The Fountain (2006) - Darren Aronofsky

[Shivers]

Ainda sem estreia nacional prevista, mas já estreado em Veneza onde não foi lá muito bem recebido (ver mais abaixo):

"The Fountain" is an odyssey about one man's thousand-year struggle to save the woman he loves. His epic journey begins in 16th century Spain, where conquistador Tomas Creo (Hugh Jackman) commences his search for the Tree of Life, the legendary entity believed to grant eternal life to those who drink of its sap. As modern-day scientist Tommy Creo, he desperately struggles to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his beloved wife Isabel (Rachel Weisz). Traveling through deep space as a 26th century astronaut, Tom begins to grasp the mysteries of life that have consumed him for more than a century.

http://www.thefountainmovie.com/
Trailers: http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/thefountain

'Fountain' Booed at Venice

British movie star Rachel Weisz was stunned when her new movie The Fountain was booed at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival yesterday. The film, directed by her fiance Darren Aronofsky, left the audience confused and disappointed - even though Weisz insists it is important to have something "different" on screen. The $35 million flop was snubbed repeatedly by movie studios until Warner Brothers decided to back it. The story spans 1,000 years and stars Hugh Jackman as a 16th century Spanish explorer, 21st century scientist and 26th century astronaut searching for the Fountain of Youth. Weisz, whose presence at the festival marked her first official public appearance since the birth of son Henry Chance in May, says, "I think it's wonderful that this film is so different. I would love to work with Darren again."

[Elliot]

Sem duvida o filme que mais curiosidade me desperta para este ano!

[Argaroth01]

Acho que este é bem capaz de ser o novo "2001".

[wavey]

acabei de ler no IMDB que este filme foi vaiado pelo público. Mais outro filme que pretende arriscar numa nova história e não convence o público. Realmente, a pipoca está em alta!

[Argaroth01]

Será que as pessoas se tornaram tão preguiçosas mentalmente ao ponto de vaiarem um filme porque não fazem um esforço para o tentar perceber ? Daquilo que vi e li deste "The Fountain", nota-se claramente que se trata de uma experiência mais simbólica e metafísica do que propriamente material. Está para lá um pouco da simples percepção a que muito cinema obriga.

[Edward Brock]

Pessoalmente também antecipo que assim seja, já que sigo os desenvolvilmentos à volta deste filme com atenção há já algum tempo. No entanto não quer dizer que possa vir a ser um mau filme.
Quanto a comparações, parece-me que poderá mais vir a ser o próximo Solyaris do que um "2001", até pela temática abordada.




Hmm, pensando melhor parece mais é uma mistura entre os dois!

[Argaroth01]

Não sei em que site esta crítica saíu (retirei-a de um outro fórum), mas aqui fica a opinião do Eurico Barros:

Se quisermos dar uma definição aproximada, minimamente rigorosa, de The Fountain, a nova realização do americano Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem por Um Sonho), em competição, diremos que é um filme que parece ter sido escrito e realizado após um excesso de exposição às obras de Paulo Coelho e de Carlos Castañeda, sob a influência de substâncias alucinogénias de pureza mais do que duvidosa e tendo como pano de fundo sonoro contínuo um best of do rock psicadélico em caixa de dez CD. Aterrou na Mostra um ovni com matrícula New Age e o seu nome é The Fountain. Pensem em misticismo de Loja dos Trezentos. Pensem em erva adulterada. Pensem num triplo álbum ao vivo dos Santana. The Fountain é tudo isso em cinema, e muito mais.

Hugh Jackman interpreta um médico que está a pesquisar a cura contra o cancro, Rachel Weisz faz de mulher dele a morrer de cancro, e a escrever um livro passado na Espanha do século XVI, sobre um "conquistador" que procura a árvore da vida eterna entre os maias para salvar a sua rainha e o seu país de caírem nas garras do Grande Inquisidor, ganhando assim a imortalidade. Jackman também faz de "conquistador" e Weisz (casada com o realizador) de rainha na história do livro, que Darren Aronofsky filma como se fosse uma aventura de série B, com dois cenários, seis actores secundários e diálogos escritos durante uma noite brava de copos com os amigos.

Um filme, três séculos

Não contente com isto, Aronofsky arranjou um terceiro nível para a história, passado num efeito especial comprado nos saldos de refugo de Battlestar Galactica: uma bolha a flutuar no cosmos, dentro da qual se encontram Hugh Jackman careca e uma árvore. Isto porque estamos no século XXVI, e a personagem de Jackman, além de ter descoberto a imortalidade e passado a um estádio superior da consciência, leu livros de ioga e viu episódios a mais da série Kung Fu. Mas onde quer que estejamos em The Fountain, no mundo "real", dentro do livro ou na bolha sideral, a nossa reacção é uma de duas: ou estamos de boca aberta e de olhos esbugalhados, ou então não conseguimos parar de rir. Ambas porque o que estamos a ver é incomensuravelmente mau, descomunalmente ridículo, solidamente pateta, mas ao mesmo tempo profunda e sinceramente convencido da sua "profundidade" e do seu "significado". É como olhar para um tontinho que tenta discorrer sobre o sentido da vida e o lugar do homem no universo, só que com actores de Hollywood e efeitos digitais a enfeitar.

Uma coisa é certa: The Fountain está destinado a transformar-se em filme de culto. Porque haverá sempre, algures no planeta, um ganzado militante, um místico de carteirinha, um viciado de acid rock, que depois de assistir a The Fountain rasgará um sorriso de beatitude e exclamará: "Grande trip, meu!", passando a olhar para Darren Aronofsky não apenas como um cineasta, mas como um xamã.

Típico...

[Shivers]

Gostei particularmente do ultimo parágrafo.

[brainX]

O paragrafo inicial está brilhante

Mas que escritor, lol.

[Edward Brock]

LOLada!

O Eurico de Barros de vez em quando escreve umas coisas assim um bocado para o estranhas. Concordando ou não com ele, sempre foi um crítico... invulgar.

Argaroth01, presumo que essa crítica tenha sido retirada do DN.

[Argaroth01]

acabei de ler no IMDB que este filme foi vaiado pelo público. Mais outro filme que pretende arriscar numa nova história e não convence o público. Realmente, a pipoca está em alta!

Ora aqui está algo de animador e não sei porque razão não foi mencionado também. A imprensa vaiou o filme... O público deu-lhe uma ovação de pé durante 10 minutos.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/sto ... 38,00.html


'I knew we were going to get attacked ... '

When Brad Pitt pulled out, Darren Aronofsky's new film looked doomed. This week it was booed at Venice. But the director and his partner Rachel Weisz tell Geoffrey Macnab why they're still smiling

Thursday September 7, 2006
The Guardian

Darren Aronofsky and Rachel Weisz
Venice beached: Darren and Rachel go to work

Late afternoon in an upstairs ballroom in the Excelsior Hotel in Venice, and Darren Aronofsky is talking about his new film, The Fountain. Two days on from its world premiere, the film has already divided audiences: at the press screening, it was booed; at its public screening the following evening, the film was given a 10-minute-long standing ovation.

Aronofsky doesn't appear surprised by the mixed reception. A thin, bespectacled figure in a striped shirt, he is in a wry, philosophical mood, pointing out that his first two features, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, experienced similarly rocky births.

"Requiem got slaughtered by the press," Aronofsky cheerily recalls. "We had a 30-minute standing ovation in Cannes and the next day Variety said I should go into therapy instead of making movies. The New York Times trashed Pi. I am totally used to it."

Article continues
It's not hard to see why The Fountain has proved so contentious. A hugely ambitious story about love and death, it defies easy categorisation. At its simplest, it is a melodrama about a scientist (Hugh Jackman) who can't come to terms with the fact that his wife (played by Aronofsky's partner, Rachel Weisz) is dying of cancer. So far, so straightforward, but this is also an action movie and a sci-fi film. The narrative opens with Jackman as a hirsute, bloodthirsty 16th-century Spanish conquistador in Central America, trying to find the tree of life. With a manic glee in his eye reminiscent of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he fights the natives and attempts to kill a Mayan witch-doctor who tells him "death is the road to awe".

On top of this, the subplot about the conquistador searching for the tree of life to save his queen is taken from a novel that Isabel (Weisz's character) is writing on her deathbed. And then there are futuristic sequences in which we see Jackman as a bald, 26th-century astronaut, looking more like Buddha than Buzz Aldrin, still trying to bring his beloved back to life.

Visually, the film is extraordinarily rich and just a touch eccentric. There are sequences showing the galaxy that rekindle memories of old Carl Sagan documentaries about the mysteries of the cosmos. Aronofsky's futuristic world, filmed without recourse to CGI, also has a freshness that carries echoes of old Georges Melies silent cartoons from the dawn of cinema.

Aronofsky doesn't apologise for the film's complexity. "I think it is a really simple story." As in the sci-fi novels that he loves, the plot simply takes some time to come into focus. "A man and a woman are in love and the woman has this tragic problem - she is going to die. The man is your typical man and he tries to fix it [her condition]. She gives him this incredible gift - she writes him a book which is a metaphor for what is going on in their life."

The Fountain has been in gestation for a small eternity. It is seven years since Requiem for a Dream, the director's last feature. Brad Pitt, Aronofsky explains, is to blame. In 2002, The Fountain was weeks away from shooting in Australia, with Pitt starring. "We started working on The Fountain in 1999. We had spent $18m - and then the lead actor quit."

Even today, the film-maker can't quite explain why Pitt withdrew. "It is like breaking up. If you break up with someone after two and a half years preparation, it is hard to say if it was one thing. It wasn't like he left the toothpaste cap off the toothpaste."

But Pitt and Aronofsky remain friends. "The only reason the film was happening was because of Brad. I think creatively we grew apart. By the time it was ready to go, he wasn't ready to go - and so it fell apart."

The Russian-American film-maker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, made his debut feature Pi for $60,000 and still can't quite get his head around the fact that $18m was spent on the aborted first version of The Fountain. For seven months afterwards, he tried to muster enthusiasm for other projects, but couldn't get the film out of his system.

"One night I couldn't sleep. I was sitting in my office and across from me were all the books I had read for The Fountain. I realised that the film was still in my blood."

Aronofsky began to reconceive the project as a low-budget feature - something he could do without studio interference. In time- honoured fashion, the potential financiers balked at backing such an unconventional project. "Pretty much everyone in the world said no to this film several times." In the end, with Jackman and Weisz aboard, the film did attract studio backing. It was made for $30m. Aronofsky and his crew prepared just as diligently second time around. Weisz spent several weeks at cancer hospices, observing how the terminally ill are prepared for death.

The director has little patience with the American way of dying. "We spend a fortune keeping people alive who shouldn't be alive and we don't allow death in any way into the hospital setting," he says. "At 93, my grandma had a heart attack and we brought her to a hospital. They tried to bring her back three times. They broke her ribs. There is something wrong about that."

Aronofsky reveals that he began to fret about his own mortality when he reached his early 30s. At the time, his parents had become ill. "That freaked me out - to have people that you really love start to deal with big issues. I started to think about what it would mean to lose someone."

On one level, The Fountain is Aronofsky's love letter to Weisz. The first time we see her, she is shown in a huge, lambent close-up. She is constantly portrayed wearing white, as if she is some kind of Madonna-figure. "We had an intimacy that we were able to translate into work as well," he says. Weisz, who has arrived in Venice fresh from filming with Wong Kar-Wai, tells me that "who we are when we work is very different to who we are around the house". Of the curse of couples who work together, she says: "There are success stories and people who end up splitting up - but we did OK."

Aronofsky is a cerebral film-maker who throws himself into each new project as if it were his latest college course. As he puts it, Pi gave him the chance to steep himself in "math and the kabbalah". Requiem for a Dream taught him everything he ever wanted to know about drug addiction. Now, thanks to The Fountain, he is an expert on Mayan culture.

Yes, Aronofsky acknowledges, some audiences might find The Fountain outlandish. "I know we're going to get attacked by some cynics, but it is time for some sincerity and just to talk about the things that make us human."

One of the paradoxes about The Fountain is that Tom (Jackman) is so busy trying to save his wife's life that he doesn't actually have time to pay her any attention. When she asks him to come outside to see the first snow, he is too preoccupied with his work that he refuses, little realising that they won't enjoy many such other moments together. Weisz says: "For me, that is what the movie is about - the moments in life we can do something that is very simple and what can be more simple than taking a walk in the snow with someone we love? I think on our deathbeds, we're not going to regret that we didn't work more. We're just going to regret that we didn't spend more time with the people we love."

This isn't a mistake that Aronofsky seems in danger of repeating. Not so long ago, he was offered the chance to direct an episode of Lost. He was keen to take the job but he put the work on hold. At the time, Weisz was nearing the end of her pregnancy (the couple now have a three-month-old son, Henry Chance) and she made it very clear where his priorities should lie. "I didn't know what it would be like being away from a seven-month pregnant woman, but I learned quickly."

· The Fountain will be released in February 2007.

[Edward Brock]

Ou 8 ou 80.
Também não me admirava muito que o público tivesse aplaudido o filme só para responder aos críticos. Assim ficam quites.

Por mim fico ansiosamente à espera da estreia.

[Nuno Antunes]

Uma pobre decisão comercial: «The Fountain», para já, só estreia em Portugal a... 15 de Março de 2007. Como «O Último Capítulo»...

[jgeiras]

Uma pobre decisão comercial: «The Fountain», para já, só estreia em Portugal a... 15 de Março de 2007. Como «O Último Capítulo»...

what!!!!!?
eu é que não vou esperar assim tanto

[Shivers]

Em Toronto:

"The Fountain" has become known as a troubled production, delayed for several years and booed upon its debut in Venice. It turns out the early reaction were half true. The film, screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, is indeed messy, but it's a thought-provoking and beautiful one as well.

Director Darren Aronofsky is clearly aspiring for a "2001" or "Solaris"-esque meditation on the nature of human existence (or in this case, the end of existence). There are also similarities to his masterful "Pi," in that the characters are rational men (mathematicians or scientists) facing discoveries that cannot be explained or tamed by scientific means. "The Fountain" is a time-spanning sci-fi romance about death and rebirth, and a couple's attempts to control or accept mortality.

The story involves Tommy (Hugh Jackman), a scientist looking for a cure to cancer. His interest is more than professional, because his wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz) is dying from the same illness. She is writing a book called "The Fountain," about a Spanish conquistador (Tom again) tasked by the queen (Izzy) to find a tree, the sap of which will grant its imbiber eternal life. In another scenario, the tree stands in the center of a glass orb floating through space, in which we also find Tom and occasionally the spectral presence of Izzy.

"The Fountain" has allegedly undergone extensive cuts to bring it in at its current runtime of 95 minutes, and it shows. While Izzy and Tommy share an edgy chemistry, their characters lack the nuances that would make their relationship a bit more fleshed out. Tommy in particular is so angry most of the time that it can be sometimes tough to sympathize with his character. And while most of the special effects are remarkable, there are a couple moments that give off a somewhat new-agey whiff.

In the end, love conquers all, with Tim digging the movie.

However, "The Fountain" has stretches that are so haunting and magisterial that they counteract many of the film’s flaws. The space travel sequences have an eerie grandeur. The urgency of Izzy’s situation, and her acceptance of it (death is "the door to awe," she says) are chilling. And the score by Clint Mansell enhances the delicate mood. In all, what Aronofsky is aspiring to with "The Fountain" may exceed his grasp, but there’s still plenty here that’s unsettlingly exquisite.

Que venha isto depressa.