Word: requiems
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...week, Nhat Hanh arrived in the former Saigon for a 10-week tour, his second in two years. His plans include a series of three-day Buddhist mass-chanting ceremonies, the first starting March 16, to pray for the dead on all sides of the Vietnam War, unprecedented "Grand Requiem" ceremonies that Nhat Hanh's followers hail as a leap forward in Communist-Buddhist relations...
...really surprise. Another Christmas death, another pop-cultural immortal with a Dec. 25 tombstone. Add James Brown to a distinguished list that includes Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields and Dean Martin (Birgit Nilsson, if you want to go a bit upmarket). Along with the Noels, sing a requiem for the Godfather of Soul. But make sure it ends with Brown?s trademark ?Hey!? - that quick, high-pitched syllable that exploded from him with seismic suddenness, like the bark of an electrocuted schnauzer...
...Darren Aronofsky must have known the risk he was taking as he prepared the ambitious movie romance called The Fountain. His previous films, the no-budget Pi (1998) and the low-budget Requiem for a Dream (2000), both quirky art-house hits, had been on the somber side, to put it mildly. To put it accurately, they were visual monologues that took place inside the deranged minds of their protagonists - respectively, a math whiz obsessed by the number 216 and a heroin addict with a possessive (and understandably perplexed) mom. Instantly, anybody could see that Aronofsky...
...Aronofsky then went the route of so many phenoms: being courted and misused by the big studios. Having spent $60,000 to make Pi, and $4.5 million on Requiem, he suddenly had hundred of millions dangled in front of him to direct a Batman prequel, or an adaptation of Theodore Roszak's meta-cinematic novel Flicker. Projects collapsed; time marched...
...film as he did to his first two, building elaborate visual motifs: Tree rings as a Mayan tattoo and as cloud formations; foliage that surrounds Tomas in the 16th century and grows through him in the 26th. Just as you didn?t have to be a junkie to appreciate Requiem or a member of the Kabbalah to go for Pi, you don?t have to be moved to tears by The Fountain to admire its complexity...