It’s a jungle in there (7/14/07)
____________
The Fountain. [Darren Aronofsky, 2006.]
Death is the path to the light: a moral with which auteur-Conquistador Aronofsky clubs the viewer over the head as relentlessly as alter ego Hugh Jackman pursues the Fountain of Youth/Tree of Life/cure for brain cancer/path through the nebula into the dying star about to be reborn as a nova, down long corridors to the blinding white light at the end of the tunnel [which, the production designer admits, they did finally give up and slimed with goo, the better to make it look like a birth canal]; the meanwhile gorgeous Rachel Weisz continues to die pluckily — perhaps while writing the novel in which all this is going on, though that part isn’t clear [and of course doesn’t matter.] — Beautifully designed and executed, one must admit; but though Bo Diddly could write a song on a single chord, you can’t write much of a melody on a single note.
Quibbles: the transparent spherical spaceship though beautiful isn’t as completely original as the authors seem to think, see Edward E. Smith,
The Skylark of Space, 1927 [this was, in fact, the very first interstellar spaceship to appear in fiction]; again, the general path-to-the-source through a radiant nebula though marvelous in its realization is, as the authors doubtless know, essentially an elaboration of Doré’s illustration of the conclusion to Dante’s
Paradisio.
One must, however, admire the tenacity with which Aronofsky brought this project back from the dead after it had apparently flatlined in Australia in 2000 [and is the movie then a metaphor for itself? — oh, never mind.] If only Terry Gilliam could have such luck; we might see
Don Quixote yet.
____________The girl can’t help it (5/11/07)
