In Contention

Tag: Pi

  • Aronofsky at Edinburgh

    Darren AronofskyAs someone who prefers watching movies to listening to others talk about them, I probably haven’t attended as many of the In Person Q&A sessions at this year’s Edinburgh festival as I should have. Sam Mendes lost out in my priority scale to “The Red Shoes,” while the likes of Bill Forsyth and Brenda Blethyn (whose award-caliber work in “London River” I discussed yesterday) passed me by.

    I did, however, catch Darren Aronofsky’s career discussion earlier this week, and a most entertaining couple of hours it was. It wasn’t quite clear why Aronofsky was at the festival, given that he had nothing new to present – perhaps he also simply fancied a chance to kick back and watch a few movies in a picturesque town. (Earlier in the day, I had found myself seated behind him at the “Antichrist” screening – he didn’t look quite as impressed as I was.)

    As with the last time I saw Aronofsky speak, when presenting “The Wrestler” in London, the filmmaker’s interview style is largely too chatty and anecdotal to relate in writing – for the most part, I simply dropped my notepad and enjoyed the patter. The interviewer (whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, escapes me at this moment, though I can confirm she was both gracious and very well-versed) reasoned that “The Wrestler” was still fairly fresh in the audience’s mind, so the conversation mainly flowed around Aronofsky’s first three features.

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  • BEST ACTOR WATCH: Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’

    Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerFor some time I have been cautiously anticipating Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming film “The Wrestler.” I say cautiously because, as much as I love Aronofsky’s vision of a cinematic world slightly askew, I recognize his potential for going off the rails in blind artistic rage.

    I loved “The Fountain.” I found it to be one of the two best films of 2006, a unique and vigorous demand for new barriers in the cinema. Some people hated, detested it, found it a waste of celluloid, but I saw a filmmaker dissatisfied with the limits of his medium and stretching to make a different kind of film entirely.

    Then again, I hated “Requiem for a Dream,” the film largely agreed upon as a testament to his considerable talents. I found it to be an embarassing display, the sophomore slump from a director clearly going places.

    And of course, in “Pi,” I think many would agree that the seeds of expertise were sewn, the potential glaringly apparent.

    And now we get “The Wrestler,” which will bow at the 65th annual Venice Film Festival later this month. The film stars Mickey Rourke as a professional wrestler “making his way through the independent circuit, trying to get back in the game for one final showdown with his former rival,” according to IMDb. And for some reason, it sounds like a story with a lot of potential, to say nothing of what an actor as gifted as Mickey Rourke could do with a role such as this.

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