas ( the Conquistador) and Tommy ( the Surgeon/healer) emanate as fiction and back story, respectively.

It is a divisive film, not only because there is a lot of argument as to which is the real story...but also what the real message of the film is. Some even say it is completely incomprehensible ( 1 of 4 stars at Venice Film Festival) while others say that it is very life-affirming in terms of realization on what is important in life.

The musical background by Mansell is so poignant and stirring and contributes immensely to the appreciation of the film!


Jo

[jo]

[njr]

WOW! I saw it with my daughter who was 19 then!!

Nancy

[jo]

Some beautiful artwork --

The Fountain through time!

[njr]

Wow! That guy is so talented!

[jo]

[jo]

Hugh has acted out many scenes where he is shown crying with grief, sadness, regret, or realization of an elusive feeling...or when he could not directly express his feelings.

*The Fountain - especially when he starts tattooing his ring on his finger
*Prisoners - when he sees the bloodied sock of his missing daughter
*Australia - when he thought he had lost Lady Ashley and he was in the bar with his friend
*Real Steel - when he could not express his feelings to Max ( "Don't worry - your secret is safe with me").
*Les Miserables - the Soliloquy and the Death Scene
*Logan - did he shed a tear ( of peace) at the end?
*Greatest Showman - when he realizes what he almost threw away - FROM NOW ON

In the Wolverine movies, most of his feelings of grief were expressed with his scream of rage ( Silver Fox and Jean)!


*On stage - with A STEADY RAIN - as he reminisced about their youth, slumped on the front stage and with a solitary tear coursing down his cheek.


Jo

[jo]

People continue to be mesmerized by THE FOUNTAIN --

www.ilovekent.net/2019/03/19/new-release-tuesday-the-fountain/

Home Arts/Entertainment New-Release Tuesday: The Fountain
Arts/Entertainment
New-Release Tuesday: The Fountain
By Greg Wright -
March 19, 2019


Past the Popcorn provides South King Media with exclusive reviews of Theatrical and Home Video entertainment. We aim to dig just a little deeper than the surface of what we watch.

It’s difficult to know what to say about Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. When complete objectivity fails you, I guess, just gush.

In the interest of full disclosure, I ought to note that I first screened The Fountain after having spent the fourth consecutive day at my wife’s bedside in the hospital back in 2006. So the entire thematic thrust of The Fountain—coming to terms with the death of things you love—was, shall we say, arrestingly relevant.

What’s more, one third of The Fountain’s plot centers around Izzi Creo and her losing battle with a brain tumor. Her husband Tommy is a research scientist working on primate studies which, if proven viable, might just save Izzi’s life. Along the way, he stumbles on an exotic Central American tree bark that has amazing rejuvenating properties—though it does not appear to arrest the growth of tumors. Also along the way, Izzi journals an open-ended story of a conquistador’s quest for the Tree of Life.

And here’s where the story gets all metaphysical. When one of Tommy’s study subjects begins to reverse the aging process, it occurs to him that he’s stumbled onto the legendary fountain of youth. The film’s opening sequence, straight from the conclusion of Izzi’s novella, also plays to that legend, as Queen Isabella’s conquistador captain leads the last of his men in an assault on a Mayan stronghold. The imagery, as well as the film’s title, invokes the legend of Ponce de Leon and his search for the fountain of youth.



Oddly, Aronofsky’s film isn’t about the fountain of youth. It’s about the Tree of Life. Melding tales from Mayan culture, biblical accounts, and related religious traditions, the director envisions an apocalyptic future which unites and fulfills them all.

In Izzi’s 16th Century tale, Isabella’s Spain is threatened by Inquisitorial zeal. When a priest returns from the New World with a clue to the location of the Mayan Tree of Life, the queen dispatches her loyal Captain to distill and capture its life-giving power.

In Aronofsky’s contemporary tale, Tommy’s study has run across the bark of this very tree—a tree of Izzi’s imagination. And interwoven with these two tales is the fanciful, impressionistic, and futuristic story of another man’s quest to bring the expiring Tree of Life across the universe to the site of a dying star—where, if the Mayan legends are true, it will be reborn in the cataclysm of the star’s death. Along the way, this future incarnation of Tom is sustained by morsels taken from the tree’s flesh. (Sound religiously familiar to anyone?) Aronofsky’s three stories overlap, punctuated by the progressive revelation of Izzi’s fiction and the tension of how Tommy will complete Izzi’s tale while on his 26th Century galactic quest.

Yes, that’s right. If that sounds baffling, pompous, and preposterous, you’ll probably find Aronofsky’s film equally so. If you find that description intriguing, however, you might just find The Fountain stunning and spellbinding. I did.

Ultimately, The Fountain analyzes our perceptions of death, and our perceptions of life. I don’t think it gives anything away to note that, when he finally fulfills his quest, Izzi’s conquistador discovers that eternal life looks nothing like what he expected. The same is true with the space traveler’s quest: does it fail, or does it succeed? That all depends on one’s perspective—a perspective that Tommy sorely needs in order to deal with Izzi’s terminal condition.



Two things to note, beyond my simple observation that The Fountain is a brilliantly conceived and executed artistic vision. First, Hugh Jackman is simply a revelation here. Playing all three of the central male roles in three different centuries, Jackman fleshes out each with humanity, passion, and subtlety. Each is distinct, yet they are one; and if that’s Aronofsky’s nod to the Trinity, I wouldn’t be surprised. Jackman brings a passion to each of these men that’s hard to beat. I believed the conquistador’s loyalty; Tommy’s bedside grief is tangible; and the space traveler’s agonized plea to be free of Izzi’s final request wrenches my soul. Tommy’s last name, Creo, by the way, is Spanish for “I believe.” Doubt no further, Thomas.

Finally, longtime Aronofsky collaborator Clint Mansell has composed a score that’s worthy of special mention. In an age when film soundtracks have become so professional that they almost disappear into the woodwork—which, for the most part, is a good thing—it’s rewarding to run across a score that both functions as a character and complements the overall vision. In this case, Mansell’s nod to Philip Glass strikes, so to speak, just the right note.

The Fountain will not please many audiences, I dare say. But those it pleases, it will please mightily. It’s a brilliant (if possibly obtuse) look at the power of life—and the power of death.


You can watch The Fountain for free with a trial of Starz on Amazon. You can also stream at YouTube for a small fee.

[jo]

There wasn't much publicity during the release of THE FOUNTAIN in late 2006. Hugh could not make it to the controversial premiere at the Venice Film Fest ( he was in Australia for TBFO-arena, if I remember it right). It was not promoted very much by Warner Bros... although now I see quite a few tweets or film blogs citing the movie for its beauty.

I found this interview with a young-looking Hugh ( this was in 2006 or thereabouts) and after he regrew his hair from the movie.





This was his very first performance that should have merited at least an Oscar nomination...but was sadly missed because the movie was not widely released and not supported by WB during the awards season.

[jo]

(Note: PRamsey directed Rise of The Guardians)

[jo]

The beautiful and dramatic complexity of THE FOUNTAIN keeps surfacing as more people discover this gem.

But initially, the movie was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival and did not bow successfully at the Venice Film Festival. I can no longer find the source article but there was a report that Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron ( who was just hailed for ROMA recently, but was exhibiting CHILDREN OF MEN in Venice then) almost got into a fist fight - at the very least a shouting match with some film audiences who booed THE FOUNTAIN after its screening in the Venice Biennale.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528113/Venice-boos-Rachel-Weisz-as-she-makes-festival-debut.html

[jo]

Richard Corliss of TIME wrote a very favorable review of THE FOUNTAIN --

content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1562575,00.html

WARNER BROS.
Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz star in Warner Bros. Pictures' sci-fi fantasy The Fountain.

Email Print Share Reprints
Follow @time


Movies critics can't agree on much, but there's one assumption most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it. It's that a film that says life is crap is automatically deeper, better, richer, truer than one that says life can be beautiful.

That's a 180 from the prevailing notion in classic Hollywood, where optimism was the cardinal belief, at least on-screen. (It was in the front office that the knives came out.) Most movies, whatever their genre, were romances; they aimed for tears and ended with a kiss. But to serious critics then, and to the mass audience now, sentiment is suspect. Feeling is mushy, girly — for fools. To be soft-hearted is to be soft-headed. So critics will see a horror film with extreme violence, or (less frequently) an erotic film with extreme sex, and accept these as genre conventions, whether or not they're grossed out or aroused. But a movie that tries to make them feel is somehow pandering to their basest or noblest emotions and, as they see it, deserves a spanking from any smart reviewer. These days, nothing is as easy to deride as dead-serious romance.


Darren Aronofsky must have known the risk he was taking as he prepared the ambitious movie romance called The Fountain. His previous films, the no-budget Pi (1998) and the low-budget Requiem for a Dream (2000), both quirky art-house hits, had been on the somber side, to put it mildly. To put it accurately, they were visual monologues that took place inside the deranged minds of their protagonists — respectively, a math whiz obsessed by the number 216 and a heroin addict with a possessive (and understandably perplexed) mom. Instantly, anybody could see that Aronofsky was one of the few American filmmakers who saw the cinema past as a jumping-off point, not a toy store to plunder. His films were full of promise; and more, they delivered on their promises.

Aronofsky then went the route of so many phenoms: being courted and misused by the big studios. Having spent $60,000 to make Pi, and $4.5 million on Requiem, he suddenly had hundred of millions dangled in front of him to direct a Batman prequel, or an adaptation of Theodore Roszak's meta-cinematic novel Flicker. Projects collapsed; time marched on.

Throughout, Aronofsky pursued his own epic, The Fountain, about a man who will do anything to save his critically ailing wife. The film was to cost near $100 million and to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The original financiers dropped The Fountain when those two bowed out. (They later reunited to make Babel, in which they played virtually the same roles.) Aronofsky slimmed down the budget to $35 million, cast Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in the main roles, and made the damn movie. The whole trip, with all its frustrating detours, took six years. Then the Cannes Film Festival rejected The Fountain for its Competition selection. (You'd have to have seen the films the Festival chose to understand what an insult that was to Aronofsky.) The picture finally received its world premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival.

The history of movie romance is the story of beautiful people with terrible problems. That's The Fountain in a nutshell. Jackman is medical scientist Tom Creo, who's conducting experiments to "stop aging. Stop dying." He has been injecting Mayan medicine into the tumorous brain of a monkey named Donovan (a tribute to the 1953 surgical science-fiction movie Donovan's Brain) to find a cure for the cancer that threatens the life of his novelist wife Izzy, played by Weisz. That's one story. Another is the quest of a 16th-century conquistador, Tomas, to locate the Mayan Tree of Life for his Queen Isabella; this is also the plot of Izzy's latest novel. Finally, Tom is a space traveler in the 26th century, finding the Tree, and his destiny, in a giant translucent bubble.


At Venice, the bubble popped, and neither star could save The Fountain from a death sentence of boos at both the critics' and the public screenings. The film was dismissed as an expensive waste of time (although another high-IQ sci-fi epic shown at Venice, Alfonso Cuaron's dystopic City of Men, was reported to have cost between $80 million and $150 million). Weisz, who earlier this year received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Constant Gardener and became a mother, seemed equally maternal in defense of her new movie. "I think it's wonderful that this film is so different," she told the press. "I would love to work with Darren again." (She'd better say that. Weisz and Aronofsky live together, and he is the father of her child.) The film had an equally risible reaction at early screenings in the U.S. It opens in theaters today. Or as they used to say about movie bombs: it wasn't released — it escaped.

As I suggested, these critical catcalls reflect less the quality of the film and more the prevailing fashions of the art-house intelligentsia: in favor of bleak austerity, dismissive of sweeping sentiment. But on its own terms, this is a daring and impressive achievement.

Unlike every modern epic from Star Wars to Harry Potter, this one isn�t spurred by revenge (you killed my father, so I must wipe out your civilization). Here, love is the driving force (I will do anything to keep you alive), making The Fountain the rare quest film with a hero as selfless as he is besotted. Izzy calls Tom �my conquistador!� and she�s not kidding.


Neither is Aronofsky�s movie. Ever. It�s a truism of the adventure film that audiences can take it seriously if it doesn�t take itself too seriously. Play the material lightheartedly and viewers can enter into its world; play it straight and solemn, and they�ll get the giggles. The Fountain, which with its opening chords announces its life-or-death theme (and life beyond death), has no time or inclination for comedy. Every line of dialogue, each special effect, all those portentous glances underline the desperate urgency of Tom�s enterprise: to find a way to stop Izzy from dying.

Not to minimize the importance of overthrowing the Galactic Empire or dumping The Ring in Mount Doom, but shouldn�t there be a place in the canon of epic films for a story about a man trying to keep his dying beloved alive? Kids, who think they�ll live forever, might not hook up to this trope, but adults should. They�ve certainly seen it before: Armand trying to breathe life into the dying Marguerite Gautier, or Romeo trying to shake the poison out of Juliet, or Isolde going operatic over Tristan. The Fountain is essentially a classic deathbed scene, at feature length and sustained intensity.

Aronofsky brings every bit as much cinematic audacity to this film as he did to his first two, building elaborate visual motifs: Tree rings as a Mayan tattoo and as cloud formations; foliage that surrounds Tomas in the 16th century and grows through him in the 26th. Just as you didn�t have to be a junkie to appreciate Requiem or a member of the Kabbalah to go for Pi, you don�t have to be moved to tears by The Fountain to admire its complexity.


But I was. Those Old Hollywood romantic tropes still call to me. I was stirred by Jackman�s delicate power as a man both grieving and driven, spanning millennia, from the Iberian past to the astral future, to prove that love is stronger than death. I was impressed by Weisz� commitment to the role of Izzy, though it requires her mainly to shiver and sweat. And I was touched that Aronofsky, who could have kept making spiky little art films (and that would have been fine), took a chance on himself and the movie audience with a love story that is likely to alienate his old fans and confuse the mall rats.


I regret only that he cut the film to the bone; 96 mins. is a fine length for Scary Movie 4 but insufficient for all the ideas, images and feelings Aronofsky wanted to cram into The Fountain. If you ask any director what the favorite cut of his latest movie is, he�ll say the four-hour assembly — and that trimming the film to manageable length is like hacking off so many limbs. (Presumably that�s why Peter Jackson has added 51 mins. of footage for the DVD of King Kong, which in theaters clocked in at an elephantine 3hr.7min.) In most cases, what was removed would not have been missed. But here, I�ll wager, there�s a better fat film screaming to get out of this good thin one.

I like and respect the short version of The Fountain. But I can�t wait to see the director�s-cut DVD.

Regrettably, Warner Bros would not even allow Darren Aronofsky to make a DIRECTOR'S CUT of the movie. What Darren did was to write his own commentary on the film and let someone upload it to share with fans.

But here you are -- if you haven't downloaded it yet!

www.weisbrodimaging.com/2010/11/18/directors-commentary-of-aronofskys-the-fountain-remastered-for-download/

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/Bw2-PgwFDkm

[njr]

^ Wow! He is ambidextrous!

[jo]

The movie always elicits long and mostly profound discussions.

www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/1ihplb/discussion_on_darren_aronofskys_the_fountain/

[jo]

While trawling through these posts, I came across the link to the documentary by Niko Tavernise on the making of the movie. Some excellent scenes showing Hugh achieving the acting requirements ( including climbing the tree). Do watch it on a full screen ( see icon at the right hand side bottom to convert it to full screen mode).


www.nikotavernise.com/phone/film.html

[jo]

Four of his six 2006 film releases were --

*The Fountain - he loses Izzy and grieves for her for a very long time.
*The Prestige - the death of his wife, presumably by accident, sent him on a path of part obsession and part revenge.
*XMen: The Last Stand - Jean was not his wife, but his longtime love -- and he had to kill her because she asked him to do it ( to stop her from her destructive mode).
*Scoop - he was going to kill his lover because she guessed that he was the serial killer, but she foiled him.

Other two releases --

*Happy Feet -- happy with wife "Norma Jean"
*Flushed Away -- happy with "Rita"


Jo

[jo]

Beyond ERSKINEVILLE KINGS, this was the first indication of how good Hugh Jackman could be tackling serious drama...and by an auteur whose works sometimes confound movie audiences!