The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

This morning I listened to the latest IN audio dialog  The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness and felt very excited to hear there's a new movie by Darren Aronofsky,  the director of Pi and Requiem for a Dream - two great movies which I highly recommend (however, do not see Requiem when you feel depressed).  I'm about to head off to see The Fountain, I'll let you know what I think of it.  I also really enjoyed what Stuart had to say in response to Critics in “The Cure for Altitude Sickness” segment.  (BTW there is none of the usual talk of the three states of consciousness etc. that some people have mentioned finding repetitive in the audio dialogs.)  Here's the write-up for the dialog:

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

OK, I loved this movie, but I don't feel like saying anything about it.  I'm going to see it again for sure though, and buy it when it comes out on DVD.

I read an interview with Darren Aronofsky, and he mentioned that in one of the film festival screenings, two journalists got into a fistfight over it - how cool is that?

arthur

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Previously The Fountain was incarnated as a graphic novel, following a first failed attempt to film it:

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Arthur, I just saw the movie last night and loved it too –what a wild and rich tapestry of images and connections and meanings – and it does leave one wordless. 
Somewhat reminiscent of how I felt after first seeing 2001 on a big screen …

There weren't very many people in the theater – and most viewers were pretty young, late teens and early twenties. As the movie ended, I watched and listened as this uncomfortable murmur arose. It escalated into this nervous, and finally scoffing, laughter, as people began making fun of certain repeated lines in the movie (particularly “finish it”).

Quite strange to be sitting there in this afterglow as people scoffed and laughed!

So it looks like it's going to be one of those films that people either love or hate…

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

Hi Maryw

The theatre in which I saw it was almost deserted - mind you, I went to the 4 p.m. show.  I really want to see it again at the threatre at least once; if I wasn't going to the Meth play tonight I would very likely see it again today.

“Arthur, I just saw the movie last night and loved it too –what a wild and rich tapestry of images and connections and meanings – and it does leave one wordless. 
Somewhat reminiscent of how I felt after first seeing 2001 on a big screen …”

Wow, a woman who thinks 2001 was a great movie (unless you were speechless in horror at how bad it was) - I'm used to women mocking that movie.  ;)

It was interesting that after the Fountain ended, I didn't even want to engage my rational/narrative mind - it was beyond that.  That kind of rational interpretation will come, but I'd rather sit with it more, try to, y'know, grok it more fully.

To those who might have their experience of it lessened through overhype, I say this: it sucked, really it's just kind of mediocre at best; prepare to be disappointed.  But, do go see it.  :)

arthur

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Arthur: “Wow, a woman who thinks 2001 was a great movie” 

– It's particularly good when you're under the influence of ….. um, never mind.

But I was only on popcorn when I saw The Fountain.

:-)

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Maryw: ah, well that explains it.  Green rabbits moving sideways… :p

everybody: see also Julian's review: Integral Cinema?  The Centaur Drinks from the Fountain.

fountain out,
arthur

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

An interesting article in Wired magazine gives a lot of background info on this movie and its creators.  A couple of highlights:

Aronofsky's team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks' technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you're looking at infinity,” he says. “That's because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.”

The microzoom optical bench furnished Aronofsky's film with something neither a computer nor an old-fashioned matte painter could deliver – chaos, in all its ultra high-definition fractal glory. “The CGI guys have ultimate control over everything they do,” Parks says. “They can repeat shots over and over and get everything to end up exactly where they want it. But they're forever seeking the ability to randomize, so that they're not limited by their imaginations. I'm incapable of faithfully repeating anything, but I can go on producing chaos until the cows come home.”

…

The tagline of π was “faith in chaos,” and even when The Fountain was spinning out of control, Aronofsky says, “I just trusted that things hadn't clicked yet for reasons I would understand later. In the end, I got to make the movie I wanted to make.”

And in the I can't fucking wait, whoo-hoo! category, we have:

New projects are already piling up on the director's desk. Aronofsky and Watson are planning an adaptation of Flicker, Theodore Roszak's novel about a critic who sees subliminal portents of the apocalypse in B movies. Aronofsky will also produce an original animated musical by Dawson and Schrecker this fall and is rumored to be developing a script based on the life of Timothy Leary.

None of these projects suggest that the former guerrilla filmmaker who vowed to bring cyberpunk to America is going mainstream. In recent weeks, he and Handel have started taking long walks around New York City again, brainstorming their next collaboration. “It's another fantasy film. Unfortunately, it's an even bigger idea than The Fountain,” Aronofsky says. “So it's going to take some time to do. But hopefully not six years.”

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

The Fountain trailer

Pi trailer

BTW, someone posted the entire last ten minutes of the movie on YouTube, but I won't post a link here - don't want to tempt people who haven't seen the whole movie to watch that part. 

spiral out,
arthur

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

The Fountain trailer

Pi trailer

BTW, someone posted the entire last ten minutes of the movie on YouTube, but I won't post a link here - don't want to tempt people who haven't seen the whole movie to watch that part.  This is such a great movie, wow.

death is the road to awe…

arthur

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Recently I recommended The Fountain to Robert Augustus Masters, and he just posted this review on his blog:

MORE THAN ENTERTAINMENT: THE FOUNTAIN

I don’t think I’ve ever disagreed so strongly with so many movie critics over a film. Their distaste for and dismissal of Darren Aronofsky’s latest work, The Fountain, was not all that surprising, given that it’s a film that cannot be truly appreciated, let alone fully resonated with, unless one has already spent some quality time in spiritual bootcamp investigating – and not just intellectually – core issues like the nature of identity, love, being, and death, not to mention the means through which these can best be explored.

My guess is that if most of the critics who trashed The Fountain were to be presented, in all sincerity and minimal superficiality, with the question: “Who are you?” (a warmup for “What are you?”), their answer would probably be to supply their name and perhaps occupation. If pressed further, the result would likely be not more in-depth or mind-transcending responses, but rather only a turning away from or ridiculing of the question, as if it were just some sort of sophomoric navel-gazing exercise. Yet the very immaturity that they might attribute to such an enterprise simply exposes their immaturity and adult-erated take on topics that really matter.

Those who have not significantly explored their own depths – psychological, spiritual, emotional, and otherwise – are probably going to toss The Fountain into the same bin as What The Bleep Do We Know, What Dreams May Come, and other such movies (whether they liked them or not), confusing the regressively unitive and otherwise prerational elements of such films with the transrational (and transegoic) elements of The Fountain.

There is an ecstatic dimension – sometimes shatteringly, heartbreakingly beautiful – that shows up throughout The Fountain which is very different than conventional spiritual upliftment. My heart felt ripped open and raw watching it, as deep grief and an equally deep joy coursed through me, as if in fully embodied recognition of what we truly are. Instead of just providing some fascinating information (data-fodder, mystical and otherwise, for the mind) or a tasty bit of spiritualized entertainment, The Fountain provides us with a potentially transformative opportunity, through our unguarded participation in its multidimensional poetics, as well as its often epiphanous intimacy with the inherent paradoxes of Life.

Like good poetry, The Fountain doesn’t explain, but reveals. It raises profound questions, and offers something more real than answers. This may be an irritant to film critics who are busy doing time in their headquarters, but is a sublime balm, Life-affirming and succulently transcendent, to those who have begun to awaken to their true nature.

In The Fountain an edge is played that most other “spiritual” films don’t go near or even acknowledge, an edge that doesn’t console or provide spiritual robes for the conventional self, but that instead shakes it to the core before blasting it far beyond what can be imagined. This edge, lined with reality-unlocking implications, is touched, at least in its darker dimensions, by a few other films, such as Mulholland Drive, but The Fountain dares to bring deep relational love into it, without slipping into romanticism, spiritual and otherwise. The agony of love when death comes nearer than is wanted is honored as much as the bliss of love when everything lines up, even as a deeper love, a death-transcending love, is allowed to arise slowly but surely from the debris of all this, in eloquently nuanced detail and flow.

Film critics who viewed most of the offerings of so-called spiritual cinema would probably be turned off by the terminally sweet tone, simplistic patter, shadow bypassing, and one-dimensional acting that pervades many of these. But to toss such lightweight, spiritually sentimental films into the same bin as The Fountain simply indicates an inability to distinguish pop spirituality from a deeper spirituality.

And what is that deeper spirituality? First of all, it cannot be known through merely rational means, however much the rational mind presumes to know it. Film critics who are identified with or holed up in their thinking minds, unquestioningly believing themselves to be who they think they are and confusing cleverness with intelligence, can only see prerational spirituality (that is, intellectually childish, superstitious, overly ritualistic spirituality), and so lump all spirituality into the same prerational basket, much as Freud famously did with religion, labeling it with facile ease as “New Age” or as some kind of metaphysical mush or babble.

The love in The Fountain is an ever-intensifying mix of everyday love, big love, and supreme love, unburdened by the solemnly clichéd pronouncements (i.e., “we’re all one” or “we’re all connected”) and sugary excesses that often pollute spiritual cinema. The agony and the ecstasy are both very much present – and heart-rippingly easy to feel –along with a sense of tacit revelation that I found incredibly moving.

And threading through all of it is the presence of death, on many levels. Death that is fought, death that is the opposite of Life, death that is the enemy, death that is a disease, death that is but a doorway, death that serves and deepens Life, death that makes possible a deeper Life, death that enriches love and Love. There is so, so much that the protagonist (masterfully played by Hugh Jackman) is dying to see, and through him, through his struggle, his trio of apparent lifetimes, we become more intimate with what we are dying to see. And dying to be.

The Fountain invites us to die into a deeper Life – not through some kind of teaching or transmission of information, but through wholeheartedly participating in the journey of the protagonist and his wife (beautifully played by Rachel Weisz). We are then less spectators watching a movie, and more initiates in a temple of revelation. And why not? Why can’t cinema serve our awakening?

To really get into this, we have to get naked, showing up in (and as) undressed Being, allowing ourselves a second innocence, an awakened innocence that strips us of our knowledge and automated certainties and deposits us in the Open Secret of the hyperbole-transcending Mystery of our existence. If our mouth drops open, so be it; if our buttoned-up case of mistaken identity starts to give up the ghost, so be it; if we’re brought to our knees, and prayer becomes not something we do but are, so be it.

Yes, The Fountain is just a movie, but it is also that rarest of creatures, a movie that has the power to transport us not just into the mystical but through the mystical, taking us into what we never really left, but only dreamt we did. Use it as a catalyst for touching what matters most of all; I can assure you that it is clean, free of harmful additives, non-addictive, and worth revisiting.

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

Good Fnord, that Robert Masters keeps blowing me off the couch. And this luminous gem of an effortless masterpiece was just a little movie review. Oh man, I’m floored, I have to stop reading stuff around here and wander in the desert for a while.
(shakes head, exits left)

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

urk!  Talk about the law of unintended consequences, aka the Tao of D'oh!  Don't wander too long in the desert, Mascha, we need you here.  :)  



arthur

P.S. Glad you like Robert, he's a clever monkey isn't he?

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

Arthur and I bought this movie today, took it home and watched it. I cried through several parts of this movie, including probably the entire last half hour. I've been freshly broken open again.

I took Arthur to the airport, and we're only going to be separated for a week, so he was surprised to see me crying again and asked if I was feeling upset that we were parting. I said, no, that it was the soldier and his wife and son walking toward the airport terminal. It's pretty common to see that these days, but today I was overcome with gratitude and grief.

Jesus, what a movie.

Liz

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I rented The Fountain last night.  I haven't watched it yet, but will do so later this week.  RAM has given such a powerful, enticing review of the film, I can't wait!

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

It's difficult for me to watch a movie when people have touted it a lot. My suggestion would be to go in without any preconception that it's great. What moves you might not be the same. I've been disappointed so many times with movies that others thought were great that didn't live up to it.

Liz

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Thanks, Liz.  I'll try to go into it with an open mind.  I've read some of the negative sorts of reviews that RAM mentions, so I've heard good and bad about the movie.  We'll see.  My wife is somewhat skeptical, but willing to watch.  She usually expresses reservations about movies that are too “fantus” – Nepalese for fantasy-like…

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

I found it to be a very powerful and profound movie, but your mileage may vary - it seems to be a “love it or hate it” scenario.  Yeah, try to go into it with an open mind (this advice applies to all other experiences as well, of course.)   :)

spiral out,
arthur

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Quite simply this is the movie that led me to Integral studies!

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

hey pod peeps

if you haven't seen it - check out my integral review of the fountain on ken wliber's blog at this location.

looking forward to the blogapolooza!

~j

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

Dear Ones,

I really wanted to like this movie, The Fountain.  I loved Pi, though I haven't seen Requiem, my son, a film nut like me says “Dad, you just have to.”  Maybe I will one day when I am feeling really strong.  I have been reading reviews and industry blabber about Fountain for months while waiting for it to arrive on dvd.  I knew of the film's history, that Pitt had bailed on an earlier version, that it had got the graphic novel treatment, that the budget had been slashed and that Jackman/Weiss were supposed to be “great.”  I read RAM's review (one of my hero's) and got downright excited to see the film.

15 minutes in, I almost turned it off.  Aronofsky had pushed Jackman/Weiss into the over-acting stratosphere imo along with employing what I consider the most maddening film technique of all - namely turning the lights down so dark you can hardly see any goddamn thing except conquistadore's noses, flashing lights and quivering tree and neck hairs. 

No doubt about it, the subject matter was transcendent, evocative, and rudely shattered most of the conventional story-telling tradition - good for Aronofsky.  However, why the deliberate obscurantism?  Why so friggin' dark?  A dimmed out cancer lab?  WTF?  The freakishly hyped stakes of the cancer doc torn between just being there for his dying wife and trying to save her by staying in the lab?  What did that serve?  She was cool with the dying and it freaked him out EVERY TIME.  He refused her everytime she said she needed him and then turned back EVERY TIME - boring!

I love that A. brought the Tree of Life to film, and that he showed that it was not its elixir that provided eternality, but reverence for the tree itself.  I loved that A. told the story about the Spanish search for the source of eternal youth and that it turned out to be the Tree of Life, and that this was known or suspected before the conquest began and that A. posed the Institutional corruption of Catholicism as the evil force seeking to repress such knowledge.  I stongly suspect that this shit actually happened, that the Mayans actually had developed a technology that provided de facto eternality (actually it was the Toltecs who developed it)  I loved that A. took the conventional road to set the story and the back story in the love-as-struggle relationship context.  It seems as if A. was suggesting that the three lives of Tommy Creo were an evolutionary succession beginning with self-interest and lusty loyalty,
“we” interest, and lusty loyalty, then “thy” interest with lusty loyalty as a distraction - that the feminine was there to tempt, to plead, to provoke, to promise, to encourage - but NOT to participate.  What's up with that?

I really hate to report this as the film seems to have really struck some powerfully positive chords in people I genuinely admire, but, from a story-telling, film-making perspective, the Fountain pissed me off.  My biggest bitch is to the grandiose, pretentious, over-the-top emotionalism and manipulative “lotsa-meat-but-no-muscle” cinematography.  In the end, I felt way more jerked around than illuminated.  Disappointing.

yer pal,
Michael

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Michael: I really hate to report this as the film seems to have really struck some powerfully positive chords in people I genuinely admire, but, from a story-telling, film-making perspective, the Fountain pissed me off.  My biggest bitch is to the grandiose, pretentious, over-the-top emotionalism and manipulative “lotsa-meat-but-no-muscle” cinematography.  In the end, I felt way more jerked around than illuminated.  Disappointing.

~~~~~

Hi Michael

I love that you would come in after all the praise and say “This movie SUCKED!”  hehehe.  I dig it when people call it as they see it, even if their perspective may  diverge from that of the herd or even - harder to forgive - my own.  :)

It sounds to me like the movie was way overhyped for you, for one thing.  When that happens for me I'm gonna hate the movie unless it delivers full nondual enlightenment on a silver platter - and that hardly ever happens.

It's interesting that a lot of the stuff you say you hated about it are things I loved about it…a matter of perspective perhaps?  For example, you complain about the darkness of the movie - but what struck me about the movie more each time I saw it is how it obsessivly folds in on itself visually, in an almost fractal manner.  One of the recurrent visual themes is points of light in darkness - whether candles in a dark room or the starfield.   I also find it more useful to think of the movie as one moment (THE moment) and the male and female leads as the Masculine and Feminine aspects of consciousness.  The overacting nicely matches the contours of my own heart when I am staring Death in the face.

Or that's one of the ways to frame it…there are various ways to describe it, but it points beyond words - and beyond conventional interpretations of storytelling, perhaps.

spiral out,
arthur

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Arthur,

OK.  Out of respect for you and RAM, I will see the bugger again.

A little back story:  two days ago, and just before wathching the Fountain, I listened to Terri Gross interview del Toro about Pan's Labyrinth and other features of Del Toro's life.  I had also (as is my sometimes habit) read a lot about Pan's Labyrinth before I saw it though I listened to the del Toro interview after viewing the movie.  Ironically, I liked the movie better before listening to the interview.  Del Toro surprised me with his admission that, at an early age, in reaction to a grandmother figure who he likened to Sissy Spacek's mother in Carrie, he had dumped the Catholic hierarchy of saints and above for the dark side of the monsters.  del Toro claimed that they were more real, more reliable, more useful and that Pan's Labyrinth was his homage to the fruitful welcoming available below.    Hmmmm … I still “like” del Toro and can get the “me and my shadow” lullaby, but either Terri never asked him or del Toro never addressed it, but I did not hear much in the way of an ascendency of consciousness, rather a descent to a lower order of coping, of pal-ing it up with the heavies for protection.

Strangely, exactly the opposite occured with Tommy Creo - Hero man on a multi-incarnational mission - the solitary quest.  This hits close to home for me, the solitary part, I mean, and I am deeply considering its implications.  It did not help to see Tommy screeching his way through life(s).  The total, barren, almost-fucking-deadness of the 3rd life “sphere” and his down-to-a-handful-of-lentils-a-day lifestyle plus the frigging terror at the thought of death was disconcerting for me.

I have been there.  My experience is that the road of life leads to the “awe” moment and death's door is its realization.  Death, and the near-death experience are much more sober than represented in this movie.  I believe that the quest for immortality and eternal youth is, as A. is suggesting, merely hiding from the fact of our mortality.  If that is his point, then I get it though I do think that the very powerful image of the Tree of Life gets lost in the end. 

Who knows, maybe I just have a touch of altitude sickness?  I will see it again and keep that fractal image you saw in mind.

yer pal,
Michael

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Michael: Del Toro surprised me with his admission that, at an early age, in reaction to a grandmother figure who he likened to Sissy Spacek's mother in Carrie, he had dumped the Catholic hierarchy of saints and above for the dark side of the monsters.  del Toro claimed that they were more real, more reliable, more useful and that Pan's Labyrinth was his homage to the fruitful welcoming available below.    Hmmmm … I still “like” del Toro and can get the “me and my shadow” lullaby, but either Terri never asked him or del Toro never addressed it, but I did not hear much in the way of an ascendency of consciousness, rather a descent to a lower order of coping, of pal-ing it up with the heavies for protection.

~~~~~~

Thanks for that…I thought there was “pre/trans” confusion in Pan's Labyrinth, in fact that it seemed actively hostile to ascendency or just didn't get or value that.

You might want to wait a while to see Fountain again, maybe wait until you can see it with zero expection and a fresh mind.

spirals,
arthur

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Groovy dialogue, guys.

I've been both sick and really busy, so I haven't been posting, but I've been enjoying everyone's writings. I'm looking forward to getting to Vancouver on Friday so I can have time to think enough to write.

The first time I watch a movie, there's very little thought that goes into analyzing it, unless it's truly atrocious. I'm getting the entire thing as a gestalt. Later I break it down. I could never have come up with all the stuff you said, Micahel, after one viewing. Perhaps you're watching the movie from your headquarters and not where it's actually aimed.

Liz

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Liz: The first time I watch a movie, there's very little thought that goes into analyzing it, unless it's truly atrocious. I'm getting the entire thing as a gestalt. Later I break it down. I could never have come up with all the stuff you said, Micahel, after one viewing. Perhaps you're watching the movie from your headquarters and not where it's actually aimed.

~~~~~~

Yes!  That's how I feel too, especially with a movie like The Fountain, a cinematic finger pointing at the transrational moon.  When I came out of the theatre after seeing it the first time, I told my rational mind to shut the fuck up for a while and let it sit.  :p  With the deepest, transrational movies - this applies in spades to David Lynch movies - that is by far the best policy I've found.  Realizations, feelings, interpretations will bubble up over time.  Chasing it around my headquarters is decidedly suboptimal.

fountain out,
arthur

p.s. aside to everyone: you gotta look at the bigger version of Liz's current cat/evil cat” avatar - it kicks ass like no no ass has been kicked before.

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

Michael,

Just a very simple remark…
I think watching the movie on a big screen is a very different experience from a DVD. Considering how important the visual and the lighting is to get the ambience and messages across in this particular movie, I think you're missing out on a lot. Try seeing it in a movie theater, or if that's too late a big widescreen TV - that might change your perspective a bit. If it doesn't, at least you've given it a fair chance. And that, it deserves.


peace
pelle

Re: The Fountain and The Cure for Altitude Sickness

Indeed: although I have a not-entirely-legal copy on DVD, I'd  like to see it in a theater first, precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. It only appeared in theaters some two weeks ago here in Holland, and only in a few theaters. We were supposed to go and see it in Amsterdam last Thursday, and combine that with a visit to an art gallery. But since the gallery was closed because of Ascension Day, we postponed the whole thing.

Really looking forward to finally experiencing it…

Peter