happy tree friends

Rating: 1/10 (25 January 2008)

Here it is... the movie I knew Aronofsky was capable of; after the "Look at me, I'm shaking my camera" singularity of Pi... And after the "starts-in-human-squalor-and-goes-lower" one-note experience of Requiem for a Dream... Aronofsky has contributed a real service to humanity by providing a litmus test for blind-dates. Just drop the name of this piece of overwrought obfuscation into a conversation, and if your new friend gets excited, you can spare yourself an entire evening, at the very least, with a complete poseur.
This is the terrific-looking, crappy movie that every director seemingly has in them after The Cell, Flatliners, Blade Runner, Brazil and everything else by Terry Gilliam, and hundreds of other bad movies. It's been art-directed to death. No such care was tendered on the script which is composed of faux-gravitas interrupted by arty posturing, and outbursts instead of drama. Why does someone devise such original visuals, then stumble over cliché after cliché. It seems impossible that Aronofsky hasn't realized there isn't a great movie that doesn't also work on a crappy 10" black and white TV, with a bent hanger for an antenna. The whole show here is prettiness.
The films features are keyed to the pretensions of a high-school sophomore, but when you're 37 and you present this material with a straight face, you should be deeply embarrassed. This is the kind of movie where everyone is either talking in breathy, serious whispers or they're shouting. It's about as deep as a perfume commercial, which is what it seems to be taking its cue from. (Calvin Klein's 'The Fountain...') If I ever see another character pull their partner into an overflowing tub again, I'm going to track them both down and make them eat soap.
I was completely open to the imagery of the space terrarium. But I was laughing out loud at the conclusion, where Jackman drinks some Ranch dressing from a tree and discovers his inner salad. That's your big conclusion after such a bloated, belabored tease? These muddy 'ideas' are worth about twenty minutes of investigation, or a viewers time. I welcome experimental work, but when it results in material more vapid than a Friday the 13th movie, you're not an artist. If you've compared this movie to Kubrick's 2001, it means you don't understand either of them.
Wow. This is just powerfully bad, self-indulgent, adolescent stuff.