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The closest theater showing this to me is 50 miles away. I hate limited releases
Black Swan | A Film by Darren Aronofsky
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The closest theater showing this to me is 50 miles away. I hate limited releases
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Sweet, will definitely be watching.
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Sweet, will definitely be watching.
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I was hoping that this was just a limited release with a general on the way, but doesn't look like it..
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I was hoping that this was just a limited release with a general on the way, but doesn't look like it..
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It's like. I got no idea which I would start +%*@$## first. Mila look like a freak, but I wouldn't wanna pop early. Gonna have to think about this for a while.
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It's like. I got no idea which I would start +%*@$## first. Mila look like a freak, but I wouldn't wanna pop early. Gonna have to think about this for a while.
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[h2]Nutcracked[/h2][h1]Natalie Portman as an unstable dancer in the inert Black Swan.[/h1][color= rgb(102, 0, 51)]By Dana Stevens[/color][color= rgb(102, 102, 102)]Posted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010, at 7:57 PM ET[/color]
One thing you can say about Darren Aronofsky: You never know what he's going to do next. A through-line connecting his movies to one another would read like a 2008 stock-market graph. There was Bleak House[/i][/i] as a 3-D musical. The Wrestler is the only one of Aronofsky's films I've really liked, but I approach each new one with fresh excitement: Though his movies can be risibly off-kilter, Aronofsky is a filmmaker of ambition, energy, and scope—a guy whose reach has a way of thrillingly exceeding his grasp.
Nina, after a respectable but undistinguished career as a low-ranking dancer, desperately covets the lead in Swan Lake, a demanding part in which the same dancer must play the innocent white swan, Odette, and her wicked black double, Odile. But Thomas gives her to understand, repeatedly and unsubtly, that while her form is flawless, Nina lacks the inner fire and wildness and all-around *****iness to dance Odile. One of Thomas' many refined cruelties is an ability to fan rivalries among his female dancers, and Nina soon becomes fixated on surpassing both Beth (Winona Ryder), a veteran female ballerina on the verge of retirement, and Lilly (Mila Kunis), a sultry, hard-partying younger member of the corps who seems to possess all the Odilian qualities that Nina lacks. The childlike and seemingly virginal Nina still lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), a glittering-eyed loon who gave up her own dance career to have a child and who now spends the day painting creepy portraits in her studio.The reach/grasp ratio is way off in Black Swan (FoxSearchlight), a movie that combines some truly stunning visual and cinematic ideas with some truly terrible, well, ideas. Yet the conceit at its heart is not unpromising. Like the über-ballet movie of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes[/i], Black Swan is a dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that's never quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who's clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we're never told. Though Aronofsky fetishizes tulle tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing, and what choreography we do see looks pretty conventional.)
And that's all you need by way of setup, since the drama of casting, rehearsing, and performing Swan Lake is soon engulfed by the drama taking place in Nina's own mind. Most of Black Swan unfolds in a feverish, lurid dream space that we can only assume to be a representation of the heroine's subjective experience—though it sometimes does appear as if something objectively nefarious, even supernatural, may be happening in those cramped rooms and smoky rehearsal studios.
By moments, Black Swan dabbles effectively in the grisly vocabulary of body horror. In a scene that recalls Cronenberg's The Fly, Nina finds the skin of her hand peeling off in long strips. At moments when she's close to finding the black-swan character, she develops goosebumps that give her flesh the look of plucked poultry. These scenes have a primal power that, even out of context, can get your palms sticky with sweat. (Just watch the trailer.) But as the movie goes on, this visceral imagery of bodily disintegration never finds a dramatic context to make sense in. Nina is just a collection of neurotic behaviors, not a character, and nearly all the conflict on screen derives from her victimization (or perceived victimization?) at the hands of others. We never understand what's at stake for her as an artist, other than sheer achievement for achievement's sake. With this movie's curious inattention to the question of why performing matters to its heroine, it could just as easily be a movie about a girl's brutal struggle to become Baskin Robbins' employee of the month.
Given the Cronenberg-like flaying I administered to Natalie Portman in my review of last year's Brothers, I feel it's important to specify that Portman is not to blame for what's wrong with Black Swan. She may not be the most nuanced of actresses, but this role—a passive, frightened girl trying really hard to be perfect—is a lot better suited to Portman's strengths than the earthy working-class mother she played in Brothers. She's clearly knocked herself out (and, scarily, dropped 20 pounds from her already sub-size-0 frame) to get the ballet rehearsal scenes to look right. (The actual dancing is done by members of the Pennsylvania Ballet along with Sarah Lane and Kimberly Prosa as Portman's body doubles.*) And in at least one scene, the content of which I can't reveal without spoiling the plot, Portman does a nice little piece of real (which is to say, non-"bravura") acting. Just as her character drives herself to the edge of madness in pursuit of the black-swan role, Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.
One thing you can say about Darren Aronofsky: You never know what he's going to do next. A through-line connecting his movies to one another would read like a 2008 stock-market graph. There was Bleak House[/i][/i] as a 3-D musical. The Wrestler is the only one of Aronofsky's films I've really liked, but I approach each new one with fresh excitement: Though his movies can be risibly off-kilter, Aronofsky is a filmmaker of ambition, energy, and scope—a guy whose reach has a way of thrillingly exceeding his grasp.Nina, after a respectable but undistinguished career as a low-ranking dancer, desperately covets the lead in Swan Lake, a demanding part in which the same dancer must play the innocent white swan, Odette, and her wicked black double, Odile. But Thomas gives her to understand, repeatedly and unsubtly, that while her form is flawless, Nina lacks the inner fire and wildness and all-around *****iness to dance Odile. One of Thomas' many refined cruelties is an ability to fan rivalries among his female dancers, and Nina soon becomes fixated on surpassing both Beth (Winona Ryder), a veteran female ballerina on the verge of retirement, and Lilly (Mila Kunis), a sultry, hard-partying younger member of the corps who seems to possess all the Odilian qualities that Nina lacks. The childlike and seemingly virginal Nina still lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), a glittering-eyed loon who gave up her own dance career to have a child and who now spends the day painting creepy portraits in her studio.The reach/grasp ratio is way off in Black Swan (FoxSearchlight), a movie that combines some truly stunning visual and cinematic ideas with some truly terrible, well, ideas. Yet the conceit at its heart is not unpromising. Like the über-ballet movie of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes[/i], Black Swan is a dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that's never quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who's clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we're never told. Though Aronofsky fetishizes tulle tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing, and what choreography we do see looks pretty conventional.)
And that's all you need by way of setup, since the drama of casting, rehearsing, and performing Swan Lake is soon engulfed by the drama taking place in Nina's own mind. Most of Black Swan unfolds in a feverish, lurid dream space that we can only assume to be a representation of the heroine's subjective experience—though it sometimes does appear as if something objectively nefarious, even supernatural, may be happening in those cramped rooms and smoky rehearsal studios.
By moments, Black Swan dabbles effectively in the grisly vocabulary of body horror. In a scene that recalls Cronenberg's The Fly, Nina finds the skin of her hand peeling off in long strips. At moments when she's close to finding the black-swan character, she develops goosebumps that give her flesh the look of plucked poultry. These scenes have a primal power that, even out of context, can get your palms sticky with sweat. (Just watch the trailer.) But as the movie goes on, this visceral imagery of bodily disintegration never finds a dramatic context to make sense in. Nina is just a collection of neurotic behaviors, not a character, and nearly all the conflict on screen derives from her victimization (or perceived victimization?) at the hands of others. We never understand what's at stake for her as an artist, other than sheer achievement for achievement's sake. With this movie's curious inattention to the question of why performing matters to its heroine, it could just as easily be a movie about a girl's brutal struggle to become Baskin Robbins' employee of the month.
Given the Cronenberg-like flaying I administered to Natalie Portman in my review of last year's Brothers, I feel it's important to specify that Portman is not to blame for what's wrong with Black Swan. She may not be the most nuanced of actresses, but this role—a passive, frightened girl trying really hard to be perfect—is a lot better suited to Portman's strengths than the earthy working-class mother she played in Brothers. She's clearly knocked herself out (and, scarily, dropped 20 pounds from her already sub-size-0 frame) to get the ballet rehearsal scenes to look right. (The actual dancing is done by members of the Pennsylvania Ballet along with Sarah Lane and Kimberly Prosa as Portman's body doubles.*) And in at least one scene, the content of which I can't reveal without spoiling the plot, Portman does a nice little piece of real (which is to say, non-"bravura") acting. Just as her character drives herself to the edge of madness in pursuit of the black-swan role, Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.
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[h2]Nutcracked[/h2][h1]Natalie Portman as an unstable dancer in the inert Black Swan.[/h1][color= rgb(102, 0, 51)]By Dana Stevens[/color][color= rgb(102, 102, 102)]Posted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010, at 7:57 PM ET[/color]
One thing you can say about Darren Aronofsky: You never know what he's going to do next. A through-line connecting his movies to one another would read like a 2008 stock-market graph. There was Bleak House[/i][/i] as a 3-D musical. The Wrestler is the only one of Aronofsky's films I've really liked, but I approach each new one with fresh excitement: Though his movies can be risibly off-kilter, Aronofsky is a filmmaker of ambition, energy, and scope—a guy whose reach has a way of thrillingly exceeding his grasp.
Nina, after a respectable but undistinguished career as a low-ranking dancer, desperately covets the lead in Swan Lake, a demanding part in which the same dancer must play the innocent white swan, Odette, and her wicked black double, Odile. But Thomas gives her to understand, repeatedly and unsubtly, that while her form is flawless, Nina lacks the inner fire and wildness and all-around *****iness to dance Odile. One of Thomas' many refined cruelties is an ability to fan rivalries among his female dancers, and Nina soon becomes fixated on surpassing both Beth (Winona Ryder), a veteran female ballerina on the verge of retirement, and Lilly (Mila Kunis), a sultry, hard-partying younger member of the corps who seems to possess all the Odilian qualities that Nina lacks. The childlike and seemingly virginal Nina still lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), a glittering-eyed loon who gave up her own dance career to have a child and who now spends the day painting creepy portraits in her studio.The reach/grasp ratio is way off in Black Swan (FoxSearchlight), a movie that combines some truly stunning visual and cinematic ideas with some truly terrible, well, ideas. Yet the conceit at its heart is not unpromising. Like the über-ballet movie of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes[/i], Black Swan is a dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that's never quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who's clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we're never told. Though Aronofsky fetishizes tulle tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing, and what choreography we do see looks pretty conventional.)
And that's all you need by way of setup, since the drama of casting, rehearsing, and performing Swan Lake is soon engulfed by the drama taking place in Nina's own mind. Most of Black Swan unfolds in a feverish, lurid dream space that we can only assume to be a representation of the heroine's subjective experience—though it sometimes does appear as if something objectively nefarious, even supernatural, may be happening in those cramped rooms and smoky rehearsal studios.
By moments, Black Swan dabbles effectively in the grisly vocabulary of body horror. In a scene that recalls Cronenberg's The Fly, Nina finds the skin of her hand peeling off in long strips. At moments when she's close to finding the black-swan character, she develops goosebumps that give her flesh the look of plucked poultry. These scenes have a primal power that, even out of context, can get your palms sticky with sweat. (Just watch the trailer.) But as the movie goes on, this visceral imagery of bodily disintegration never finds a dramatic context to make sense in. Nina is just a collection of neurotic behaviors, not a character, and nearly all the conflict on screen derives from her victimization (or perceived victimization?) at the hands of others. We never understand what's at stake for her as an artist, other than sheer achievement for achievement's sake. With this movie's curious inattention to the question of why performing matters to its heroine, it could just as easily be a movie about a girl's brutal struggle to become Baskin Robbins' employee of the month.
Given the Cronenberg-like flaying I administered to Natalie Portman in my review of last year's Brothers, I feel it's important to specify that Portman is not to blame for what's wrong with Black Swan. She may not be the most nuanced of actresses, but this role—a passive, frightened girl trying really hard to be perfect—is a lot better suited to Portman's strengths than the earthy working-class mother she played in Brothers. She's clearly knocked herself out (and, scarily, dropped 20 pounds from her already sub-size-0 frame) to get the ballet rehearsal scenes to look right. (The actual dancing is done by members of the Pennsylvania Ballet along with Sarah Lane and Kimberly Prosa as Portman's body doubles.*) And in at least one scene, the content of which I can't reveal without spoiling the plot, Portman does a nice little piece of real (which is to say, non-"bravura") acting. Just as her character drives herself to the edge of madness in pursuit of the black-swan role, Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.
One thing you can say about Darren Aronofsky: You never know what he's going to do next. A through-line connecting his movies to one another would read like a 2008 stock-market graph. There was Bleak House[/i][/i] as a 3-D musical. The Wrestler is the only one of Aronofsky's films I've really liked, but I approach each new one with fresh excitement: Though his movies can be risibly off-kilter, Aronofsky is a filmmaker of ambition, energy, and scope—a guy whose reach has a way of thrillingly exceeding his grasp.Nina, after a respectable but undistinguished career as a low-ranking dancer, desperately covets the lead in Swan Lake, a demanding part in which the same dancer must play the innocent white swan, Odette, and her wicked black double, Odile. But Thomas gives her to understand, repeatedly and unsubtly, that while her form is flawless, Nina lacks the inner fire and wildness and all-around *****iness to dance Odile. One of Thomas' many refined cruelties is an ability to fan rivalries among his female dancers, and Nina soon becomes fixated on surpassing both Beth (Winona Ryder), a veteran female ballerina on the verge of retirement, and Lilly (Mila Kunis), a sultry, hard-partying younger member of the corps who seems to possess all the Odilian qualities that Nina lacks. The childlike and seemingly virginal Nina still lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), a glittering-eyed loon who gave up her own dance career to have a child and who now spends the day painting creepy portraits in her studio.The reach/grasp ratio is way off in Black Swan (FoxSearchlight), a movie that combines some truly stunning visual and cinematic ideas with some truly terrible, well, ideas. Yet the conceit at its heart is not unpromising. Like the über-ballet movie of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes[/i], Black Swan is a dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that's never quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who's clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we're never told. Though Aronofsky fetishizes tulle tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing, and what choreography we do see looks pretty conventional.)
And that's all you need by way of setup, since the drama of casting, rehearsing, and performing Swan Lake is soon engulfed by the drama taking place in Nina's own mind. Most of Black Swan unfolds in a feverish, lurid dream space that we can only assume to be a representation of the heroine's subjective experience—though it sometimes does appear as if something objectively nefarious, even supernatural, may be happening in those cramped rooms and smoky rehearsal studios.
By moments, Black Swan dabbles effectively in the grisly vocabulary of body horror. In a scene that recalls Cronenberg's The Fly, Nina finds the skin of her hand peeling off in long strips. At moments when she's close to finding the black-swan character, she develops goosebumps that give her flesh the look of plucked poultry. These scenes have a primal power that, even out of context, can get your palms sticky with sweat. (Just watch the trailer.) But as the movie goes on, this visceral imagery of bodily disintegration never finds a dramatic context to make sense in. Nina is just a collection of neurotic behaviors, not a character, and nearly all the conflict on screen derives from her victimization (or perceived victimization?) at the hands of others. We never understand what's at stake for her as an artist, other than sheer achievement for achievement's sake. With this movie's curious inattention to the question of why performing matters to its heroine, it could just as easily be a movie about a girl's brutal struggle to become Baskin Robbins' employee of the month.
Given the Cronenberg-like flaying I administered to Natalie Portman in my review of last year's Brothers, I feel it's important to specify that Portman is not to blame for what's wrong with Black Swan. She may not be the most nuanced of actresses, but this role—a passive, frightened girl trying really hard to be perfect—is a lot better suited to Portman's strengths than the earthy working-class mother she played in Brothers. She's clearly knocked herself out (and, scarily, dropped 20 pounds from her already sub-size-0 frame) to get the ballet rehearsal scenes to look right. (The actual dancing is done by members of the Pennsylvania Ballet along with Sarah Lane and Kimberly Prosa as Portman's body doubles.*) And in at least one scene, the content of which I can't reveal without spoiling the plot, Portman does a nice little piece of real (which is to say, non-"bravura") acting. Just as her character drives herself to the edge of madness in pursuit of the black-swan role, Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.
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Saw it tonight...
Went into the film not knowing what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. Very dark film.
Mila and Natalie lesbian scene was
Went into the film not knowing what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. Very dark film.
Mila and Natalie lesbian scene was
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Saw it tonight...
Went into the film not knowing what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. Very dark film.
Mila and Natalie lesbian scene was
Went into the film not knowing what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. Very dark film.
Mila and Natalie lesbian scene was
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I can't find any theaters with it. Aronofsky is one of my favorite directors.
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I can't find any theaters with it. Aronofsky is one of my favorite directors.
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Want to see, no one wants to go. Forever alone.
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Want to see, no one wants to go. Forever alone.
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Originally Posted by jschue
Darren Aronofsky
I'll give him a pass on The Fountain but every other one of his movies is dope.
yeah, he got a little too conventional with the fountain
hope black swan is
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Originally Posted by jschue
Darren Aronofsky
I'll give him a pass on The Fountain but every other one of his movies is dope.
yeah, he got a little too conventional with the fountain
hope black swan is
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Can't wait to see this, has OSCAR written all over it
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Can't wait to see this, has OSCAR written all over it
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word is that it's doing amazing as a limited release, setting records in fact...
"Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan
"Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan
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word is that it's doing amazing as a limited release, setting records in fact...
"Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan
"Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan
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just saw it. one of the best acting jobs i've ever seen. she will win an oscar. movie lingers with you after you watch it.there are a few things i would have liked differently
he made a ballerina movie very unsettling. that takes talent.
he made a ballerina movie very unsettling. that takes talent.
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