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kottke.org posts about Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky & His Cast Reunite for the 20th Anniversary of Requiem for a Dream

To mark the 20th anniversary of the debut of Requiem for a Dream, MoMA organized a virtual reunion of director Darren Aronofsky and the four principle cast members (Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans) to talk about “the film and its impact on cinema and culture”. Would have loved to hear from cinematographer Matthew Libatique and Clint Mansell (who did the fantastic music for the film) as well, but even six-person online panels are a little unwieldy. (via open culture)


mother!

Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler) is coming out with a new film in September called mother! It’s a “psychological horror-thriller” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. The score is by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who did the excellent score for Arrival, and not by Clint Mansell, Aronofsky’s long-time collaborator.


Creation clip from Noah

This was one of my favorite scenes the film…Russell Crowe’s Noah telling his children the creation story, which ends up being half supernatural and half evolution.

Worth watching for the special effects alone.


VFX reels for Grand Budapest and Noah

LOOK Effects did the visual effects for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. (via @Colossal)


Noah soundtrack

A Clint Mansell soundtrack for a Darren Aronofsky film? Hell. Yes.

Mansell also did the soundtracks for Moon (my favorite of his, I think) and Requiem for a Dream. The Noah soundtrack is available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon.


Trailer for Noah

Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) has made a movie called Noah, about Noah’s ark. It stars Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, and Anthony Hopkins. Here’s the trailer:

Spoiler: Noah survives and lives to the age of 950. More spoilers in Genesis Chapter 6. (via devour)


The sounds of Aronofsky

The person who made Wes Anderson From Above and Tarantino From Below has put together a supercut of distinct sounds from Darren Aronofsky’s films.

(via ★interesting)


SnorriCam

The SnorriCam is the chest-mounted camera that directors like Darren Aronofsky have used to great effect. You can see a bit of Aronofsky’s use of the SnorriCam in these clips from Requiem for a Dream. (Note: that second clip is a bit graphic.)


Black Swan trailer

The first trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is out. Natalie Portman plays an out-of-control ballerina.


Aronofsky and Portman in Black Swan

When I first saw the headline, I thought “this is amazing…Darren Aronofsky’s directing a movie based on the book by Nassim Taleb and Natalie Portman’s gonna star in it!” The plot of the actual movie is only slightly less implausible:

“Swan” centers on a veteran ballerina (Portman) who finds herself locked in a competitive situation with a rival dancer, with the stakes and twists increasing as the dancers approach a big performance. But it’s unclear whether the rival is a supernatural apparition or if the protagonist is simply having delusions.

Hey, they’re making Blink and Moneyball into movies, why not The Black Swan?

Update: An additional important note about this film:

In this movie, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have sex. Yeah. You read that right. And not just nice sweet innocent sex either. We’re talking ecstasy-induced hungry aggressive angry sex.


Interview with Darren Aronofsky

The Onion AV Club has an interview with Darren Aronofsky about his new film, The Wrestler.

The more we thought about it, the more we realized the connections between the stripper and the wrestler were really significant. They both have fake stage names, they both put on costumes, they both charm an audience and create a fantasy for the audience, and they both use their body as their art, so time is their biggest enemy.

Toddler or not, I’m getting out of the damn house to see this movie.


Trailer for The Wrestler

Trailer for The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Mickey Rourke.

Back in the late ’80s, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was a headlining professional wrestler. Now, twenty years later, he ekes out a living performing for handfuls of diehard wrestling fans in high school gyms and community centers around New Jersey. Estranged from his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and unable to sustain any real relationships, Randy lives for the thrill of the show and the adoration of his fans.

Rourke looks great in this and Aronofsky appears back on form. I’m not saying that The Fountain was bad…but it probably was. (thx, kabir)


An annotated list of movies due out

An annotated list of movies due out in 2008. I didn’t know that Darren Aronofsky was working on a new movie…about a boxer and starring Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg, no less.


Darren Aronofsky is working on a screenplay

Darren Aronofsky is working on a screenplay for a film about Noah. You know, the dude with the Ark. “Noah was the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk. It’s there in the Bible — it was one of the first things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor’s guilt going on there. He’s a dark, complicated character.”


The Fountain


Wired profile of Darren Aronofsky and his

Wired profile of Darren Aronofsky and his new film, The Fountain, which will finally be coming out on November 22. The special effects in the film are non-CGI: “No matter how good CGI looks at first, it dates quickly. But 2001 really holds up. So I set the ridiculous goal of making a film that would reinvent space without using CGI.” Trailer is here.


New trailer for The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s

New trailer for The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s fountain of youth movie.


Trailer for The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s (Pi,

Trailer for The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) new film. Official site, interview with Aronofsky on the film, which was originally supposed to star Brad Pitt.


Pi, God, and apartment supercomputers

The New Yorker recently ran a feature on how a couple of mathematicians helped The Met photograph a part of The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. That same week, they ran from their extensive archives a 1992 profile of the same mathematicians, brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky. The Chudnovskys were then engaged in calculating as many digits of pi as they could using a homemade supercomputer housed in their Manhattan apartment. There’s some speculation that director Darren Aronfsky based his 1998 film, Pi, on the Chudnovskys and after reading the above article, there’s little doubt that’s exactly what he did:

They wonder whether the digits contain a hidden rule, an as yet unseen architecture, close to the mind of God. A subtle and fantastic order may appear in the digits of pi way out there somewhere; no one knows. No one has ever proved, for example, that pi does not turn into nothing but nines and zeros, spattered to infinity in some peculiar arrangement. If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as “The Book of Kells,” and it might mean something. It might be a small but interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician.

The Chudnovsky article also reminds me of Contact by Carl Sagan in which pi is prominently featured as well.

According to Wolfram Research’s Mathworld, the current world record for the calculation of digits in pi is 1241100000000 digits, held by Japanese computer scientists Kanada, Ushio and Kuroda. Kanada is named in the article as the Chudnovskys main competitor at the time.

(Oh, and as for patterns hidden in pi, we’ve already found one. It’s called the circle. Just because humans discovered circles first and pi later shouldn’t mean that the latter is derived from the former.)