{"id":1974,"date":"2020-07-04T21:39:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-04T21:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=1974"},"modified":"2024-02-08T08:13:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T08:13:25","slug":"film-review-the-fountain-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=1974","title":{"rendered":"FiLM REViEW: The Fountain, 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the most part I prefer to post on stuff I love, and keep things positive. That said, I’ll not shy away from posting critical stuff, if I feel like it. Teresa just watched The Fountain <\/em>on Amazon Prime, meaning I was more or less forced to watch it. Anyhoo… so, here goes…<\/p>\n

The Fountain<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eugh… just dreadful.<\/p>\n

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz embody the vacuity and self-centredness of modern western humanity. And Aranofsky weaves a web of portentousness around them based on aesthetics, emotion and pseudo-mysticism, all of which has the intellectual integrity of a micron thin wafer of, well… nothingness.<\/p>\n

Like so much contemporary culture, this aspires and doubtless believes itself to be deep, but winds up being all about surfaces. The two central characters – let’s just call them Izzy and Tom, to keep the overblown pseudo-complexity at bay – are petulantly flighty, and I don’t believe in either of them, for even a nanosecond.<\/p>\n

There’s really only one character, Jackman’s. Everyone else is just an adjunct to his egotism. And all the settings are triumphs of form over anything and everything else. 96 minutes of overblown set-dressing!*<\/p>\n

The only levels on which this film might conceivably work are, one, aesthetically – on the surface level (and to me it’s all surface) – and two, poetically or metaphorically. It fails on the first as I don’t like the aesthetics, as impressively produced as they may be. As for the second? For me, ideas such as are obviously signposted here – life and death, love and loss, etc – need to be couched in terms I can relate to, or that engage me. And in these respects this film fails totally and utterly, personally speaking.<\/p>\n

I loathe the narcissistically self-involved ‘characters’, Tom in particular; I’m not a fan of pseudo-religious cod-mysticism. I don’t even like the much vaunted music, which attempts to give the onscreen action a gravitas it never attains. Weisz is really just a cipher, whilst Jackman’s Tom is a bizarre Richard Madeley lookalike himbo, whose solipsistic ‘love’ is nowt more than a pretext for throwing tantrums.<\/p>\n

Just as I was pleased to see the ‘characters’ in Ridley Scott’s similarly awful Prometheus<\/em> knocked off, it was a relief when Tommy, having indulged in yogic flight, walking on water (groan), and finally gorged on the white sap of the father tree – truly symbolism to gag on – got composted.<\/p>\n

Awful drivel, perfectly suited to our shallow self-regarding times.<\/p>\n

*If this film were to be nominated for any awards, it ought to be ‘interior design’. Mind you, I wouldn’t hire Aranofsky or any of his hirelings to decorate our<\/em> home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the most part I prefer to post on stuff I love, and keep things positive. That said, I’ll not shy away from posting critical stuff, if I feel like it. Teresa just watched The Fountain on Amazon Prime, meaning I was more or less forced to watch it. Anyhoo… so, here goes… The Fountain … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “FiLM REViEW: The Fountain, 2006”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-vQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1974"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11326,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions\/11326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}