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Whoa.

Looks like Aronofsky's Noah movie is still moving forward. Time to give it a thread of its own.

A teaser-trailer is up. I wasn't a big fan of Requiem for a Dream, and yet I'm eager to see Aronofsky's new film. He's an impressive stylist. Time will tell if he's more than that. I'm also excited that he's going to direct an upcoming episode of Lost.

I wonder if Christian reviewers will get as excited about the Christ imagery in this upcoming Aronofsky film as they did about his last one, The Wrestler.

Whoa! Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

I did a search under "Aronofsky" to see if we had a thread about this already, but didn't turn one up. Feel free to redirect me if we do. Since we'll soon be voting on new nominations for the top 100, I've made it a mission to see as many as possible before the vote. This week I've managed to knock off The Grapes of Wrath, In the Heat of the Night, The Royal Tenenbaums and Pi. The first three were great, but of the four, Pi is the only one I'd consider to really delve into spiritual territory. So, that said ... what the heck did it all mean? If all goes as planned, I'm rewatching it tonight. Initial impressions were this: It might have been an exploration of the futility of trying to decipher the mind of God. It might have been a look at the link between genius and madness. It might have been a refutation of meaning in the universe. (although I suspect this is the laziest interpretation) It might have been an affirmation of infinity ... ie, of eternity ... as represented by an infinite number. Anyone? Jason, since I think you originally nominated it (can't find the list of nominations anymore, though) .... Or MattPage, since you're a math/science guy?

I diligently searched the board and didn't find any threads about this movie, which shocks the petunias out of me. I just watched this last night. Best Buy had a deal for Pi and Requiem for 14 bucks, so I snatched them up. Pi I had already seen. I'm really curious to know what others here on the board this of this film. Immediately after watching it, I watched it again with the director's commentary, hoping that Aranonfsky would shed some light on what I should think about this movie. He did, and he didn't. He did, by letting me know I didn't miss anything. All through the movie, I had been planning on evaluating it in terms of his solution to the amazing problem he had created for his characters. However, the film finished without one. Not being completely confident in my movie-watching skills, I paid extra attention during the commentary, and was rewarded by him telling me that his intention was not to provide a solution, but the demarkate the problem. He didn't, because I would formerly always critique a film featuring a genuinly unstopable evil (as the addiction in Requiem seems) as simply nihilistic, but the interview with Selby (the author of the book) made me think.... What really got me was his bit about people trying to escape the suffering in their life. He said that the root problem with his characters was that they would escape the suffering in their lives in various ways, leaving an empty hole that needed to be filled. And if I understood Selby correctly, the way they filled it was with drugs. This is, to me, a completely different way of thinking about drugs and addiction, because I always thought of addiction as the escape itself, rather than a filler to compensate for the escape. If this is true, then this movie clearly and profoundly demonstrates the idea that Man Longs for Transcendance. And demonstrates the impotence of drugs to properly fill that need. Leading to the question of "What can?" Hmmm.... But I'm not sure I can get the movie to fit that mold. What is the characters' escape? What is the vaccuum in their lives that the drugs and TV and coffee fill?