Stuart Rosenberg (1927-2007)

It has been reported that talented director Stuart Rosenberg has passed away. Much like the Hollywood studio directors that he grew up watching Rosenberg worked in a wide variety of genres.
He began his career in television directing programs ranging from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS to THE UNTOUCHABLES to THE TWILIGHT ZONE. He made his feature film debut with the Paul Newman film COOL HAND LUKE in 1967 for which he won the Director's guild award for.
Other notable films in his career include the great LAUGHING POLICEMAN, BRUBAKER and of course THE AMITYVILLE HORROR.
He made two of my favorite films, the underrated Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve comedy from 1969, THE APRIL FOOLS and the Mickey Rourke classic POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE. These films meant a lot to me growing up and I revisit them each year.
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM director Darren Aronofsky has often credited Rosenberg as being one of his mentors.
Rosenberg and his films will be remembered.

The Art of the Opening Credit Sequence: The Wrestler

Designed by Kristyn Hume...

Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008)

Artist and Muse #8

Rachel Weisz and Darren Aronofsky on the set of their extremely moving meditation on love and death, The Fountain. This undervalued and under seen film is scheduled for dvd release in May. Along with Soderbergh's Solaris this thoughtful and lovingly rendered film is, in my eyes, the most underrated science fiction film since Blade Runner.

Out Now On Dvd

Released yesterday on dvd were two of my favorite films from the past year and two of the most visionary and striking works of the decade.
Darren Aronofsky's meditative THE FOUNTAIN continues to divide people but I urge everyone to give it a look. The disc is disappointing in the extras department with only a series of featurettes as the supplemental material. The print is beautiful though and I honestly believe this film will build more of a following in years to come so hopefully another edition will be released in the future. I should add that the featurettes do add up to about an hour and are a fascinating look at the history and making of the film.
Almost everyone seems to agree on Guillermo Del Toro's remarkable PAN'S LABYRINTH and rightfully so. It is a rare breed of fantasy film that manages to be a feast for the eyes, heart and mind. The film is available in a deluxe two dvd set with about two hours worth of extras plus a commentary by Del Toro.

I love both of these very brave and heartfelt films and am glad that they are going to have the chance to be seen now by more people.

A closer look at THE FOUNTAIN is coming soon.

Bjork On The Fountain

While I am attempting to formulate a halfway intelligent post on THE FOUNTAIN I thought I would share a couple of quotes from Bjork on the film. I came across these on a great discussion going on about the film over at the Criterion forum. One is from a Stylus magazine feature and another is from an interview with Aronofsky at The Guardian. Links for both interviews will be provided below. Apparently Bjork really took the film to heart and it influenced her newest album, the very fine and exciting VOLTA.

Question (Stylus): "You’re clearly an “artist” as much as a musician—what are some of the more affecting pieces of artwork or film or design or theater you’ve seen in the past few years that might’ve given Volta some of its shading?"

Answer (Bjork) "I was really impressed with [Darren Aronofsky’s film] The Fountain. It was refreshing to see someone expressing visually their inner spirituality without it being full of organized religion. There was more personal spirituality, which is how I feel we are all on the inside."

Then the added thoughts from The Guardian:

Björk says: "With Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, maybe it was a relief to see him portray a spiritual world that was so idiosyncratic at a time when I feel so overwhelmed by religion. It's so strange that the inner- most secret place in a person is their spiritual belief, and something as mass-produced as organised religion can just storm in there. The Fountain is not Christian or Jewish or Muslim -it's areligious; not against or with it. It's just alternative."

...
The spirituality in THE FOUNTAIN is one of the main things I respond to so it was really nice to see an artist I respect as much as Bjork express these thoughts.

Finally in an interview with New York magazine Aronofsky listed his own personal influences in making THE FOUNTAIN. They are:

David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”

Comic artist Moebius’s 40 Days in the Desert

The Popol Vuh (The Mayan sacred text)

Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The Conquest of New Spain

Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano’s “Memory of Fire” trilogy

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain

Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America

Early hip-hop group E.S.G.’s “U.F.O.”

Diego Velázquez

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt recognize some of my favorites are on there. THE HOLY MOUNTAIN connection seems pretty obvious but I was very thankful to see ONCE UPON IN AMERICA pop up. This isn't a connection I would have made but the structures of the films are similar in the way that the past, present and future are all closely connected, plus the main characters sense of guilt and memories of a lost love.
I hope to be posting my own thoughts of THE FOUNTAIN soon, it is a film that I am feeling very close to so I don't want to throw out just a casual post on it.

The discussion at the Criterion forum shows perfectly just how much this film is dividing people and it is extremely interesting reading.

Here are the Stylus and Guardian links:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2065823,00.html
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/interview/bjork.htm


Bjork's new album is now available and is a fine addition to one of the most innovative catalogues in popular music.

Aronofsky's The Fountain Commentary Online

It looks like Darren Aronofsky's promised commentary for his ambitious and moving THE FOUNTAIN has been posted online. I have not been able to listen to it yet but I plan to do so soon. I love the ambiguity of the film and hope that he doesn't attempt to over explain it in his track, but either way I am looking forward to hearing his thoughts.
The link is over to the right under the heading "The Fountain Commentary"

UPDATE: It looks like the site has exceeded its bandwidth this morning but hopefully it will be back up soon.

My Silent Sigh is 36 Today.

I must admit to having had the biggest crush on Rachel Weisz since I first saw her in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty 11 years ago. I often wonder if the sigh I let out, when she first came on the screen, was audible to the people around me. One of the most beautiful women I have ever seen has developed into one of my all time favorite actresses in the past decade.
Rachel is a combination of the greatest attributes the best actresses have carried throughout the years. She possesses the grace of our most classic actresses from Audrey Hepburn to Grace Kelly but also the intensity of a Liv Ullmann or Jessica Lange.
Armed with the most disarming smile since Romy Schneider, the London born Weisz has for the past decade excelled in everything from light comedy to heavy drama, Hollywood blockbusters to low budget indies, period pieces to futuristic science fiction. This most diverse of all of our modern actresses more than deserved the academy award she received for 2005's The Constant Gardener and with six films on the horizon in the next two years she doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
Arguably Weisz's first great role came in 1998's I Want You but she really began to hit her stride at the beginning of the decade with scene stealing roles in the underrated war film Enemy at The Gates and the justly acclaimed About A Boy.
Her finest performance, for me, remains her vicious turn in Neil Labute's The Shape Of Things. Along with Fight Club this film's surprising twist caught me off guard and affected me for days after viewing it. Weisz is magnificent in the film and gives a performance that makes Labute's film more terrifying than most great horror films. Rarely has an actor been able to tap into cruelty like Weisz does in this role. It's still a performance that catches me off guard and Elvis Costello's bitter acidic songs that Labute scored the film with have become inseparable, for me, from Rachel's demonic turn in this film.
She has often been underused but films like Runaway Jury and Confidence are notable in her filmography just for the opportunity they gave her to work with legends like Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman.
The Constant Gardener gave her one of her finest roles and, even with the stiff competition of Junebug's great Amy Adams and Brokeback Mountain's Michelle Williams, she more than earned the Oscar.
Last years The Fountain was her best work since The Shape Of Things and it marked her first collaboration with her husband Darron Aronofsky. I will write more on this film when the dvd arrives and I can re-view it. I will say that it is rare for a modern film backed by a major studio to have so much to say about life, love and death. The Fountain is an ambitiously personal vision made by someone obviously in love, people can complain about the film all they want but they can't say it isn't among one of the most sincere films of the decade.
Most notable of her upcoming projects are two new Wong Kar Wai films, My Blueberry Nights and the already controversial remake of The Lady From Shanghai.

I'm very drawn to this woman and her unique screen presence. Some of it has to do with finding out that I wasn't the worlds biggest Elvis fan (check the necklace in the picture) but a lot of it, I think, resides in the sincerity and dignity that she brings to her work. These are two qualities I find greatly lacking from most of our modern actors. I hope modern cinema doesn't let her down, to quote Paul Simon she reminds me of why God made the movies.

Cinema's Great Faces: Grazyna Dlugolecka in Walerian Borowczyk's Dzieje Grzechu (The Story of Sin)

Recently while I was watching Natalie Portman's extraordinary performance in Black Swan I was reminded of Grazyna Dlugolecka's startling turn in The Story of Sin (1975). Of course the two films are stylistically and thematically very different works but there was something about the way Darren Aronofsky obsessively concentrated his camera on Portman's face that reminded me of the way Walerian Borowczyk filmed Dlugolecka in his own masterful film. It was a personal response and I am not trying to make any broad comparisons, but it did plant the thought in my head that I needed to pay tribute to one of Borowczyk's greatest works here, hence this post. I'd like to dedicate these stills to their subject Grazyna Dlugolecka, a marvelous actress who deserved many more great roles than she was granted in her career.