>From a friend:
Greetings, "The Fountain" has just been booked into the Co-Ed Theatre for this Friday, 12/8. We've been pitching the Co-Ed for a few weeks to bring it here. This is a spiritual film many folks here will love. It needs to be experienced on the big screen but is rapidly dissapearing from theaters for lack of box office sales. Most folks in FF are probably not aware or very aware of "The Fountain" and have no idea how much they may enjoy it. Please help us promote this unique film experience. Most of the national reviewers that pan this do not understand the depth of it's spiritual story- as we will. We have only one week to alert local film fans. Please consider forwarding this out to your friends who may be interested. We very much appreciate your part in promoting and supporting these unique intelligent/spiritual films in FF! As usual, the better the turn out the more likely more of these will come. Thank you! ~Bruce "I saw THE FOUNTAIN in Baton Rouge -- great movie! I loved the film and people will love it in Fairfield, very meditation and evolution oriented film -- but it has plenty of action and snazzy stuff too!" ~Jim Claitor- Film Producer Beyond anything you could expect from love By AMY BIANCOLLI Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Before contemplating the sublime metaphysical head trip called The Fountain, it's best to remove your shoes and socks. Shave your head. Assume the lotus position. Exhale slowly. Ommmm. Now close your eyes. No, bad idea; then you wouldn't be able to read. Just keep them open while you visualize this: Hugh Jackman, hairy and bearded, as a conquistador fighting an ancient Mayan priest who tells him that "death is the road to awe." Hugh Jackman, hairy but clean-shaven, operating on a monkey brain as a modern-day cancer researcher. Hugh Jackman, bald, floating inside an orb with a sentient tree as they drift through space toward a golden nebula. He is, like you, in the lotus position. There you have it: The Fountain, a film that defies description, summation, expectation or any other -tion. Exquisitely beautiful and almost unbearably sad, it is also - no way around this - truly strange. However strange you think it is, it's stranger. Plopping Hugh Jackman into a giant soap bubble isn't the half of it, but it's a fine place to meditate on the movie's oddness. The Fountain is cinema as poetry; romance as revelation; science fiction as prayer. It ponders death, and not as some pale Bergman chess master, but death as a form of ecstasy. As a writer and director, Darren Aronofsky has never been one to shy from either the morbid or the ecstatic, and he's yet to make a conventional film of any kind. His most recent feature, 2000's Requiem for a Dream, concerned four addicts chasing different forms of bliss, while his breakout Pi followed an obsessive math whiz on a quest to find the 216-digit name for God. In Aronofsky's movies, the path to enlightenment - that "road to awe" - isn't lined with wildflowers, unless they're sprouting violently from someone's midriff. Yes, that happens in The Fountain. A lot happens in The Fountain, though it's barely an hour and a half long. Here I'm compelled to say two things. First: This is one outlandish film, and many viewers will hate it. Hate. It. Second: It's nevertheless a transcendent work of art, a vision of undying love that finds hope in grief, epiphany in death and life in the loss of Eden. Trippy visuals (inspired by David Bowie: true fact) and an urgent score (by Clint Mansell, with help from the Kronos Quartet) combine with a quixotic screenplay (by Aronofsky and Ari Handel) and Jackman's guts-bared performance to create a work both foolish and divine. I, for one, was transfixed: eyes wide open, awed." Lisa <http://www.ew.com/ew/search/verity/result/1,9158,,00.html?origin_topic=&ori gin_type=&origin_brand=0&find=Lisa%20Schwarzbaum&x=7&y=10> Schwarzbaum wrote in E.W. "There's something as recklessly okay about The Fountain in its imperfection as there is something undeniably cockamamy; it's an entirely mood-dependent experience enhanced by identification with romantic/spiritual/kabbalistic/journal-or-blog-keeping tendencies of one's own, and ruined by impatience." The Fountain -- Ann Hornaday- Washington Post "The Fountain," by Darren Aronofsky, is a futuristic romantic thriller with sci-fi and historical elements that blend into a trippy meditation on love, loss and the inextricable link between the two. It's a valentine to Aronofsky's girlfriend and luminous leading lady, Rachel Weisz. It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck. Aronofsky, of course, is responsible for two of the most accomplished films of the past 10 years, "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream." They exemplified both wild imagination and superb control; "The Fountain" suffers from a surfeit of the former and too little of the latter. Still, if this latest outing doesn't burnish Aronofsky's reputation as a cinematic visionary, it doesn't necessarily damage it, either." 'Fountain' taps into spirituality as it explores the quest for immortality By WILLIAM ARNOLD Seattle Post "What is going on? Aronofsky says, "We've become so preoccupied with sustaining the physical that we often forget to nurture the spirit. So that's one of (the movie's) central themes: Does death make us human, and if we could live forever, would we lose our humanity?" So, in a way, the film is his version of "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many viewers will enjoy its similarly challenging structure and New Age razzle-dazzle, which is nicely crystallized by some especially imaginative special effects in the climax. In an era in which even the so-called independent cinema chases formulas and is ruled by a cowardly herd instinct, you really have to admire Aronofsky's guts for making such a risky, uncompromising, spiritual-minded film."
