The Fountain Spews

I am happy to report that my mouth sore is finally going down. On Friday, I bit the inside of my cheek real hard, and it bled a lot and prevented me from performing oral sex this weekend, but it's finally healing a little bit. I am glad of this because it allows me to focus on healing another oozing, disgusting wound that I suffered on Sunday. This one was caused by watching The Fountain, which won an unexpected underdog victory, stealing from M. Night Shayamalan's entire oeuvre the Veronica Moser Shittiest Movie In History Award.

I guess I should put a spoiler warning here because I might give away the... ending? Actually, I'm not sure the movie had one, but there was this part where the credits came on, so that's when I left. The presence of a plot also remains under debate. Anyway, this is your spoiler warning, though I submit that it is not possible to spoil a movie that was never fresh in the first place.

Ok, here's the synopsis. In the beginning, Hugh Jackman is bald and living in a giant floating bubble with a tree that whispers to him. The tree's name is Rachel Weisz. Then suddenly, Hugh Jackman has a beard and armor and is starring in the movie King Kong... not the Peter Jackson version, I mean the one that takes place in 15th-century Spain. You know the one. Right, and lastly, Hugh Jackman is also a doctor that studies brain tumors in monkeys because his novelist girlfriend, Rachel Weisz is dying of a brain tumor herself, and he's going to save her by saving the monkey. The monkey's name is Donovan.

It's hard to say whether the three plotlines are Jackman and Weisz reincarnated or whether the doctor line is text, and the other two are horrible transparent subtext. I think it's supposed to span 3 lives, though, and in each one, Jackman (Tomas the Conquistador, Thomas the Doctor, or Tom the Bubble Boy) is trying to save Weisz (Queen Isabella, Izzy the Writer, or Izzy the Hairy Tree of Life and Patron Saint of Static Cling) from dying. There's a nebula involved and a lot of whispering.

That's the movie. It was like some stupid student project at a pretentious film school done by an undergrad who hasn't realized nobody in the real world cares about his vision... and that his vision is shallow and poorly-executed.

Anyway, the message of the movie was that death is appealing. I'm being serious. It was one big rah-rah for euthenasia and suicide, calling death "the great awe." I'll avoid the obvious joke about this movie doing a good job of making death look good by being so horrible you want to kill yourself. We're supposed to believe that death is good for its regenerative power. The only evidence that really makes this clear is at the end when Tomas the Conquistador drinks the sap of the tree of life and turns into an attractive flowerbed. The problem is, he killed a ton of soldiers and a some holy sacred guard to get there, and none of them turned into flowers. It all seemed like an awful waist to me, and now the Queen will never see him again and Spain will not be saved. Thomas the Doctor plants a dead seed thing in the snow on his girlfriend's grave (he doesn't save her, it's actually kinda funny) so that Izzy will become a tree, but you just know the stupid thing won't grow, and if it does, it's on Ellen Burstyn's farm, and you know she'll just plow over it. Lastly, Bubble Boy gets the tree to the nebula, but it died before it got there. I'm not really sure what happened to him, but it involved yoga and lots of floating around. The whole thing was such crap.

The monkey was pretty good. Oh, and there was a shot where Rachel Weisz's hair looked nice. That's it for the positives.

This movie gets no stars because it already used its quota to make a lame-looking nebula. I swear, you'll see more awe-inspiring space art at the planetarium.

In all seriousness, I've read a lot of reviews on this movie, and everyone seems to have some facts wrong. It's not because the movie was intelligent, it's because it was incoherent. The plotlines didn't work together at all, the characters were lame and stereotyped (and Hugh Jackman cried a lot). There was nothing good. Nothing. Well, almost nothing. Man, I really wish the monkey had a bigger part.

To conclude, this was a movie even Veronica Moser wouldn't do a scene in.