How Hott Is This?



Darren Aronofsky is brilliant. And he happens to be married to an astonishingly gorgeous woman.

But back to his brilliance. Aronofsky kind of wandered off the reservation a bit the the interesting but ultimately over-ambitious "The Fountain." Immortality is a subject that should only be taken up late works of a Master -- Mircea Eliade in Youth Without Youth, for example. It is not a young man's game, the subject of endlessness which lies well-hidden in the heart of every artistic implulse (from the act of graffiti to Bach's Mass in B Minor to the cave paintings at Lascaux).

Still, Aronofsky got the stuffins beaten out of him by the critics (and rightly so). What did he do? He toned it down, brought things back under the rule of gravitational forces (which wasn't the case in The Fountain) and went "earthy" with The Wrestler. He showed that he can be a humble man. It was what was called for. And pulled it off. Brilliant.

Now, it seems, after that reprieve, Aronofsky is working his way back into more ambitious, artistic fare. The Black Swan. The trailer has a Kubrickian vibe.

Which is the awesome.

With artists like Marty Scorsese and Katherine Bigelow and Chris Nolan and Sir Ridley Scott and Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppolla still in the game, it is hard to remember a time in which so much high-quality, heavyweight intellectual-artistic American directing was taking place.