Hmm, I guess I have to watch this movie now....

<Wanders off to finally watch The Fountain, so that he can listen to the commentary>

Okay, on the third attempt I managed to pay attention to the commentary and not get totally lost in the film.

Just the other day I was talking to this girl, a total film nerd. We hit all the high points you always hit when you're nerding out with somebody about movies, and when she brought up "The Fall" I countered with this movie. She said she's never seen it. I tried for like two solid minutes to say something about it to her, anything at all. But I just came up completely blank. I don't know how to put words to this movie at all.

I dunno if this is just purely me, or if it's one of those universal things. But every once in a while, I read a book or see a movie or have some kind of experience that's just completely non-verbal.

So it was really neat to listen to you guys talk about the movie on an intellectual level, because despite having seen it many times, I'd literally never thought about any of that stuff at all. It was just purely expressionistic to me, and I never considered it literally at all.

Even now, I'm struggling to put together a coherent sentence about the movie. I guess all I can really say without sounding like an idiot is that I think it's a profoundly moving film, and that each time I watch it I'm filled with the desire to lay silently in the dark and listen to someone else breathe.

Some random comments: About iron from the stars, i think there was plenty here already before life began. If you mean when the planet was forming then yeah, it came from the sun.

I'm nowhere near sick of space movies because the good ones are far and few between. Moon, Star Trek, WALL•E, Sunshine... that's only 1 or 2 a year.

2001: ASO is different because when heavy shit happens, the people will barely acknowledge it then move on as quick as possible, and get back to the small talk about the fake chicken sandwich. It added to the grandeur Kubrick was going for. The Fountain explores the hell out of feelings. But yeah, they're both trippy.

Does anybody know why they didn't let Aronofsky do a commentary? Even Mad Men gets 2 (lousy ones) per episode.

Another good one guys, lots of great info about the movie. Now, please explain Mulholland Drive to me. And how do magnets work?

I like these reactions. Good thread so far, chaps.

Jeffrey: All I have to say is, want a drink?

Beldar: *pounds head into things* Yeah, we need to get into David Lynch, so someone can correct me on my exasperation.

Maul: Right?

Ah, Evangelion... never has anime fandom seen such a "fuck you" from a creator The original show is well worth checking out (avoid all the reworked re-releases), if only for a) how much weird religion stuff they tried to toss into a giant robot show (and it's Japanese trying to interpret Judaism, which is fun), b) how dysfunctional everyone is, and c) how much the budget affected things. Not only do you have lots of off screen speakers and long moments of silence, but network outrage over the amount of violence got the last two episodes scrapped with no money to redo them, meaning what made it to screen is lots of text and voiceover. Oh, and the creator had a nervous breakdown iirc.

I am not an astrophysicist. But my understanding is that nucleogenesis takes place in stars, where hydrogen is fused into helium, and then helium into … err … lithium? Anyway, and so on up to iron. Stars that explode scatter those elements into space, where they can congeal into planets and asteroids and people and puppies.

I've never been clear, though, on where the elements heavier than iron come from. I remember reading pretty specifically that stellar fusion stops at iron, though I don't remember why or how.

EDIT: I looked it up. First of all, it's nucleosynthesis, not nucleogenesis. And second, it turns out stars can create heavier atoms than iron by a process called [this was the part where my eyes glazed over].

So yeah. Starstuff.

Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2010-07-12 17:31:40)

Haven't gotten through the whole commentary yet, but whoever brought up In the Blink of an Eye is my new friend.  I brought it up during Watchmen or FMJ, and its nice to see Murch get his due.

I saw Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion and found it boring not deep. But it must be that i didn't get it because a lot of people love it.

All matter comes from the big bang. Over the years gravity formed that stuff into solar systems and galaxies. Asteroids don't come from exploding stars.

Thanks for doing this episode, at least I now know why other people love this movie. I think I'll have to watch it again, but I'm still not convinced it pays itself off for me.

My problem with the movie comes down to a lack of symmetry between the three stories. Any one of them is fine, but they don't add up together. Even if we narrow the story down to boy+girl, we've got a story where Tomas is following Isabelle's bidding, a story where Tommy is trying to save Izzie so hard that he's ignoring her, and a story where he's isolated while eating a tree that symbolizes Izzie. The central story is neither mirrored nor contrasted by the other two parts of the triptych. They seem mostly held together by actors, colour scheme, and a love of geometry.

I'm not clear if the future section was a metaphor or literal. I'd be fine with either, and love it if both options added up and made it ambiguous, but neither adds up. Either literal Tommy didn't learn anything by the end of his story and spends 500 more years in isolation and mourning, or it's a metaphor about him slowly killing Izzie by living off of her in order to reach enlightenment. The literal option is depressing and breaks the emotional arc of Tommy, and the metaphor isn't paralleled in either other story.

The inconsistency in the tree symbolism really frustrated me. In the future Tom is living off a tree. We establish that it's an Izzie-tree and that it keeps him alive for hundreds of years. In the present, there's the plant he studies with special properties AND a tree seed Izzie gives him that he eventually plans on her grave. It would add up so much better in my head if they were the same organism, but they're just not, for no apparent reason. As well, in the past, the tree is the Tree of Life. When Thomas finds it he ends up sprouting Grim Fandango style, becoming part of the tree (and the ciiiiirrrcllllle, the circle of life). So in the past Thomas becomes the tree, when we already established that the tree is Izzie, which is just kinda awkward.

In the end I felt like it was this close to looking gorgeous AND holding together, but just doesn't for me. The lack of internal consistency in a movie that I want to love just makes me go bleh.

Exactly my problem with the film. I hate the school of thought that says you should be vague because it says something about the human condition. No. You say something about the human condition by actually *saying* something.

Otherwise you're just an FC Rabbath film.

That was basically my interpretation too, right up to the point where you guys said something in the commentary about the very last shot, of Tommy looking at Izzi's gravestone. One of you guys (I forget who, sorry) pointed out that he smiled, and that that could symbolize the culmination of his arc. Which totally works as an ending scene; I would have been really unhappy if the film had ended with distant-future-Tom dying then flashing back centuries or millennia to see a guy still obsessed, just starting a journey the ending of which we'd just seen. Now, after having pondered it for a few days (as this movie always makes me do) I think I prefer to imagine the future storyline as the road-not-travelled, the logical extension of Tommy's obsession, which is averted at the very end.

I can't defend that interpretation on logical or storytelling grounds, but I think it just makes me happier.