Post 178

Tonight I watched Stranger Than Fiction and The Fountain. I thoroughly enjoyed both, and surprisingly, they work well together thematically. I think the literati will appreciate Stranger Than Fiction, but there is plenty for the illiterate too. One thing I appreciated was the irony of the closing disclaimer at the end of the credits. Though the film is about an author who writes about a character that ends up being real, any resemblance of the film with real life is merely coincidental, so please don't sue them if you are an author whose main fictional character ends up being real, and someone made a movie of that (talk about play within a play). Zach Helm wrote a great film and his next, which also includes Hoffman, looks like fun too.

Before I get any further, this is for you Angela.

A lot of the snippets I read about The Fountain on rottentomatoes.com from negative critics said it had too many ideas and couldn't do any of the ideas justice. That wasn't my experience with it. I thought it was a focused, inspired story. Hugh Jackman is in this movie, and in the last film I saw him in, The Prestige, he was criticized for a passionless performance. He has remedied that here. In my review of Casino Royale, I mentioned Jeffrey Wright. The other Aronofsky film I've seen, Pi, turned me on to Mark Margolis. Margolis is good in The Fountain and incidentally had a very small role in Scarface as a South American assassin, "Alberto the Shadow." Anyway, I still like him, and like Wright, he shines with each role. The other aspects--music, cinematography--of the film also shine.

Have a great week.