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By Collin, on March 17th, 2011

Darren Aronofsky leaves The Wolverine


Well, shit. I think the headline speaks for itself. What more can I say? Deadline covers the story better than I ever could. According to them Aronosky said, “As I talked more about the film with my collaborators at Fox, it became clear that the production of The Wolverine would keep me out of the country for almost a year. I was not comfortable being away from my family for that length of time. I am sad that I won’t be able to see the project through, as it is a terrific script and I was very much looking forward to working with my friend, Hugh Jackman, again.”

Sounds pretty lame to me. But, it is a personal decision and it happens. The essence of Aronofsky is now gone from the project. The dude is the ultimate flake-out artist. The word is that it has nothing to do with Japan’s recent crisis, but instead, it is just what he claims: He doesn’t want to be away from his son.

What’s next for The Wolverine? Fuck if I know. I just feel bad for Hugh Jackman who is killing himself right now physically. I hope someone dope comes in and finishes the movie. Isn’t Cary Fukunaga available? Whatever. On a side, why does Aronofsky still have that mustache? Again, he looks like a jewish John Waters.

-Collin


By Collin, on October 20th, 2010

Darren Aronofsky has been confirmed as the director of Wolverine 2, why X-men is awesome, and why this is huge news to me

But first a little back story on me:

From about three to eight I underwent multiple surgeries in order to a fix a heart condition I was born with called pulminary valve stenosis. If gone unchecked, it would have killed me in my teenager years. The aftermath of these surgeries still ails me today, but one of the great things about all my surgeries was that I was allowed to go get a comic book or pack of cards from a store that was near the hospital. Comic books and cartoons were a big escape for me when I was young.

Moreover, because of my heart I could never play sports. I was always getting so fucking tired during my younger years that I preferred staying in and organizing comic book cards, playing video games, and watching cartoons. Most of all, X-men comic books were really, really important to me and so was the cartoon. (I owned a Wolverine special addition holographic card that got fucking ripped off from me while I was in daycare. I still remember who the fuck did it and will never forgive him.) I collected X-men action figures, cards, board games, video games, VHS tapes, everything, everything, everything.

Issue where Wolverine gets his insides ripped out. Source :http://www.comics.org/issue/84768/cover/4/

And at the center of it all: Wolverine. He was my favorite. My hero. I quit reading comics when Magneto pwned him and ripped out his insides in Fatal Attractions. Also, we find in that issue, Wolverine does indeed have bone claws. Only when I hit puberty and discovered that vaginas were more interesting did I get over this stuff.

Another story involving X-men and me is when the first one came out I decided to have a few beers on my way to the movie – I was pumped. I decided to throw the cans out the window and the sheriff at the mall saw, drove up, and threw me in bracelets. I was in the back of a cop car begging him to let me see the movie and that I’d been waiting a decade for this movie. I told him how much I loved the mythology and named off all my favorite characters and story lines. He let me off with a warning. Fact.

The Point:


The marvel masterpiece everyone wanted and the Gilbert family owned.

Anyway, I say all this to highlight the following: This shit is important to me! It is important to me and tons of other people. It isn’t just a cool idea. It is, and was, a huge part of our lives. I love the South Park episode Imaginenationland where Stan claims that Luke Skywalker is basically real because of how much he changed people’s lives. This is true. It goes for Wolverine as well. In a New York Magazine Hugh Jackman confirmed that Aronofsky would be directing Wolverine 2, which will follow the storyline of Wolv in Japan. Awesome.


This was the balling, rare card that got traded for two shitty marvel masterpieces. It still makes me angry to this day.

The Conclusion

Brian Singer hadn’t been into comics before he directed the first two X-men. Then fuck him! Let him jack off his boyfriends at home and not fuck up a great franchise. When Brian Singer’s films are the best in the series, we all know there are serious problems.

As it is, Darren Aronfosky is a mega comic book fan and has been slated to direct a graphic novel/comic book movie for a long time. Hollywood needs directors who are in love with the material -  to give it homage. When I heard that the Hughes brothers might make Akira, the famous manga, I almost killed myself. (On a side note, when I wear my Akira shirt around town Asian dudes always look at me weird. I suppose it would be the equivalent of a black dude wearing a John Mayer shirt. None of that is bad, just different)

Wolverine 1 was atrocious. Not just bad, but spiritually deflating. I figured that was it, X-men was doomed.  There are very few comic book movies I think do their source material justice: Iron Man, Batmans (Christopher Nolan), Hell Boy, 300, Watchmen and Spiderman. Everything else is just okay. Regardless, there is light at the end of the tunnel… Aronfosky is a hero of mine and will do the material justice. He is so uncompromising that he will do it justice or quit. That is how he rolls. Finally!

-Collin

By Collin, on October 13th, 2010

Darren Aronofsky MIGHT direct Wolverine 2

Aronofsky has been attached to dozens of films that ended up not happening. But maybe the greatest director of his generation is going to cash-in. I don’t really believe it, but this article from Deadline has my dick hard. The article reports that,

Word is that Aronofsky–who worked for next to nothing upfront to get Black Swan made is in the throes of landing a healthy payday in the vicinity of $5 million against 5% of gross.

Say whaaaat? 5 million with 5% gross? That’s Will Smith-type money. Considering that the first made almost 400 million bucks, while being one of the worst films ever made, as well as being downloaded a bizillion times before it even came out. If this movie is good, Aronofsky might earn up to twenty million bucks. Woot, woot.

After almost a decade of making great cult-films Aronofsky is selling out. It is about fucking time if you ask me. Aronofsky said once that he only earned fifty thousand dollars for Requiem for a Dream. Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, but over a few years? You could make more money as a manager at McDonalds. A project which equated to about two and half to three years of work. It is also said that he earned almost nothing for The Wrestler and Black Swan as well.

My fear, however, is that Aronofsky will quit or be fired when Twenieth Century Fox wants to make a stupid, cheesy film. X-men Origins: Wolverine was proof-positive that the comic book movie-era was coming to an end, in terms of quality. And claims that Synder did justice to the X-men series is just not true.

I’m hardly a fanboy, but I was a huge comic book reader when I was young and loved the X-men animated series. No film has ever done justice to the either. Yes, the X-men series is better than its counterparts, but Wolverine was one of the worst comic book films ever made.

Anyway, I’m crossing my fingers for D-$.

-Collin

By Collin, on September 29th, 2010

Darren Aronofsky –

The greatest director of his generation?

Part 1 – Pi (1998)

Young indie filmmakers are told to be daring and make films Hollywood would never consider producing. Aronofsky directed Pi in 1998, and in doing so, literally made a film no one had ever seen before. A grainy, high-contrast black and white, cyberpunk, mathematics thriller. A what? Well, I’ll get to that. Aronofsky won best director at Sundance for the film and many wondered if he would buckle under the hype surrounding his career. Almost twelve years later his fifth film Black Swan opens to a limited release in December. In that twelve years Aronofsky has risen to be one of the most uncompromising and polarizing filmmakers of the past decade.

His films Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler are considered masterpieces and The Fountain his only folly. But is it really? Frequently working with director of photography Mattew Libatique and composer Clint Mansell Aronofsky has created a body of work that I consider the best of the past decade. For The Wrestler he became only the third American to ever receive a Golden Lion, which is considered one of the most prestigious awards in filmmaking. (Sofia Coppola has since won a GL as well for Somewhere) I will quickly be discussing all his movies, why they’re awesome, and why he is questionably the greatest director of his generation.

The title greatest of his generation is just viral bait. How do I know what his generation is? Genre? Age? The period he got famous? Who knows? Instead, I’ll argue for why his movies are great, not why other director’s movies are not. Keep in mind I’m not just performing fandom fellatio on Aronofsky, but instead, trying to encourage everyone who reads this to watch his movies and consider their impact and value.

Shot from Tetsuo: The Iron Man, one of many influences.

Neuromancer, Akira, Testuo – The Iron Man, Sin City, Repulsion. Who the hell would have thought all those would mix into a sixty thousand dollar, independent film? In the mid-nineties Aronofksy was a twenty-nine year old American Film Institute graduate who was a promising talent, but needed to make a feature film. Like I said before, there are daring independent films and then downright ludicrous ones. Aronofsky set out to make a cyberpunk film about math, obsession, and madness. Pi is all about math, but like all of Aronofsky’s films that is only what simmers on the surface. Deeper boils the theme shared by all Aronofsky’s films: obsession. Pi follows Max, a genius mathematician, as he delves deeper into his mind in order to discover a mysterious number that makes order of the universe.

Black and white? Hell yeah!

It would be fruitless to delve too deep into the mathematical ideas explored in Pi. The science is not unlike that of Inception in that Aronofsky makes the audience believe in the logic and scientific possibility of the impossible. Regardless, what strikes viewers first is the fact the film is black and white. Most people would say, “yuck, a black and white film. It is all grainy and looks like shit.” Well, yes. It is black and white. Looks like shit? Well, that is up to you to decide.


Max at his computer called "Euclid".

Aronofsky and his director of photography Matthew Libatique were apprehensive about making a color 16mm film, instead, they went with a black and white stock that was more expensive than color film and took up a majority of the film’s budget. Aronofsky said this when asked why he decided to go black and white transversal and the limitations of having such a small budget:

For instance, we could only afford 16mm film, but color 16mm looks like shit no matter what you do with it. So, my cinematographer and I decided to make as stylized a film as we could with black and white. We didn’t want to make a gray film like Clerks. We wanted to make a black and white film, so we chose b/w reversal film. It’s hard to buy, it’s hard to expose and it’s hard to process, but if you nail it, it’s gorgeous. 1

An example of the stark black and white film stock.

What a gutsy decision. When Aronofsky mentions that transferal is a hard film to expose, it is an understatement. When exposing this type of film the DP must nail the f-stop perfectly, if not, the film is really grainy, underexposed, muddy, and shitty looking. To be honest, the exposure wasn’t always nailed. Many shots are almost unwatchable, but for some reason it works. I wonder if Pi would have worked as a color film. There is just something to the highly stylized, almost art-on-the-wall quality to some of the shots. Moreover, the muddy, underexposed look works sometimes. Pete Townshend, the gutiarist for The Who, was the first to use feedback as an artistic tool – sometimes poor sound, or in Pi’s case, unpolished visuals, adds veracity and a grittiness to the art.

Film language and why Aronofsky makes it not suck to talk about

Film language is a term that makes anyone who has taken a film course cringe. Most of the time teachers throw up an archaic movie like Citizen Kane and break it down: Mise-en-scene. Mise-en-shot. Deep-focus. Continuity. Why this shot? Why that shot? Ugh, makes my stomach sick just thinking about it. Countless students have been lost this way. Finally a director came along that made these things exciting, not just academic. Aronofsky’s style has been called pretentious, but I think he might have the most exciting cinematic technique in modern filmmaking. Almost every shot in Pi was premeditated to be subjective and descriptive of Max’s inner psyche. This might be the genius of the film.

Innovative rigs were used in order to represent Max’s genius/madness. The most obvious of which is the Snorricam. First used in Mean Streets, Aronofsky dumps the typical use of the rig (to show people drunk) and instead uses it to add intimacy, disorientation, and immediacy to Max’s mental state. Also used frequently is the shaky-camera and I’m not talking cinema-verite style either. When Max’s headaches occur, the camera shakes rapidly, and with the addition of a perfect sound effect, the audience is given a nauseating interpretation of Max’s pain. And, of course, Aronofsky’s famous hip-hop editing, which is a rapid series of shots to show a montage of actions. Aronofsky certainly didn’t invent the style, Scorsese was using it back in After Hours, but Aronofsky’s perfect execution of the technique popularized it in cinema. The camera rapidly edits between Max locking and unlocking his doors, taking drugs, and doing other tasks. The clip below highlights almost all of them:

3 Min. Section of PI (1998) from Kristian Tumangan on Vimeo.

Damn original

Moreover, Pi hit Sundance and Aronofsky walked away with the Best Director award and a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize. I still read about filmmakers who reference Pi as the pinnacle of originality and daring execution. Ramin Bahrani, director of the great film Goodbye Solo, said this about Pi last year in a discussion with Roger Ebert on the state of indie movies:

I’m starting to realize that no matter if they say film is dying–no matter if they’re telling me you have to do this, you have to do that–I think they’re wrong. I think the more you risk, the better. Did you like the Darren Aronofsky film, ‘Pi?’ Because it risked everything. What the hell is it? I mean, who came up with this thing? The more you risk the better.2

This highlights the greatness of Pi to me. It isn’t necessary the best film of all time, but it seems to exist only in the time and space that Aronofsky created for it. A movie that was gutsy and payed off. There were no guarantees Aronofsky would ever have a career, let alone get a second shot, if Pi bombed. He banked his life on an absurd premise. It is the audacity of Pi that makes it endure.

1http://aronofksy.tripod.com/interview15.html

2http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/03/the_new_great_american_directo.html

Part 2 – Requiem for a Dream coming soon…