King Darren: The Whale

This concludes my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six films from Darren Aronofsky, in the year after the film I'm watching this month, The Whale, made him the first director to top my year-end list on two different occasions.

My second viewing of The Whale was both the viewing in this series I was looking forward to most and the one that worried me most. 

The trepidation resulted from the fact that the praise for this film was by no means unanimous. Yes Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for this role, but many critics disliked it, for reasons ranging from it being fatphobic (I disagree with that) to it being too tied to its origins as a play (I can see that) to it being highly melodramatic (I can see that too, but in the best sense of that word).

On a personal level, I wondered if my emotional reaction to watching the movie last December -- I cried on four or five different occasions -- had crippled my critical faculties, and boosted this movie beyond the level of adoration that was warranted. 

It was actually a rather cut-and-dried case, in that moment. Darren Aronofsky's primary competition was Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling, a film that had even more detractors than Aronofsky's film. Despite my also being enthralled by that movie, the haters had more time to get under my skin since I saw it two months earlier. The films in my third and fourth positions (Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once) had no real shot at leap-frogging these two.

But whether I had justly chosen The Whale as my #1 movie of 2022 or not, I knew there were red flags about it, including the notion that some people found it fatphobic. When a movie may be biased against an entire demographic group, and I still name it my #1, I have to ask myself if I am failing to recognize a core insensitivity that makes people in that demographic group actively hate it.

There was also a bit of pressure on this second viewing. Way back at the start of the year, when I was watching Pi or Requiem for a Dream and it came up with my wife that I intended to finish with The Whale, she said she would watch it with me. Since I always like to show my wife my favorite movie of the year, I was sort of looking forward to this all year.

But then when December actually rolled around, she found the weight of all the end-of-year activities too exhausting, and it seemed likely that she would opt out of his verbal commitment. My wife is down to maybe only ten to 20 movies a year as it is, and spending nearly two hours with a man who is eating himself to death probably did not seem like her idea of how to spend the holidays. 

We're down in Tasmania right now visiting my mother-in-law, and I calculated that Wednesday night was the best time for me to watch it, to make sure I did actually get it in before the calendar ticked over to January. As it happened, not three minutes into the movie, she saw I was watching it and settled herself on the couch of the place we're staying, not knowing how much she would fit in but willing to give it the old college try.

This hadn't worked during our last high-pressure (for me anyway) viewing, which was Skinamarink at Halloween time. As that movie is one of my favorites of 2023, and as it is scary as hell, I had hoped my wife would find it a good Halloween-themed viewing. Instead, she gave up after about 45 minutes -- which is more than some people would give that movie.

I'm glad to say my wife made it the whole way through The Whale, and got a little teary at the end. However, she couldn't give it her full endorsement, saying she wasn't sure exactly what she had thought of it. I guess that's better than the people who hated it outright.

For me, I could tell the viewing wasn't going as well for me this time as the first time. I felt being stuck in Charlie's apartment more than I had the first time, which is kind of the point of the movie but also something that can exhaust a viewer for the wrong reasons. My viewing circumstances were decidedly different this time: on holiday, after a few beers, whereas a year ago I'd attended a morning screening. 

The other pressure was self-inflicted. When I revisit a movie where I cried the first time, I'm always curious to see if the reaction will be the same the second time. In a way, tears are like laughter, as both result from being taken off guard by something the movie is doing, for very different reasons. Just as I don't expect to laugh as hard at a movie on my second time watching it, I don't expect to cry as hard. But if I didn't cry at all during The Whale, what would I be left with?

Although the tears did not flow freely, I did get moist on a couple occasions, which maybe was as much as I could have reasonably hoped. The Whale had a tough act to follow, as my previous year's #1, the cancer family drama Our Friend, actually caused me to cry more on the second viewing than the first. That's basically unprecedented, and unfair to The Whale.

The scene that still got me the most was between Charlie and his ex, played by Samantha Morton. The script prepares you for her to be a boozy asshole, so on both viewings I was utterly taken aback by her emotional generosity in her one powerhouse scene. Like every character in this movie, she's a real person, not a one-dimensional sinner or saint. And the way she refers to the man who stole Charlie away from her, calling him "your friend" with this touch of sentiment and possibly even love, just broke my heart. 

There were scenes that I felt were a little stagey, a little on-the-nose, where I was wrapped up enough in everything not to notice those aspects the first time. Overall, though, if I'd had it to do again, I still would have slotted this ahead of Don't Worry Darling last year. It's still a powerhouse movie with an incredible central performance, and excellent performances around it.

And on the subject of its fatphobia or lack thereof ... I ultimately come down to this conclusion: If you are ever going to make a movie about a morbidly obese man, you are going to get accusations that the film is repulsed by him. So either the choice is never to make a movie about such a character, or to go beneath the knee jerk reaction and decide to grapple with what the film is actually doing. The film is obviously concerned for Charlie, but not because he "looks gross." It's because the condition of his body is most likely going to kill him, and because it's a reaction to a depression that results both from things he could control and things he could not control. I said it at the time and I say it still: This is a movie about a person, not a body. 

Interestingly, though, it may be no better than my third or fourth favorite Aronofsky movie. I'd definitely place Requiem for a Dream and mother! ahead of it, the latter benefitting from repeat viewings after finishing at #15 in 2017, and the former remaining a singular nightmarish vision of addiction that finished at #13 in 2000. And then don't forget the film that actually won Aronofsky his coveted #1 ranking in 2008, The Wrestler, which remains steady in my appraisals each time I watch it.

In other words, four of Aronofsky's eight feature films are movies I absolutely cherish, with Black Swan and Pi both staking a strong claim to my affections. 

That makes Darren a king in this or any year. 

CineNerdle reads The Audient

I've been playing CineNerdle for something like eight months now and I've never even mentioned it to you.

One of the countless online puzzles that grew out of the Wordle craze, as you can tell by its "-rdle" suffix, CineNerdle requires its players to find five movie titles or themes in a 16-box grid. Each title or theme is comprised of four individual boxes. For example, if you had "Space," "Wookiee," "George Lucas" and "It's a Trap," you'd swap boxes until these four appeared on one row or column, and your answer would be Return of the Jedi. (Lucas didn't direct Return of the Jedi, but he is affiliated with it.) You get 15 swaps to find all five themes or movie titles, and the trick is that there's one where each of the first four answers contributes one box to a fifth answer. 

Once you get three, the boxes turn yellow to let you know you're one away. However, sometimes you'll have two series of yellow overlapping crossing the same rows, so all four boxes in one row or column will be yellow, meaning you have to move one of them to a different row or column, thereby wasting precious swaps. 

The original version of CineNerdle involves getting five movie titles from clues that are not the names of movies. Then there is also the reversal version, accessed from a different tab on the game interface, where you are given titles of movies and then need to figure out five themes that relate to four of the movies each. For example, all four of the movies might be directed by Ron Howard or all four might feature Harrison Ford. But then it even gets silly and superficial, like all four movies have a number in the title or all four movies are about a talking duck.

Then there are also logical games, only about a dozen of which have ever been submitted because they are very complicated. There's a grand theme for the puzzle and then clues about where things need to be moved, like "the four movies directed by Quentin Tarantino are in the four corners" but then also "no films featuring Meg Ryan are adjacent to any of the Quentin Tarantino movies." You get five chances to see if your configuration is correct. These are very rewarding but very time consuming, so they don't easily fit into my need to pass the time quickly for five minutes, which is when I usually play.

I was big into CineNerdle when I first started playing. I had exhausted all the puzzles and had to wait for a new one to be released each day. (The benefit of CineNerdle over something like Wordle is you can play all the puzzles in the archive, so you can pick up any time and not miss any of the games that have ever been offered.)

But then during baseball season, I had the more pressing need to read player news updates or even just stare at the accrued stats of my current fantasy players. Yes, there is a lot of starting at information you already know by heart in fantasy baseball, such is the strength of the obsession. So for six months I really fell behind on CineNerdle, and had more than 100 of each of the mainstream types of puzzle waiting to be played, and a handful of the logical. 

Since the normal baseball season ended six weeks ago, I've had a chance to catch up on CineNerdle and now I am in danger of exhausting all the puzzles again. I'll deal with how to pass my time next when that moment arrives and not before. 

Why am I telling you about this today?

Well, two nights ago I played the game you see above you, reversal #163, two of whose themes were particularly appropriate for The Audient. The print is rather small so let me show you in better detail.

This ...

... is four movies directed by Baz Luhrmann. Immediately below that, at least the way I swapped the tiles, this ...

... is four movies directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Unless this is your first day reading The Audient, you would know that two of my three bi-monthly series in 2023 involve re-watching the films of Luhrmann and Aronofsky. And these two of the three are being conducted in the same months, which are February, April, June, August, October and December. 

In Luhrmann's case I'm re-watching the exactly six features he's made, which is easy enough. With Aronofsky, who has made eight, I eliminated the two I had already re-watched within the last two years, which were The Fountain and The Wrestler. The CineNerdle puzzle designer acknowledged that as well, including only titles I was actually re-watching for each series.

To play out the rest of this game and further demonstrate how it all works, the other three answers were:

1) Films directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

2) Films written by Charlie Kaufman.

3) Films about stage productions.

There's no one right way to orient them, by the way. The answers can appear on any row or column as long as their relationship to each other is the same. It's a smartly conceived puzzle engine.

In a way, the other answers here further the notion that the person who submitted this puzzle reads The Audient. Films written by Charlie Kaufman was my bi-monthly theme in 2021, the year after Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things topped my year-end rankings. If you want to go one further, Inarritu also directed a #1 for me, Birdman, so this puzzle also includes three directors who have made one of my #1 films -- even if Kaufman is being acknowledged for his writing here rather than his directing. (He needs to direct one more feature before he will have four.) 

Look I know it's just a coincidence. Aronofsky and Luhrmann are both big directors. They both had 2022 films that were nominated for Oscars, with The Whale actually winning a best actor statue for Brendan Fraser. I still thought it was funny to see it ... and it gave me an excuse to finally sell you on CineNerdle, if you too are always seeking ways to pass five minutes of your time.

In December I will indeed be wrapping both bi-monthly series by re-watching those 2022 Oscar nominees, one of which was my #1 film of 2022. 

King Darren: mother!

This is the fifth in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Darren Aronofsky in the year after he became the first to repeat as director of my top film of the year.

This was my fourth viewing of mother! in the only six years it has existed, so you know I like this one -- or at the very least am still trying to work out my feelings toward it. If it were the latter, though, I'd probably stop at two viewings. I'm up to four, with more coming probably every three years if I had to guess, because I do enjoy the exquisitely excruciating experience of this movie so much.

It also makes an appropriate way to kick off October, since this is, for all intents and purposes, a horror movie. There are no jump scares, no ghosts and goblins, just constant senses of unease, stress, anxiety and life unraveling out of your control. It may be one of the best psychological horrors of the 21st century.

Not everyone agrees with this. In fact, a cultural critic I respect immensely, Stephen Metcalf of the Slate Culture Gabfest, thought it was one of the worst moviegoing experiences he had ever had. He's ten times the intellect I will ever be, but he just doesn't get it on this one. And I don't think he's a squeamish guy who doesn't like to be confronted when he's watching a movie; far from it. He just thought it was garbage, and I don't think he could have been more wrong.

That said, I can understand why a person would feel assaulted by this movie. That's entirely the point. If you thought you were buying a ticket to something with a conventional narrative, and you got this, you might be disappointed.

But even if you did think it was a bait and switch -- I can't remember whether the ads suggested something more straightforward, though that seems likely -- I don't understand how you don't get oriented to what this film is doing and become enthralled by its assaultive nature. 

With some obvious exceptions, my favorite sorts of art at the ones that have so much to say that they become a veritable explosion of ideas. mother! is such a movie. So is Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. So is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. So is Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (You get the idea.) 

A movie like this can obviously be sloppy. You might generously call Beau is Afraid that kind of movie, but I didn't care for Beau is Afraid. The key -- and what I think Aronofsky does so well -- is to have a grand design for this chaotic explosion of themes, ideas and images. mother! is a veritable symphony of thought-provoking notions.

Is it a version of the creation story and the fall from the Garden of Eden?

Is it an environmental parable?

Is it a study of new fame and the horrors of the paparazzi?

Is it a contemplation of the creative process?

Is it a consideration of depression and/or a mental breakdown?

Is it the pre-pardom anxiety of how children will destroy the house and the life you worked so hard to build?

Is it a more general sort of horror of manners where everyone you meet will say inscrutable things and sit on your unbraced kitchen sink?

Is it one of my beloved "uncontrollable slippage of time" movies, where events are speeding past you without any ability to slow their momentum?

The answer is: yes.

mother! is all of these things, which is why I think it's such a vital document, with such a terrific performance by Jennifer Lawrence at its center, requiring her to push herself to the physical limit and threatening to overwhelm her mentally and emotionally. Just like any great acting performance should do.

Of course, in this series I am focusing on how Aronofsky's works speak to each other and reveal themselves in each other, and I think this is a rather obvious corollary to the last film I watched for this series, Noah. Although I don't think that film is bad by any stretch of the imagination, Aronofsky seems to have realized he'd prefer to work out those themes in a less literal sense. mother! explores many of the same ideas about the toxic, irredeemable human species through set pieces that are in some cases explicitly biblical, but it doesn't have to stick sacredly to that most sacred of texts. It is enough that we understand the fall of man rather than needing to watch the literal beat-by-beat points of that fall.

There isn't another perfect partner within Aronofsky's work for mother!, though visible here are some techniques from Requiem for a Dream and the scope and scale of metaphor from The Fountain. 

In fact, it's occurring to me that Aronofsky may be split in his filmmaking identity in a way similar to Steven Soderbergh, for example, in that Soderbergh alternates between idiosyncratic personal choices and bigger budget popcorn movies intended to attract mainstream audiences. Except that I think neither version of Aronofsky is laid out on the same sort of platter as audience pleasers like Ocean's 11 and Logan Lucky. With Aronofsky you have head trips like The Fountain and mother!, and then you have fundamentally realistic movies like The Wrestler and The Whale, and never the twain shall meet. (Actually, they do sort of meet in Black Swan.) But neither mode is especially expected to rake in the dough at the box office.

It's interesting to me to note that given how much I love Aronofsky in mother! mode, the two films that have been my favorite of the year have been his two most extreme on the realistic end of his personal spectrum. This versatility just makes me value King Darren all the more.

The final film for this series in December will be the only #1 I watch for this series, my first reckoning with The Whale since I crowned it #1 in January. (You may recall that I didn't rewatch either The Fountain or the previous #1, The Wrestler, for this series, since I had seen them both for other reasons within the past two years.) 

There are a lot of people who really dislike this movie -- it wouldn't be Aronofsky if they didn't -- so it should be interesting to see if my views on it change at all with a year's distance from my first viewing. 

King Darren: Noah

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series revisiting the films of Darren Aronofsky, in the year after he became the first director to direct two of my year-end #1s.

I've always sort of though of Noah (2014) as the exception in Darren Aronofsky's career, the film you can't quite account for, except that's not really right for two reasons:

1) I don't think it's really possible to pin down what makes a Darren Aronofsky film. The two films I'm not rewatching for this series, because I already rewatched them in the past two years for other reasons, are The Fountain and The Wrestler, and I don't think two films could be more different from one another. And those are two consecutive films in his filmography.

2) The familiar ingredients you can identify in Aronofsky's films are certainly present in Noah.

That might be even more the case now that I've seen mother! -- not once, not twice, but three times, with a fourth coming in October for this series. Famously, you can interpret mother! multiple ways. Some people think it's a metaphor for the artist's creative process. Some people think it's an environmental parable. And then of course, most obviously -- to me, anyway -- it is a representation of The Bible, or at least certain parts of it anyway.

It strikes me that if Aronofsky was frustrated by the end product of Noah, probably his least acclaimed film, it might have been because it was just too literal. Biblical epics tend to be so. I don't have any evidence that Aronofsky does think this, but mother! is a good indication that he yearned to be more inscrutable than a fairly straightforward retelling of a Bible story allows you to be. 

Some of what we see in mother!, though, has its origins right there in Noah. (And these two are also consecutive films, which makes more sense than The Fountain and The Wrestler.) In the scene where Russell Crowe's title character goes to the city to find wives for his sons, and is so horrified by the exact level of misery and degradation and moral pestilence that exists there, he sees an innocent lamb raised high by the teeming masses, who proceed to tear it to pieces. That same thing happens -- mostly off screen, thankfully -- to an infant in mother!

Destruction and rebirth is a big theme in mother!, and naturally that's also a big part of any story involving the flood that destroyed all land-based creatures on earth except for two of each. 

(Now what will I have to discuss two months from now, when I actually watch mother!?)

But you can also look back to Aronofsky's earlier efforts when you watch Noah. The original sin montage -- snake, apple, Cain killing Abel -- is basically his updated version of the drug-taking montage in Requiem for a Dream. Plus, you can't see the flowering garden of Eden and not thinking of the tree of life in The Fountain.

So while I do think this fits in Aronofsky's career better than I once did, I'm not sure if I like it all that much better.

I was thinking that this movie basically has three visual modes, only one of which I actually like. I'll go with that one first:

1) Trippy conceptual shit. The aforementioned original sin montage fits into that, as does the conception of Adam and Eve as glowing white figures in the conclusion of Noah's story to his family about creation. The fast-growing flower is part of that as well. All this stuff works and it has an enviable crispness.

2) Digital effects. The arrival of the animals, and of course, the giant rock creatures that help Noah build the arc. I guess they're fallen angels turned into protectors? Right, they call them Watchers (just looked it up). I'm not sure if this is actually from The Bible (probably), but it reminded me of something that should have been in a Lord of the Rings movie ... but wouldn't have been great there either.

3) Drab scenes of humans glumly fighting and arguing with each other.

I'm not sure if it would have been possible to see through the first visual scheme all the way. But the digital effects -- which are fine, but suffer from the same essential problems as most digital effects -- and the people playing dress-up in a Bible epic don't serve the part of the movie that I think most had Aronofsky's heart in it.

Not as a complaint about this film in particular, but I also found myself asking all sorts of questions about the logistics of this whole Bible story, such as:

1) How are the descendants of Cain so plentiful yet the descendants of Seth so few? I get the basic premise that the Cain descendants sinfully spread their seed and multiplied beyond any sense of what God would have found decent -- kind of how the dumb people flourish in Idiocracy due to their unrestrained baby-making, while the prudent smart people die off due to their desire to wait until "the perfect time" to have kids. But are the Seth descendants so prudish that there is literally only one family of them remaining -- after ten generations? And if that's not a correct reading, and there are other Seth descendants around, what's God's explanation for wantonly killing them off in the flood as well?

2) And speaking of people God wantonly kills off, if the animals are innocent, how come he doesn't save all the animals? He keeps the minimum sample necessary for procreation of all species, including humans, regardless of whether they are saintly or sinful. It seems like a rather cruel treatment of the innocent ones, but perhaps more importantly, it represents no distinction made between humans and animals -- even though the humans are the ones he wants to purge. I guess God's hatred for humans was so great that sacrificing 99.9% of the earth's land-based animals was worth killing 99.9% of its humans.

3) I also found myself wondering how much of this is Aronofsky's interpretation of The Bible and how much is actually in there. Not wondering enough about it to look it up, apparently, but I did wonder: Was there really a Cain stowaway on the ark who tried to turn one of Noah's son's against him? Did Noah really plan to have humans die out because that was his interpretation of what God was doing, even if it meant killing his own granddaughters because they had wombs? (Beware religious fundamentalists, then as now.) If Noah's sons didn't have wives -- except for the suddenly not barren one played by Emma Watson -- how was there supposed to be enough biological diversity to prevent extreme forms of mental and physical deformity resulting from incest? When Watson gives birth to twin girls -- meaning each one can be a wife to Noah's two other sons -- is that any way to build a society full of healthy offspring? To say nothing of it being really icky to have to marry your nieces. 

It strikes me that God should have picked about four Noahs and had them make about four arcs and then had them all meet up to repopulate the earth with babies that didn't have a third ear growing out of their foreheads.

Let's end on a positive note.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie was still one of my favorite scenes, and it's really just a throwaway. When the flood waters have risen above people's ability to survive them -- conveniently, with blasts of water gushing from the earth, which is probably more dramatic and narratively efficient than weeks of unending rain -- earth's final survivors all cling, screaming, to what must be the only remaining crags of dry land, which would also be the world's highest mountains. (Did Mt. Everest exist in Biblical times?) The image of the ark floating mercilessly in the background as these little specks of people scrabble for purchase and emit their blood-curdling despair is something that really stuck with me in 2014, and still does.

I knew I had written about this already on The Audient, and only after writing the above did I go back to read that post from 2014. It's funny how little the things I thought were worth highlighting about the movie have changed in the nine years since I first saw it. You can read that post here if you are really curious and if this is not already enough coverage of one of Darren Aronofsky's lesser films. 

Alright, I previewed it already -- in October I watch mother!, for the fourth time (but first in about four years). 

King Darren: Black Swan

This is the third in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Darren Aronofsky (all except The Fountain and The Wrestler, which I had recently rewatched) in the year after he became the first director to direct two films I ranked #1 of the year.

Watching 2010's Black Swan, I was struck by the notion that this is easily Darren Aronofsky's most sophisticated film. His most prestigious. 

Part of that is the subject matter, to be sure. Ballet is the highest of high art, as notably contrasted with subject matter of The Wrestler -- which was once meant to be part of the same movie, a very long and too-stuffed movie, as Black Swan. It gets easy prestige points in the same way that Todd Field's Tar gets easy prestige points. 

But there's also something clean and straightforward about the storytelling, even as it presents us with doppelgangers and other unsettling images of body horror. It's a fairly straightforward psychodrama getting inside the head of a dancer who doubts herself.

And that's why I think it took me 13 years to watch it a second time.

Unlike Tar, there's very little wild and unexplained in Black Swan. He'd correct for this in a major way in his next film about a woman in torment, 2017's mother! But in Black Swan, I have to say it all seems a little obvious, a little on the nose, a little too literal.

Let's break it down.

Black Swan is about a dancer (Natalie Portman) who desires the role of the Swan Queen in the ballet Swan Lake. That ballet is about a woman who turns into a swan, and the role requires a dancer to play both a pure, unblemished white swan and a dark, wild black swan. It requires two very different styles of dance, and is therefore challenging, especially for a technically precise dancer like Nina Sayers.

And so, in the movie, Nina both shows signs of turning into a swan, and dealing with another character (Mila Kunis' Lilly) who represents her dark side, in whom she sometimes sees her own face, who may not actually exist depending on how you interpret the events of the film. (There's a lot of David Fincher's Fight Club in this film.)

Now, in case you think I'm coming down hard on Black Swan, let me say this: the way it does all these things is excellent. Any bit of body horror in the film -- I am especially skeeved out by the scene where Nina starts to peel back a large strip of skin from her finger -- is tremendous. The very art of ballet puts its dancers in a constant state of body horror, not only having to maintain their ridiculously skimpy weight (Nina is bulimic), but in the ways their toes are forever on the verge of being crushed and destroyed.

(TMI, possibly -- any time I see someone's toes imperiled, it gives me a sympathetic shrinking of my testicles, accompanied by an uncomfortable throbbing. That happened throughout Black Swan.)

The themes themselves, though? Maybe a little obvious.

It might be the first time Aronofsky had done anything that could be described that way. Pi was obviously a burst of original thinking and design, if a little rough around the edges -- unsurprising for a director's first film. The horrors of drugs might not have been anything new to the cinema, but they were certainly new the way Aronofsky dealt with them in Requiem for a Dream, endlessly confronting and impossible to watch. The Fountain is just kind of wackadoodle from top to bottom. Then The Wrestler is a completely unexpected left turn from the director, a realistic contemplation of an aging male athlete with health problems who is trying to make up for neglecting his daughter.

I may be conflating Black Swan with films that came after it, but I just feel like I've seen a lot of films about caustic relationships between women where the second woman might in some way be the doppelganger of the first. Bergman's Persona is the obvious template for something like this. I won't list all the other instances, especially since some of them do come after Black Swan. But even in a film I unambiguously love, Vanilla Sky, the part where the personalities of Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz blend with one another, and Tom Cruise can't tell which is which, feel a little hacky to me. (I should also say that I don't think it felt as obvious to me when I first saw it as it does now.)

Again, I'm making this criticism within the context of really liking the film. I gave it four stars on Letterboxd (retroactively) and I stand by that star rating. But it's just this is my explanation for why a film that is possibly Aronofsky's most respected, and with good reason, isn't in the top half of the director's eight films as far as I am concerned. 

Two observations about other cast members:

1) It was funny to see Vincent Cassel, because he had just been in Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom, which I saw the night before. If I were going to continue making comparisons to Tar, he'd be the focus of them, as he's basically this film's Lydia Tar -- or would have the chance to be if he were the central character.

2) It was great to see Winona Ryder at a time when she found herself -- very much like the character Beth she plays -- without a clear place in the only industry she had known since she was a teenager. I have to wonder if it was difficult for Ryder to play this part, which does very well, as she's a hot mess in all her scenes. At the time she played this role, she hadn't technically been put out to pasture -- in fact, she was in four films the year before. But it had been eight years since Mr. Deeds in 2002 when she was last considered the right person to play a romantic lead in a film, and by 2010 she had definitely been replaced by younger actors like Portman. Now in her late 30s rather than her early 30s, she might be giving us real anger in the scene where she destroys her dressing room and screams "What?" at Nina. Well, this story has a happy ending as Ryder has had a major comeback in Stranger Things and once again played a rom-com lead in the nice Keanu Reeves film Destination Wedding in 2018. Next up she has two projects that capitalize on her earliest incarnations on film, The Haunted Mansion and Beelejuice 2. (And there, a little recap on Winona Ryder's career that could have been its own post under other circumstances.)

Okay, in August I move on to Noah, which is currently my least favorite Aronofsky film -- though we'll see if a revisit gives me a greater appreciation of it.

King Darren: Requiem for a Dream

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2023 series rewatching the filmography of Darren Aronofsky, in celebration of him becoming the first director to direct two of my year-end #1s.

Every time I sit down to watch Requiem for a Dream, it frightens me a bit.

When you feel fear anticipating the viewing of a movie, it's usually because of unknown horrors that await, based on the reputation of the film or its MPAA rating. It's not usually with a film you've seen at least three times before, possibly four.

That's just how unsettling Darren Aronofsky's sophomore effort truly is. 

Each time, I'm not sure if I can handle it. I'm not sure if I will feel safe.

And that's a thrilling situation to find yourself in, if you are a real cinephile.

Of course, I do know now that I can handle Requiem for a Dream. While some -- most -- viewers stopped at one viewing, I have revisited it at least twice -- and I remember the experiences vividly. There was the time I watched it in my apartment in Sherman Oaks in what would have been 2004 or 2005, before I started keeping track of repeat viewings. And there was the time I rewatched it while away at the hotel for one of my weekend projector festivals back in 2017. Was there one other between 2004 and 2004/2005? Likely not -- if I don't remember the experience, it probably never happened. Because you remember watching Requiem for a Dream.

Each of those experiences were also characterized by being alone. This isn't a movie I want to watch with my wife making her usual trips back and forth through the living room, trips she makes because she settles down for the evening later than I do. And though Wednesday night's viewing was conducted while she was at home, it was in the garage on the projector with the door closed, where at least she'd have to intentionally expose herself to it by coming to ask me a question. She never did.

You don't really want to have to explain why you have chosen to pass a particular evening by watching Requiem for a Dream. It feels like you have to be responding to some disturbance in yourself to watch it. Sure, I could explain that I am rewatching Aronofsky's films for this series on my blog. But I likely wouldn't get that chance, because she wouldn't ask and would just reach her own conclusions.

I tried watching it with someone once. It didn't work out very well. I'm sure I've told this story on this blog before, but it would have been ages ago. The first time I saw Requiem, it was on a second date, back when I lived in New York City. She was a cinephile so it wasn't a ridiculous suggestion on my part, but I had to know the movie would be confronting. I couldn't know that she'd have her face pressed into me in the final sequence, either crying or just kind of half-moaning, half-screaming in agony. And no, this was not just some kind of ploy to cuddle up to me -- she was destroyed. You'd think it would have been the last date, but we did have about two more -- though no more movies I don't think. (We saw Quills on our first date. I probably should have gone with a rom com the second time.)

Since this was indeed at least my fourth viewing, I'm not sure how many new takeaways I have. Though there were a couple things I'd forgotten. Such as:

- The appearances of Dylan Baker and Keith David. I of course remember the film's four stars and the returning Aronofsky collaborators from Pi (Sean Gullette and Mark Margolis), plus Christopher McDonald from the TV program Ellen Burstyn's character is obsessed with. But the other two faces I recognized, who appear in small roles, I had forgotten.

I doubt David would have been cast in this role today. He's sort of the personification of Marion's downfall, as he sleeps with her himself before bringing her into the debauchery that climaxes her character arc. Casting a Black man in this role today would just be too problematic.

- How much the song "Lux Aeterna" by Clint Mansell is used in the movie. And the thing I learned is that this was his own composition, even though it sounds like a repurposed bit of a classical symphony. (I also remembered that the Paul Oakenfold version of this song is called "Zoo York.")

- That Mansell did the score. Like Aronofsky, he's one of the ones credited on two of my #1s, having also scored Aronofsky's The Wrestler and Moon.

Without getting in to too many specifics, I was also reminded just how ground-breaking this felt when it was released, with Aronofsky's trademark drug-taking montages, those quickly edited sequences that end with a pupil dilating, as well as his use of split-screen. But those are just the editing techniques. He also places his camera in extremely confronting angles, as when he puts it just in front of the character, attached to their body but pointing back at them, to create a fish-eye perspective on whatever terrible thing is happening to them.

I think especially as some people have felt wary of his later efforts -- mother! and The Whale in particular -- the take on Aronofsky has become that he's in love with flashy technique that reveals his true try-hard nature, and that he pushes buttons just to push them. He certainly does these things in spades in Requiem for a Dream.

But he also thrills us like few other directors can -- enough to make this cinephile come back to the movie that haunted people's dreams, resolving them to never see it again, for at least the fourth time.

I'll skip the next two films in King Darren's filmography as I've seen both The Fountain and The Wrestler in the past two years. Conveniently, that will leave four more films in four more bi-monthly slots, starting with Black Swan in June.

King Darren: Pi

This is the first in a 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six of Darren Aronofsky's eight movies, to appreciate him in the year after he became the first director to score two of my year-end #1s.

Darren Aronofsky was pushing the limitations of the human body in the very first moments of his very first film.

The first thing we learn about Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is that when he was six years old, he challenged his mother's claim that he would go blind if he stared at the sun. He didn't go blind, eventually recovering from a temporary loss of vision. However, he also started getting headaches that still plague him as an adult and have basically ruined his life. Whether he'd have developed the same obsession with mathematics -- or a Rain Man-like ability to multiply two large numbers together and provide an immediate answer -- without the sun staring incident or not, we don't or can't know, because Max did stare at the sun and he did almost go blind.

From his very first film, Aronofsky wanted his characters to challenge assumptions because that's what he planned to do himself. He also wanted them to look at things that made them uncomfortable, and for us as viewers to do the same. It was an assault on our flesh -- or more properly our corneas -- from the very start.

There are certainly scruffy elements that remind us that this was Aronofsky's first film, like the decision to shoot in black and white -- almost nobody makes a black and white first film anymore, though it was pretty common back then. A decade or two earlier, it was guys like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch debuting in black and white, and in the very same year, a director who came of age at the exact same time as Aronofsky -- Christopher Nolan -- also debuted with his black and white feature Following. I don't want to get sidetracked, but an extended side-by-side comparison of these otherwise dissimilar filmmakers is warranted at some point, especially since they had moments of potential crossover, as both were once associated with the reboot of Batman.

Scruffy and first filmish or not, this film is possessed of a real certainty of what Aronofsky wanted and planned to do for the next 25 years of his career. (And yes, that makes this a particularly nice year to be doing this King Darren series, as it marks a quarter century of Aronofsky in our lives.) Some of his tricks, which would also become a bit of an Aronofsky trademark, may strike us as the try hard instincts of a film school student. But I gotta tell you, I miss that kind of try hard instinct, and Aronofsky didn't stop at trying hard. He tried and succeeded. 

(It did occur to me, though, whether we'll think back on newer filmmakers who have made their first films, and so easily be able to identify such film school techniques in those initial efforts. If new filmmakers don't use black and white anymore to break into the business, what will be the distinguishing marks of their earlier efforts?)

The repeating short montage of Max popping pills to control his headaches is of course something Aronofsky would expand on in horrific ways in his next film, Requiem for a Dream. We don't need to get ahead of ourselves discussing that one because it will be on the docket in April.

One film we won't discuss in this series, because I saw it again only two year ago and decided to skip it for King Darren, is The Fountain, and there's an interesting repurposing of imagery from this film in that one. It seems Aronofsky is particularly interested in the shaved head of Gullette at the end of this film -- shaving your head being another form of assaulting the body's natural form -- because the first thing I thought of when I saw it is the shaved head of the astral plane version of Hugh Jackman in The Fountain. The themes of The Fountain remain a little opaque for me even after that second viewing, but it seems to be a continuing journey down the philosophical/mathematical rabbit hole that Aronofsky started in Pi.

I think one of the reasons Pi is so tense and haunting is exactly because Aronofsky gets the math right here. Or rather, I should say, we don't know whether he gets the math right or not, but he's presented it in such a way as to make the numbers seem really eerie -- the irrational number that is this film's title, but also the 216-digit number that might both be key to predicting the stock market and may unlock something hidden in the Torah. The whole bit where the character played by Ben Shenkman explains how Hebrew words have corresponding mathematical values seems crazy, even though it is likely something scholars have discussed for centuries. 

This is no easy task. The challenge for Aronofsky here is similar to depicting the work of a brilliant artist or musician. If the paintings suck or the music is awful, it tends to undercut the brilliance of the artist or musician. So if the math that obsesses Max were just a bunch of mumbo jumbo that didn't chill us on some level, the movie would not be nearly so effective.

That said, the character played by the future Hector Salamanca (this is where I first became aware of Mark Margolis) cautions Max about the thin line between mathematics and numerology. In telling Max that he'll start seeing the number 216 everywhere he looks for it, which will seem like proof but really just be a confirmation bias, he's kind of answering the core question of Joel Schumacher's The Number 23, still nearly a decade off in the future.

The other thing Aronofsky really gets right here, which factors into all but his most realistic films, is the paranoia. Max's imagining of ghoulish things in subways -- such as a brain on a staircase -- has a visceral impact. In fact, in that moment when he's prodding the brain with a pen, and it lets out a high-pitched scream on the soundtrack every time the pen touches the surface, it reminded me of a technique Danny Boyle would use in a future #1 of mine. It's very similar to that bit in 127 Hours where Aron Ralston is twanging his nerves like the strings of a guitar. 

Of course, it's not actually paranoia if people are really coming after you, and Max's handling by both the Wall Street people interested in his algorithm, and the Rabbinical folks who are hoping to unlock the secrets of God, keep the unbearable tension close to peak levels. 

I didn't see Pi in time to rank it, and I may have only become aware of it after the fact, possibly in relationship to Requiem -- though I'm quite sure I saw Pi before I saw Requiem. Looking at the movies I did rank in 1998, though, I'm guessing I would have had this just inside my top 20. I really enjoyed revisiting it. 

There's probably more I could say about Pi, but there's also more I have to do in my day today. I might get that chance anyway in April, since Requiem will certainly be in direct conversation with this film. 

King Darren & Baz Jazz Hands

Busy January, busy February.

And busy April, June, August, October and December.

In 2022, I cut down to just one bi-monthly series so as not to have too many movies that were a recurring obligation. That worked out well in a year in which I also rewatched all 26 of my previous #1s.

Apparently I've got space on my schedule in 2023, because I'm not only going back to two bi-monthly series -- I'm going up to three. 

Three bi-monthly series, Vance? What do you think there are, 18 months in a calendar year?

Nope I don't. I'll just have to do two of them in the same six months.

When I saw Elvis last June, and enjoyed it as much as I did (ultimately naming it my #7 of the year), it occurred to me -- not for the first time -- that I just plain like Baz Luhrmann. None of his films are failures to me, even Australia. I owned it with pride: I'm a Baz Luhrmann fan.

And because he doesn't make movies all that often, it also occurred to me that he has exactly six features to his name.

Then and there I decided that in 2023, I would rewatch Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, Australia, The Great Gatsby and Elvis, having seen only Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby more than once.

Since it's been more than 20 years since I saw Romeo + Juliet, which I didn't love at the time, that one in particular is one I'm interested in revisiting through the prism of being a confirmed Luhrmann fan, to see my potentially differing perspective on it now. 

That would have been all done and dusted -- to use the appropriately Australian term in a discussion of Baz Luhrmann -- until Darren Aronofsky came along.

When Aronofsky became the first director to ever direct two films I named #1, I knew I had to appreciate him in some way the following year.

Now, Aronofsky does not have exactly six feature films. He has eight. 

But two of those are movies I've seen quite recently. I of course rewatched The Wrestler last June for the project of revisiting all my #1s -- only five days before Elvis, in fact. And The Fountain wasn't long before that in February of 2021.

So I'll skip those two and watch Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, Noah, mother! and The Whale -- the latter of which finally opens in Australian cinemas today (you can read my review, at long last, here). 

There's a similarity with Luhrmann in that only two of the six I'm watching are films I've seen more than once, those being Requiem and mother! But I am pretty familiar with those, having seen mother! three times and Requiem at least three, probably four. 

My third mother! viewing was in late 2019, so after this series I will have seen all eight of Aronofsky's films in the 2020s, and will have a good up-to-the-moment grasp of his full filmography, to better assess just how much his work means to me. If two of his films have climbed all the way up the charts, it may be that there are things in the movies of his I appreciated less that I should be appreciating more. (Though given my love for the two #1s and the two I've seen at least three times, there's already a lot of love for Darren Aronofsky going around.)

I considered combining these two series into one monthly post, but I think I'll handle them separately, so I won't be forced to watch them in close proximity to give you my freshest possible thoughts. I'll call one series "King Darren," because Aronofsky has now proven himself through the stats, and I'll call the other series "Baz Jazz Hands," because there's no better metaphor for Luhrmann's filmmaking style than jazz hands.

Though of course there are things the men have in common, other than me liking their work. They're both men who make big choices that could be considered confrontational, whether that's on the aggressive side (rubbing your nose in the harrowing effects of drug addition) or the playful side (injecting modern pop songs into 1899 Paris). Neither is content to play it safe. 

Meanwhile, I will of course still be watching the films I haven't seen of Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow in my other bi-monthly series, Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, which will be running as normally scheduled in January, March, May, July, September and November. 

So if you need anything from me in February, April, June, August, October and December, and I snap at you, just remember: I've got a lot of movies to watch. 

Starting with Pi and Strictly Ballroom this month.