Oscar reviews

[mteson]

I happened to miss most of the major Oscar movies before the actual Oscars took place. The only movies I had seen were the exceptional Frost/Nixon and the also-exceptional Milk, both of which deserve their Oscar nominations. But following the Oscars I caught up and saw three great movies, although my opinions of them weren't the same as the Oscar

Comments

[mteson]

I really liked The Fountain for several reasons. The first is that I have a very soft spot in my heart for films that take major risks, even though those risks aren't always successful. The Fountain is an avant-garde experimental film with a non-linear storyline and an ambiguous ending. Even if a lot of the ideas in the movie don't quite work, I completely respect and admire movies that at least try to be something more than typical Hollywood fare.

I also really admire the shoestring budget in the movie. I don't know if you know this, but the movie used to have a MASSIVE budget when Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were attached to it. They built sets, they were just about to start shooting, and the whole thing collapsed when Pitt pulled out. Aranofsky ended up with half as much money and did all sorts of incredible creative things to keep the production value high. There is almost zero CGI in the film. All the outer space images are actually really small macro-photographs of bacterial cultures and fluids composited into the final image at high resolution. That's really clever and creative.

More than anything I love that the movie is something I had never seen before. It would have been very easy to make the ending simple and plain, to make it make sense to the dumbest person in the theater. I love that it doesn't do that, that Aranofsky made the movie he wanted to make, and nothing else.