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Topic: The Fountain

Lilian Burch
Film Handler

Posts: 19
From: Bethesda, MD, USA
Registered: Nov 2006

posted 11-26-2006 12:21 AM

Visually very interesting but too much repetition. Story set in future is not well connected to the story in the past and present. Had high expectations but was disappointed.

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Mark J. Marshall
Film God

Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 11-26-2006 11:54 AM

A few years ago, my friends Joe and Bob, and I were standing outside of the Egyptian theater in Hollywood marveling at how "Stranger Wore A Gun" had to be one of the worst movies we had ever seen. Few movies could compare with that one in my mind. Little Odessa came to mind at the time. And now after seeing this movie, I have to say that The Fountain is right up there with them making a run for worst movie of all time.

While I don't always get the artsy-fartsy genre of movies, I can usually tolerate sitting through them, and I'm good at spotting their artistic virtues. This one, however, was a chore to sit through, and had no virtues to speak of as far as I could tell. Even my fiancé, who is much more cultured about these things than I am, said that this movie made no sense to her. It was somewhere in between a "time traveling" story (which is what the trailer made it look like), and a "story within a story" story, but the pieces didn't work well together at all. In fact, they didn't even make much sense to us.

The main story about the couple dealing with the wife's brain tumor, and the husband trying to find a cure and all of that... THAT was an ok story. If they cut out all of the other crap with the bald guy in the bubble (why was he bald anyway?), and the historical stuff, it would have made a half way decent one hour movie. But instead all that stuff got in the way and broke up the main story in a way that had us scratching our heads wondering what the heck was going on.

While on the way home after seeing this cinematic turd, I wondered what the folks working on this movie must have thought while making it. Did they sit around privately when the director wasn't looking and say to each other... "What the hell are we doing here?" Or did they have some deeper understanding of the director's vision that we just don't get? Did they realize at the time that they were involved with such a masterpiece?

Now let's talk about the theater while we're here. We saw this movie at the Carmike theater at the Dover Mall in Delaware, and what a horrible experience that was. First of all, I went to pay for the tickets with my Visa debit card, and was told that on top of the $8+ ticket price, there was a $0.99 service charge for using the card. Huh? Is this the only theater on Earth that does that? I've never encountered that before. So, Kate paid with cash, and we made our way to the concession stand where our popcorn was automagically pre-buttered by the concessioner who never asked if we wanted it that way. Then we headed for the movie. It was a pretty small auditorium, maybe 130 seats or so. Once the movie started, the houselights went down - sort of - but they still put quite a bit of light on the screen. The feature presentation snipe was kind of cheesy, but in pretty good shape. And after the feature presentation, we were treated to... one more preview. Everything was put together with opaque tape... even the trailers, for some reason. The small digital sign outside of the theater said "Presented In DTS", however we were clearly listening to analog sound. Oh, and let's not forget that the eccentrics were off, leaving a nice shadow on the bottom and the left side of the screen.

All together, like I said, it was a horrible movie going experience, which was topped off by a horrible movie. At least I got to spend the evening with my sweetie though. That was just about the only positive thing I can say about it.

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Paul Burt
Film Handler

Posts: 46
From: San Francisco, CA, United States
Registered: Apr 2006

posted 11-28-2006 11:26 AM

Not a successful film, bbut not nearly as bad as all that. The jungle sequences had a very impressive savage beauty, and the whole bit with the tree in space, although it didn't make a lot of sense, was enjoyable in a meditative sort of way. For me, the main problem was the inexplicable bad attitude of the main character, rather than the concept itself. Really good use of mandalas (or overuse, if you will), and fine cinematography. Can't understand why Arnofsky was so obsessed in getting this film made, though.

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