What awakens me from my blogging slumber? If you guessed "Another mediocre Darren Aronofsky film," then you are correct!
1) First off, they should've just called it The Ballerina. The Wrestler and The Ballerina. Why not? Movies about troubled, self mutilating athletes who have family issues that feature the back of the leading actor's head for three quarters of the film, ending in a shot where the athlete finds some sort of grace, juxtaposed with the athelete falling from a great height - literally.
2) Look, enough with the back of the head shot. Natalie Portman has one of the best back of the heads in show business, and I still don't want to stare at it endlessly. Furthermore, would it kill ya, Darren, to raise the camera above characters' heads? Why does it always have to be eye level or bust?
3) Any movie that has a character smoke a cigarette to signify that they are evil is living in a cardboard cut out of reality. OMG Mila Kunis is smoking! Hiss! Hissss! [Superman Returns did this far worse though: when Kate Bosworth drops her bag and a cigarette comes out...well, lemme just say that it was quite the tense moment for Clark Kent.] And when Black Swan went further and had Portman's character take - wait for it! - ecstasy - given to her by the evil Kunis, it gave me the feeling I was watching an after school special. I'm not pro drugs or completely anti drugs. It's just a complexity of life that was dumbed down.
4) Usually when a screenplay is written by three different people, you can tell, and Black Swan is no exception. "Now I want you to go home and touch yourself tomorrow." "If your name is Todd and you have a penis, then yes." "I'm throwing out this cake in the garbage!" These aren't exact quotations, but they represent the vibe I got. The story was fair; it was just that the dialogue made me LOL in the theater. [Hands down the best part of the movie was when my buddy LOL'd during the flick and some other guy LOL'd ten rows behind him, LOLing at my friends LOL. LOL.]
5) I applaud Natalie Portman, both her acting and the fact that she did all of her own dancing. That said, I would have liked for a professional dancer to do some really complicated tasty moves that Darren could have cut to in a wide shot allowing the audience to see just how skilled the Portman character was as dancer. I think Black Swan missed out on showing the audience just how utterly beautiful ballet dancing probably is.
6) Heavy handed with the music. Easy does it, pal. Cue the Requiem theme! DA NANANA DA NANANA!!!
7) The melodrama between Portman and her mother. Enough, already. Cue the Requiem theme! DA NANANA "You're on uppers, Ma!" DA NANANA!
8) The sex scene between Kunis and Portman was awesome! Pretty explicit I thought, what with all the muff diving. Curious to see just how NC-17ish Blue Valentine is/was compared to this lesbian romp -- as compared to what I've heard is a realistic, though gritty, depiction of heterosexual sex. Versus, of course, the homosexual psycho-sexual intercourse that takes place in Black Swan. Cue the Requiem chants! "Ass to ass! Ass to ass!"
9) Vincent Cassel was fucking boss. Pimping ballerinas and then casting them aside when he has used them. Fucking Cassel. "You bit me!" Portman, the biter: only Cassel could bring that out of her.
10) Total waste of Winona Ryder.
Basically, Black Swan and all of the other Aronofsky films suffer from being vague explorations of the depths of the human condition/existence (The Fountain), vague grotesqueries (The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream), or both (Black Swan). [note: I have not seen Pi, but I'm sure it is a vague mathematical quest for spiritual fufillment.] In that Black Swan was both of the former, I applaud it, as well as Aronofsky's commitment to his vision and art. Plus, Black Swan was genuinely strange, so there's that.
But that does not take away from the fact that I believe he is a poor director. His visual style bores me, and, worse yet, he does not handle his stories with much finesse: the finished films do not as much bring the viewer into the world as they leave the viewer on the outside, admiring the spectacle of an idea or notion that Aronofsky is currently infatuated with. Investment in characters is the key to filmmaking and when I watch an Aronofsky film I could care less about any of them.
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