Black Swan

[LastCelt1989]

Guys, just be fore-warned that follows is a rant. Its not a formal review but I really had to pour this out so here goes...

Edit: 'Big Massive spoliers'


I just got back from watching Black Swan and need to get this off my chest. Black Swan....Fuck This Movie!!

Seriously, I hate to resort to just swearing and calling names but this movie really blows. How in the world it got Oscar nominated is a mystery worthy of Indiana Jones, Lara Croft and whatever the hell that douchebag from Uncharted was called. Ok I'll try and explain a little bit.
For those that don't know Black Swan is about some ballet dancer called Nina who is about as sweet and innocent as the care bears trying to secure the lead role of the latest big production. The problem is that the role demands her to be both as sweet and light as she is but also a big time slut and evil ***** at the same time, in her relentless determination to get the part Nina becomes increasingly unstable eventually resulting in her losing her grip on reality. There, I just summed the ENTIRE movie in about a line. To be fair this is a point the movie gets across fairly sharpish too. But it then goes fucking nowhere after it.

People have compared this to Aronofskys other big hit, The Wrestler and it does bear some similarity. The big difference though (apart from the fact that that movie didn't suck huge donkey boners) is that The Wrestler actually went somewhere after its initial premise. Randy the Ram is an ageing wrestler who has to face facts that he is being left behind, after an attempt to stay in the limelight results is him being hospitalised he tries to re-establish himself into normal society and reunite with his estranged daughter.
After some initial success he finds his new life suffocating him and so lashes out, losing everything he's worked for up to that point before returning back to the pro-wrestling circuit. An act which eventually leads him to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Black Swan on the other hand just established Nina as some obsessive compulsive with a ballet complex and an overbearing mother, sets the scene with the prick director and bitchy rival and then......plays out EXACTLY like a)you could pretty much tell it would the first goddamn half hour and b) like the plot of the ballet piece that the movie revolves around. That would be fine but the characters talk openly about the same plot that they are all following. To put this in perspective this would be like Luke Skywalker talking to Han Solo half way through Empire like this;
'Hey Han, remember that film we saw the other week about the young warrior knight who eventually learns the ways of an ancient mystical order and topples the evil empire?'
'Oh you mean the one where it eventually leads to a climatic fight involving lightning, space battles and the rougish hero and princess falling in love? Yeah that was awesome, anyway meet ya on cloud city'
'Cool, see ya then bro'

Ok maybe you think thats just a lame attempt at humour but i'm serious, anyone with half a brain can marry up the characters and plot from Black Swan the movie to those in the Swan Queen ballet in the first act and from there your just watching the movie go through the motions. And boy is there enough of that.
In The Wrestler, there was maybe half an hour of wrestling tops, the rest of the movie being very character driven. Not so in Black Swan, its just ballet after ballet with extremely repetitive segments in-between. I swear this movie ranks up there with the great satan that is Twighlight in spinning its wheels for an hour and a half. Honestly the movie just goes like this.
Nina does ballet.
Nina not good enough.
Nina cries and shows sign of future insanity.
Nina does ballet.
Nina not good enough.
Nina cries and shows sign of future insanity.
Nina does ballet,
Nina not good enough.
Nina cries shows sign of future insanity.
SURPRISE!! LESBIAN SEX SCENE!
Nina does ballet.
Nina not good enough.
Nina cries shows sign of future insanity.
Nina does ballet.
Nina not good enough.
Fuck it! Horror movie power montage.
Nina does ballet.
Nina goes insane.
Movie over. (Thank God).

Yes, I know there is a lesbian sex scene, yes the two actresses are really hot but it just isn't earned. Its is there for one reason which is to get a far larger audience than it would get on its own merits. The characters literally say 'Sex scene? What sex scene?' Almost immediatley after. The Mila Kumis character is there just to add a little counterweight to Nina's innocence and she gets virtually no character beyond slutty and the bad guy. Which she might as well have printed on her fucking forehead. Nina wears white all the time, Mila wears black. Gee, I sure would have struggled wrapping my caveman brain round who was good and who was bad without that. Thanks guys!

I'm going to end this soon because this movie gave me a damn headache, not just through its mind numbing boringness (though that didn't help) but the, and I'm not kidding here, the shaky cam. Yes, shaky cam. Now, its annoying in stuff like Cloverfield or any action movie etc but at least you can kind of see the point of it there. In Black Swan the whole thing is shot ridiculously close up and the fucking camera jolts around so much that there are some scenes where Nina is walking down the street and the camera is right behind her head shaking all over the fucking place. Why? To accomplish what? Giving me nausea? Mission accomplished guys!

I'm going to wrap this up because I could rant on this movie until Satan starts ice skating to work but before I do I will admit that the acting was pretty good and the movie as a whole isn't the same irredeemable mess like Year One or various others but that not only is it grossly overhyped, it a bad movie as well. A complete retread of The Wrestle with everything that movie did right ripped out.
Avoid!

 

[Marter]

I would just like to take the time to advertise my own review of Black Swan hopefully convince other people that it isn't a bad movie. In fact, <url=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.254228-Marter-to-the-Movies-Black-Swan>Black Swan was really good in my eyes.

So...yeah, take what the OP, and what everyone else says, with a grain of salt. The majority of critics did like it though, so...I guess that speaks for itself. This individual didn't like it, I did. It's not a film for everyone, I'll admit, but I really enjoyed it.

Also, to the OP, please indicate that there will be spoilers at the top of your post, (or put them in spoiler tags). No issue with you ranting about the film, but spoiling the plot for others isn't cool. Thanks.

 

[Trivun]

Not a bad review, except it was certainly over-biased. This is why I tend not to trust reviews of things, no matter how well written they are (not knocking you, and it was certainly well written, I merely disagree with you completely).

The whole point of the film is characterisation, which it does extremely well. I came out of that film thinking about all three of the main characters (Nina, Lily, and the director whose name I always forget. You know, Vincent Cassel's character.), and thinking heavily about the way all three characters were built up over the course of the film. And that's something that I very rarely do for any film, and I see a lot of films, believe me. I make films myself, and I do a lot of writing, and always focus on characterisation (of course, it does go nowhere without a good plot, but still...). So I can tell good characters, and this film had them.

The focus was also on subtlety. It starts out with Nina fairly sane, and she merely has a very few mild delusions. However, later on, she starts to get more insane over time, and this very gradually builds up until the night out with Lily, and indeed that scene is arguably one of the points where she's most sane, which is very ironic when you consider she's drinking and high. The bit afterwards with the lesbian sex scene is actually a perfectly good moment in the film, if you look at it in context, and by that point the drink and drugs have all worn off (as Lily says, they last "a few hours tops"...). After that is, in my opinion, the best bit of the film, because it is nothing but a thrill ride from the day of the performance right to the end of the film, and I was on the edge of my seat through that (the amazing soundtrack and Aronofsky's brilliant camera positioning helped a lot, of course). Natalie Portman had a very tough role to play, treading a very fine line all through the film of sanity and insanity, and she definitely did well for that.

And what you say, too, about the camera being shaky cam, is wrong, it is indeed used sometimes but not often at all (and the bits where it is used, as a director myself, I felt they were used to pretty good effect), and indeed I saw a lot more use of the 'Vertigo' shot and the 'Dutch Angle' shot, which are also fairly common but much more effective in portraying a sense of unease in a film. As with what you say about Lily being 'a slut and the bad guy', that's also not really true, and the reason for that is unreliable narrator. Seen before in films of course, but I've not seen that trope played as well before as in this film. Thing is, we see everything from Nina's point of view, and she's going steadily more insane, so we can only trust certain parts, and indeed in the bits where we know she's sane, Lily does everything she can to be a friend and try to forge a decent relationship between her and Nina. The bits where she's portrayed as either a slut or otherwise bitchy in any way are only the points where Nina is definitely having delusions, the most obvious being during the 'horror movie power montage' as you called it. Having seen it, you, OP, obviously know which bit I'm referring to. In fact I'd go so far as to, after critically analysing this film, say that Lily is really the most sympathetic character in the film (Nina is pretty sympathetic but nevertheless has a dark side which is what shows itself through her delusions, and the director is indeed a bit of a pervert and a prick). Lily simply wants to be Nina's friend but keeps getting pushed away, and indeed gets shown as an evil ***** in the delusions, fueling Nina's hatred of her, when she's nothing like that at all (though she is indeed slightly wild in her personality).

I dare say none of this will change your point of view, OP, and I respect that. If you don't like the movie then that's fine, and you're perfectly entitled to that opinion. We can agree to disagree. I just feel that even a film as amazing (in my opinion) as Black Swan needs defenders, and indeed this film is certainly one of those few that I can claim to have absolutely loved. That being said, I do tend to love mindfuck films, Lynch especially, so...

 

[LastCelt1989]

Sorry to anyone who read that before my edit to put up spoiler warnings . I always find it really annoying when people do that so my apologies.

If your that tooled up on movies than you definitely know more than I do, but to be honest I know a lot of moviegoers like it, but it really does come across as a film made for critics and experts, not your average joe. I wasn't the only one who walked out of it and I felt the Wrestler was much more approachable.

'The focus was also on subtlety.'

Really? If thats how it came across to you then cool but I would have said that was one of its bigger failings. She wears white for the first half before turning black for the later parts. The bath scene was about as subtle as a train wreck on a boat (cookie for the reference)and I really just found the shaky cam jarring but hey, its interesting to talk to a film buff about films.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Maybe it's because I'm a drooling, brainless sort, but I was expecting the film to be a much more typical drama involving tensions between two ballerinas competing for the same part and maybe some character growth. Perhaps the main character discovers she has a dark side or questions her old attitudes and standards of behavior. That's as far as my imagination took the 'Black Swan' theme.

I guess I'm the only one who didn't recognize in the opening scene that this movie would be a trippy horror show full of dark delusions including graphic violence and self destruction, both mental and physical, culminating in a final dazed act of brutal suicide.

I suppose I would have enjoyed it less if I had known all that going in. The movie seemed to feed my preconception before tearing it down piece by piece and replacing it with a new, perverse version of a similar story. Like I say, maybe I'm just a simpleton.

 

[Popadoo]

Wow, how amazingly mature of you. And that part where you explained the plot like so:
Nina does that,
Nina does this,
Is really really stupid. That's like me saying:
Jake turns into blue kitty,
Jake shags other blue kitty,
Evil humans attack,
Blue kitties win.
It's just immature, and you can explain ANY plot that way, even if it's an amazing movie.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

There's a plot? I'm just going so I can see Natalie and Jackie from that 70s show get it on.

 

[El Poncho]

There's a plot? I'm just going so I can see Natalie and Jackie from that 70s show get it on.

Damn straight!

That scene was obviously put in for guys who are getting dragged to see it

 

[JourneyThroughHell]

I'm not watching it.

Never.

Not in a million years. Whatever artistic achievement it is, no.

snip

And he knows why.

 

[Ubermetalhed]

The way you wrote this gives your opinion very little credibility. It's rather childish at times.

I understand the problems you had with it, I had my own aswell, but you have reduced the film down to its bare bones unnecessarily.

The film's plot, and in what direction it was going, was blatantly obvious and indeed the symbolism was also irritatingly clear. However the way it all came together and how the plot progressed to its conclusion made the film a good watch. The performances/characters,the music and the choreography of the ballet were all great aswell.

My ownly other criticisms bar being that is was to 'by the numbers' would be that the hallucinations were rather tame and the CGI was awful.

It was on the whole a very good film, not incredible but very good, much like the Godfather.

 

[Thespian]

I completely understand how someone would think all of the things you said, though they sound to me like something someone would think after having watched a brief, abridged version of the movie. Really, I think the whole thing flowed quite well.

I know the link between Swan Lake and her own life was obvious, but it was kind of supposed to be. Matter of fact, that was the point. At no point was that supposed to be a subtle allegory - It was the setting for the movie. It was the whole nature of the plot.

"A ballerina must play a role which forces her to confront aspects of her own life."

Yeah, it's obvious, but that's because it's the plot of the film.
To use your same example, it's not like Luke just kept hearing about this swingin' place called the Death Star which someone should really blow up and why don't they do it already and oh look now he did it, how unrelated. Right from the start, Star Wars blared "LUKE SHALL TOPPLE THE EMPIRE", and quite rightly so. Why hide it? So right from the start of Black Swan, (pretty much the first piece of Dialogue, I believe) it is apparent that the ballet's similarities to her own upcoming experiences would be significant.

And I really don't understand the point you are trying to make by cutting out so many necessary plot details, summarizing the film, and then saying "Look how simplistic it is!"
Sorry, but that's just silly. Ultra-simplifying a plot and then pointing out it's simplicities does nothing to help you.

To me anyway, the lesbian sex scene (which isn't really a spoiler because, like... Who hasn't heard about it by now) was about her confronting her sexuality which had been kept under such lock and key prior to it. Her delusions were presenting to her whatever she needed now,

Spoiler

Hence when she was told to embrace her sexuality, the lesbian scene, when she had to become cruel and ruthless she stabbed Lily, when she needed to be weak and vulnerable she stabbed herself, etc.,
I thought it was all sewn together quite well.

 

[jackamla]

"Black Swan" is a melodrama full bore, said with passionate intensity, dark and absurd glory. It focuses on the performance of Natalie Portman, which is nothing heroic, and reflects the conflict of good and evil in the Tchaikovsky ballet "Swan Lake." One thing is lost in his art.