D and I trundled downtown to see The Fountain. It's from the same director who did Pi. It's visually stunning in places, a great choice for the big screen--especially if you're only paying student/matinee prices. It stars Wolverine Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as humans who. . . recur. . . and here we run into a bit of a puzzle. Is Jackman two characters? Or three? We know that Weisz is married to the director; what kind of man directs his wife in a love scene with an acknowledged "Sexiest Man Alive"? It makes you wonder about other things, eh? About the film I mean.
Were we talking about existentialism the other day? Here, we're concerned with eternal life. Or at least cheating death. There are several repetitions of birth tunnel images, and a very brief bit of chen taiji. So that was nice. The film asks the question: if you can find the Bible's Tree of Life, can you use it to support an astronaut on a near-ftl flight into a dying star? If you find that question a bit peculiar, you would not be the director of this film. I'm suddenly realizing that The Fountain is something like a remake of Altered States. Dude, I'm blowing my own mind.
But the concerns of the film remind me of the story of the death of my dad's best friend. He was a lead in an early-twentieth century, Eastern European opera that revolved around a woman who was close to putting together the final touches on her eternal life serum. Doesn't death define life? my dad's friend sang on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, and he promptly stopped singing, got a quizzical expression on his face, and fell from the ladder he was on. The conductor stopped the orchestra, called out the man's name a couple times, and then called for the curtain. They cancelled the run of the show. The most intriguing aspect of all of this--and it's all pretty intriguing, eh?--was that I heard this story first on NPR's Performance Today. Yes, a review of my dad's best friend's death on the radio. I'm still more interested in the levels of that story than I am in The Fountain. But none of the peole in my story looked as good as the cast of the film.
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