Years ago when Myspace was THE thing, I filled out my personal profile and when it asked about movies, I said I'd, "Watch anything. I mean anything. Sometimes I regret that."
In my Christian walk I am terrible about the content I put in my brain when it comes to movies. I really do watch just about anything and there are times where I wish I could get back the 2 hours of my life that I just wasted. Such was the case Monday night....
I've been debating for MONTHS if I really wanted to see Black Swan or not. I had heard that it was a crazy movie and that there was a lot of sexual stuff. But I'd also heard that the dancing was really good and being a former ballerina who happens to love the ballet Swan Lake, I was excited to see that part.
I decided that I'd go ahead and see the film because I already knew about all the "bad" stuff and really, how much worse could it be seeing it, rather than just reading about it?
It was way worse.
Natalie Portman stars as 20-something Nina, the perfect little ballerina, who still lives in her childlike pink bedroom in the same house with bizarre-o mommy, played by Barbara Hershey. After years of toiling in her ballet company, she gets the starring role in Swan Lake and it's all downhill from there. Where as Nina is perfect to play the part of the delicate White Swan, Princess Odette - she's not suited to the more demanding role of the seductive Black Swan Odile and it's tradition that one ballerina plays both parts. Convinced that the new girl Lily, played by Mila Kunis, is out to steal her role, Nina's mind slowly breaks as she becomes more and more in touch with her dark side to be the Black Swan. It all comes to a head when Nina goes postal on herself in a strange twist of psychotic-ness.
Now I can handle girl-gone-crazy. It's a Darren Aronfsky film and he doesn't do much that's tame - so I knew Black Swan would be "out there." It's the girl-on-girl sexual action and all the other sexual innuendo's and such that were way worse than I thought it would be. That I dislike.
To top it all off the dancing was sub-par. There has been a huge amount of controversy about the use of dance doubles and who did what. Though Natalie Portman does mostly all of her own dancing, American Ballet Theatre professional ballerina Sarah Lane acted as body and dance double. These doubles shots involve complex en pointe work (fouettes, pique turns) and virtually all camera shots that focus below the waist on Nina's legs and feet. There are 139 dance shots in the film. Out of the 139, 111 are untouched shots of Natalie Portman and the remaining 28 are her dance double, Sarah Lane. Of the shots in which Lane is featured, 26 of the 28 are wide shots and rarely appear on screen longer than one second. The two remaining shots required digital face replacement so the audience sees Portman's face instead of Lane's. The problem with this is that the film mostly focuses on Nina's face. There isn't much that IS focused on her legs and feet. I was really disappointed.
The one redeeming feature of the movie is that it's a great film. For all it's craziness, I thought the script was well written and the cinematography was awesome - a lot of close up facial shots a la Hitchcock. And the acting was superb. Ms. Portman really did deserve her Best Actress award at the Oscar's this year.
I still don't recommend seeing it unless you have a strong tolerance for well... a lot.
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