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#76

Black Swan

Posted: 12/25/10 at 2:48pm

Haha, BroadwayBenny, touche :-P I guess what I meant is that I personally think it's a bit unfair to single her out for her bad acting in that movie where I think the movies are notorious for their terrible acting across the board. Sorry I got so defensive *waves white flag*

"Some people can thrive and bloom living life in a living room, that's perfect for some people of one hundred and five. But I at least gotta try, when I think of all the sights that I gotta see, all the places I gotta play, all the things that I gotta be at"

#77

Black Swan

Posted: 12/25/10 at 8:26pm

Sat through this ridiculous bit of over-heated garbage today. A waste of time, money, digital space and electricity. Trite, predictable, another of those goddamn reality/fantasy/madness game flicks. Pathetic drivel. People were actually gasping, gasping mind you, at plot twists that any sentient third grader should have seen coming. Risible, and entirely content free, like SHUTTER ISLAND for the PBS Great Performances crowd.

Just bad enough to clean up at the Oscars.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick My blog: http://www.roscoewrites.blogspot.com/

#78

Black Swan

Posted: 12/25/10 at 11:27pm

Thank you Roscoe! I feel like I am really missing something here! I went to see this film last week after my bff told me how great it is.
I could not disagree more. It is so cliched and boring. Once you realize what is going on it just becomes so monotous to watch. And I knew how it would end, only I did even care by then.
We have seen this theme of art and obession before, and this story brought nothing new to it. The mother character reminded me of Carrie's mother, and Portman is good, but aside from the dancing and physcial demands of the role, it is not an amazing performance at all.

#79

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 11:58am

LOL. I loved it.

Portman is terrific, but I don't know if she will beat Bening, who is also terrific in The Kids Are Alright. I'd be happy with a tie.

johnraymondbarker.com

#80

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 12:06pm

Roscoe, I couldn't have said it better myself.

"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe." -John Guare, Landscape of the Body

#81

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 12:35pm

"Entirely content free" is my favorite quote of Roscoe's. It really sums up the movie perfectly.

#82

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 1:01pm

Once you realize what is going on it just becomes so monotous to watch.

SPOILERISH, I guess:

And it's incredibly obvious what's going on. It's like they wanted that big Sixth Sense moment of realizing that Lily wasn't there during many of the scenes, but it was terribly obvious that the mother never looked at her. There's no way Nina would have come in drunk, admitting that she boned two guys in one night with a friend in tow without her mother mentioning it. I get what it was trying to do, but it failed. Maybe more of a build of Nina seeing herself in different places would have helped, but it's one of the first things that happens. You know she's bananas from the get go.

Pretty pretty please don't you ever ever feel like you're less than f**ckin' perfect!

#83

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 1:10pm

Ahh, it only takes Roscoe's post to confirm how much I love this movie since my other favorite movies are CHICAGO and MULHOLLAND DRIVE

The movie is so much more than about whether Lily is there or not, which is why it is revealed way before the big climax that she wasn't there the night before, and I thought it was always (very intentionally) obvious that Lily was sometimes actually there and sometimes she wasn't. The movie is hardly about that, it doesn't need to rely on that schtick to succeed (like SIXTH SENSE does).
Again, I get not enjoying the movie, I don't get finding it "content-free," there's so much there. Sasha Stone has a beautiful piece on it on awardsdaily.com:

Black Swan – This is a film about the darker side of what it means to be a woman. Women who are insulted, offended or indifferent to it are more optimistic, perhaps, or idealistic. It is painful, sometimes, to look at the negatives, harder still to create art about them. We never want to add insult to injury. We seem to want our oppressed to stand tall when expressed in film and literature. We want to make them stronger, more powerful, more free of vanity and weakness. We certainly can’t abide having our anti-hero one of an oppressed people. Anti-heroes, it would seem, can only be male.
There have been a few who have popped up now and again, like Denzel Washington in Training Day, Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, but for the most part, women aren’t afforded this, gay men aren’t afforded this, etc. But to me, there is no better way to see my experience as a woman than to stare down the fears and weaknesses. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan does that with Nina.
How much more women would have preferred the film if Nina were stronger, if her motivations to be perfect didn’t anything to do with her mother’s ridiculous expectations, but were instead for the greater good of humanity, or her children, or her husband, blah blah blah. But why bother telling a story we’ve seen a hundred times? It is not Black Swan’s weakness that some women didn’t see it as a flattering display of female traits (the same absurd criticism has been lobbed at The Social Network). It is the weakness of our culture which puts too high of political correct standards on art.
....
Aronofsky never backs off of the imperfection of Nina, though audiences seemed to want her to be more like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler because we humans seem to like stories about characters we can root for. The best scenes for me in Black Swan are those where Nina catches glimpses of herself in mirrors and windows. I see the women in Black Swan as all being a part of one whole. It is no coincidence that they are all dark haired. Black Swan is its own ugly duckling story, as it is about transformation. To transform one has to shed the old to make way for the new. Here, it is a violent shift.
So much of our experience as women is having to live dualities. Virgin/whore, mother/lover, good girl/bad girl. No film that I have seen captures this as well as Black Swan does. It is more about that than it is about ballet, for instance, but ballet is the best vehicle to pass the theme through because perfection really is something dancers have to strive for. This perfection is in the form. To master the form, one must wrestle their body into shape.
Black Swan is about this, but it is also about film itself, what it really and truly takes to create such an illusion. Do we really care all that much what goes into creating what we so eagerly devour? Don’t we want the beauty anyway no matter what the cost? We will greedily take it, but just don’t show us the strings. If we see the strings, we might recoil in horror.

There are some beautiful screencaps in the original article (the cinematography of the film is quite spectacular)
One True Thing: Inception, Black Swan, True Grit, Social Network

#84

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 1:13pm

If it was intentional, that's fine, but I think making it less obvious and giving it a build might have saved it for me.

Pretty pretty please don't you ever ever feel like you're less than f**ckin' perfect!

#85

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 1:30pm

I used to like Chicago a lot, but I caught it on cable the other night after having not seen it in a while, and there's something about it that doesn't hold up. I'm not joining Roscoe's virulently anti-Chicago camp, but maybe he has more of a point that I'd been willing to give him before on that one. I think it's more Bill Condon's fault that Rob Marshall's, though.

His thoughts on Black Swan, however, are right on the nose.

#86

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 2:54pm

One person's profound masterpiece is another person's tired bag of cliches.

BLACK SWAN just came off like a Charles Busch play, brought to the screen by Darren Aronofsky without ever realizing that it is a comedy. His first film, the tedious PI, had the same vibe -- the right filmmaker, a Terry Gilliam for example, could have made it into an engaging lively film. But Aronofsky's suffocating solemnity doesn't allow for anything as base as humor -- he takes refuge in cheap scares, scary lesbian sex scenes, and transparently obvious reality/fantasy confusion. There is nothing to this film, nothing at all, but empty gimmickry.

2010 has been remarkably rich in this kind of drivel. Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND and Nolan's INCEPTION trotted out this same bullsh*t earlier this year -- phony gimmickry masquerading as serious storytelling. At least BLACK SWAN spares us SHUTTER ISLANS's Holocaust flashbacks, but its ridiculous solemnity and High Gothic plot mechanics sinks whatever else it might think it has on its mind. The hints about female self-mutilation and anorexia give an idea of what a serious film on the topic might have brought to the fore, instead of Aronofsky's slasher movie silliness.

My opinion of course. Folks for whom CHICAGO and MULHOLLAND DR. are pinnacles of cinematic achievement will doubtless disagree. That of course is the fun of a board like this, the chance to read differing takes on a movie, play, whatever.

#87

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 4:03pm

I adore CHICAGO, I've seen it an embarrassingly amount of times, but I do admit that my love for it has probably gotten to an irrational level, because I really do think it's pretty amazing...and yet, once I tried writing a paper about it and could only find things to critique it. I guess it's just the kind of movie that makes me happy.
Folks for whom CHICAGO and MULHOLLAND DR. are pinnacles of cinematic achievement will doubtless disagree.
Well, Roscoe, I'd hardly say that if you like one you must like the other, that's just more my own taste, I do love both of them, though I don't think Rob Marshall could ever be the filmmaker that David Lynch is.

My opinion of course. Folks for whom CHICAGO and MULHOLLAND DR. are pinnacles of cinematic achievement will doubtless disagree. That of course is the fun of a board like this, the chance to read differing takes on a movie, play, whatever.
I completely agree, and believe it or not, I do respect your opinion a lot because I know you know your film history. I actually rented THERE WILL BE BLOOD recently after reading a great post you wrote on it and found it absolutely thrilling. So there you have it.

#88

Black Swan

Posted: 12/26/10 at 7:10pm

I am just so happy to discover I am not the only one in the one to find the movie bad and unoriginal. If people like it, FINE, I just can't keep reading (and hearing)how it is fresh, new, original, etc. It is NONE of those things.
I really thought I was going to loose my mind unitl I found a few like minded souls in the is thread.

#89

Black Swan

Posted: 12/27/10 at 1:13am

While I loved the film to pieces, I have to agree that it is nothing new. It's not the first backstage thriller, it's not the first "the understudy's trying to steal my role" thriller, and it's not the first false perspective backstage thriller. It's not even the first stylish, insanity-driven thriller about the world of dance (Suspiria says "hi").

It is a very well-acted re-imagining of Swan Lake that is predictable because the plot isn't the point. It's a showcase of Natalie Portman's performance the same way The Wrestler was a showcase of Mickey Rourke's performance. Aronofsky is not a narrative-driven director and has always been style and bombastic acting over substance. That he's being embraced for a psycho-sexual psychotic thriller based off of a ballet still surprises me. That detractors of horror films, ballet, and orchestral music have embraced the picture is the most shocking thing about the film.

One day, the film world will wake up and realize the Emperor has no clothes on. The film will disappear into obscurity for all but the most die-hard fans and even they will be less and less enamored of it with each repeated viewing. Me? I'm in it for Mila Kunis to finally be respected as an actor. That she stole the supporting actress attention from Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder speaks volumes for her skill; they weren't exactly phoning in their performances in showier roles here.

#90

Black Swan

Posted: 12/27/10 at 9:09am

The credits should read:

Natalie Portman -- Nina
Barbara Hershey -- Nina's Mom
Mila Kunis -- Angelina Jolie

#91

Black Swan

Posted: 12/27/10 at 10:39am

Poor Mila... The first thing I ever saw her in was Gia, playing baby Angelina, and I will never see her as anything else.

Pretty pretty please don't you ever ever feel like you're less than f**ckin' perfect!

#92

Black Swan

Posted: 1/3/11 at 10:52am

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this movie...I've seen it 3 times. I was told not to share that information...but I swear I'm no psycho!

It does include things I like love ballet and classical music. Not to mention great acting!

#93

Black Swan

Posted: 1/3/11 at 11:10am

Saw it again over the weekend. Loved it just as much as the first time. I'll definitely be buying this on Blu Ray.

"What can you expect from a bunch of seitan worshippers?" - Reginald Tresilian

#94

Black Swan

Posted: 1/3/11 at 1:08pm

And am I right in that Natalie Portman is engaged and pregnant by the guy who played 'the prince' in the ballet of Swan Lake?

#95

Black Swan

Posted: 1/3/11 at 5:52pm

Benjamin Millepied, Portman's fiance, will be appearing the just-announced sequel-- BLACK SWAN II: NUTCRACKER ATTACK!

#96

Black Swan

Posted: 1/3/11 at 7:33pm

^^^^
I support that sequel!

Saw the film today. Really liked it and think Natalie and Jennifer Lawrence should duke it out for Best Actress. Vincent Cassel played the perfect prick. He actually seemed less sympathetic than Barbara Hershey, imo, though the relationship with her daughter did give off Carrie and Margaret White vibes at times. My only issue was the film was fine when it just the little things, the little cuts, the sounds, etc. and then I was nearly taken out of it when Aronofsky started putting in special effects to make the transition so pronounced (that may be redundant since the whole plot is pronounced).

I enjoyed it being so derivative, normally something I detest about movies today. That may be because I thought Aronofsky made it pretty meta in addition to derivative.

Sorry Billy Elliot, this movie is now what I think about when I hear Swan Lake.

#97

Black Swan

Posted: 1/3/11 at 8:08pm

Old, interesting news:
http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/13203

#98

Black Swan

Posted: 1/5/11 at 8:45am

I'm really enjoying your writing, Roscoe. I haven't seen the movie, but my dislike of Natalie Portman has something to do with that. Also, I'm a bit uncomfortable with this exploration of the "darker side of being a woman." Really, Hollywood? You're as bad as the ballet world.

#99

Black Swan

Posted: 1/5/11 at 12:02pm

lol Roscoe hated something again, im shocked.
To be fair though it seems to be splitting people, my friend said it's Showgirls without the boobs and glitter. I really like Black Swan (and Showgirls lol) and though Kunis was brilliant.

Also describing something you hate as similar to a Charles Busch play is very mean to Busch, i LOVE Charles Busch plays, hes writing and humour is divine.

I think the Oscar this year should go to Piranha 3d, now that film was awesome lol

Namo i love u but we get it already....you don't like Madonna

#100

Black Swan

Posted: 1/5/11 at 12:07pm

Apparently Mila is single and it was the most talked about thing on Twitter yesterday. lol

Pretty pretty please don't you ever ever feel like you're less than f**ckin' perfect!

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