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Black Swan
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i saw Black Swan today 
- and i'm gonna say that Natalie Portman will win Best Actress at the Academy Awards.
it's a modern masterpiece
- and i'm gonna say that Natalie Portman will win Best Actress at the Academy Awards.it's a modern masterpiece
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what a beautiful film, probably the only one thats ever moved me so emotionally like it did
i really felt natlie portmans pain during the whole thing just how they filmed her routines and all her dancing was really clever
i loved mila in this shes beautiful
shes had quite a career 8 seasons of 70s show under her belt plus family guy
and shes still so young too i hope this movie gets her really big roles in future
"nina are you ready for me" and walks in with a black robe disturbing i mean i kinda thought there was sexual abuse going on at that point
o also
I found the film quite slow in pace, and although it 'felt' like it was building up to something 'epic' nothing really happened, and it was abit of an anti-climax.
Nothing was really explained, and you're just left to speculate, and guess, about what you've just watched for the last hour and a half.
Good performances by the actors involved, but I'm afraid the 8.9 rating on IMDB (with a top 100 spot) seems abit odd to me.
Worth a watch though, if you're a movie buff.
I think it thoroughly deserves its praise, and hopefully wins some Oscars. One of the best films I've seen this year.
Seriously?
One of the best films I have seen in a very very long time. Absolutely beautiful and utterly epic ending.
I wish it does well at the oscars and some film about a Dog with a rare form of Monkey Donkey Rabies doesn't get in the way.
I'm feeling extra lazy on this fine Christmas eve morning, so I'm going to paste an IMDB review that pretty much sums up my thoughts, and problems, with the film...
"Black Swan" is a bombastic, pretentious, middlebrow soap opera that struggles hard to say something profound about art and women, but manages to peddle hateful lies about both art and women. Men who've read too much Freud and have no understanding of women and teen Goth girls who wear black fingernail polish will embrace "Black Swan" passionately.
"Black Swan" has no rise in tension, no complication of plot. The entire film is a bleak, dreary, depiction of a schizophrenic who hallucinates and wears nice ballet costumes. Nina (Natalie Portman) is never depicted as having any normal life or healthy relationships the audience might care about her losing. From start to finish, the film features tight close-ups on Portman's anguished face as she careens through one hallucination, and one dance rehearsal, after another. Since Nina's world is so relentlessly bleak, horrific – and unreal – from the start, we can't invest in her. We can't care about her losing her hold on sanity, because she is shown from the get-go to have no hold on sanity. We can't care about her losing her friendships, or her hope, because she has no friendships and she has no hope. Nothing changes. Nothing is at stake. Nina is as big of a messy basket case an hour into the film as she was at the beginning. The endless close-ups on Nina's anguished face get old really fast.
The film-goer comes to understand disastrously quickly that Aronofsky's bag of tricks is limited. The sets are all in stiflingly monotonous black and white, no doubt to show how deep of a film this is. Since viewers don't know which scenes are real and which are Nina's hallucinations, it's impossible to invest in them.
The one bright spot in the film is Vincent Cassel, who relishes a bath in smarm as a ballet troupe's sadistic, manipulative, and very naughty director. He's the only one who has any fun, and God bless him for it. He could probably dance on the deck of the Titanic. With his French bonhomie and predatory amorality, Cassel is a cross between Maurice Chevalier and George Sanders.
"Black Swan" tells us that women are fragile and neurotic and if they do anything remarkable it makes them crazy. Craziness, in women, oddly parallels male sex fantasies. When women go crazy they have catfights with other women, including their moms, they torture their bodies and others in bloody, gory ways, they begin to pleasure themselves in visually artistic ways, and then they engage in same-gender erotic expression. Most of the women involved are young, fit, and minimally clad. How convenient for any kinky men watching this movie! Is this film misogynist? Ask yourself this, would Aronofksy make a parallel film about a football linebacker who goes nuts because being a football linebacker is a big stress? Yeah, I didn't think so, either. Of course this film is misogynist. "Black Swan" is a throwback to soft-core women's prison flics and misogynist film noir like 1947's "Possessed," that depicted Joan Crawford driven mad by passion.
"Black Swan" struggles really hard to say big things about art: that the drive for perfection can drive you mad, that artists sacrifice for their art, that art and madness are virtually identical. This viewer just cannot believe that someone suffering from full blown schizophrenia could become the prima ballerina of a high powered NYC ballet troupe. Ballet is not the whim of an afternoon. Ballet demands a lifetime of showing up on time, getting along with colleagues, and successful performance. Someone as ill as Nina could not have carried this off.
"Black Swan" wants us to believe the old, crude, invidious lie that art equals madness. It doesn't. There have been some high-profile artists who were also mentally ill, but that the public tends to focus on these people doesn't make art and madness the same thing. For most artists, art means years of unpaid hard work, dedication, self-discipline, and self-restraint. The creation of powerful art demands that the artist be, not crazier than the bulk of the population, but saner. Not buying into popular lies arouses envy and suspicion. Some people who hate art and artists are often simply envious of art and artists. And some people really don't understand art or artists and so they feel threatened and enraged by art and artists. It is these people who have given us the lie that art and madness are identical. Aronofsky doesn't do art or artists any favors by peddling this lie.
Erm, yes - That's my humble opinion - Each to their own
Anybody care to give me a short (non-spoiled) summary?
Erm...
You're projecting your own views of reality on a piece of creation. I wouldn't agree with anything you say about this film. You're assuming so much about the film that it doesn't become the film anymore.
For instance, your view about art and artists. You miss how beautiful the ballet is depicted in the film. You also don't realise how excruciatingly vicious an art form it is. Ask any ballet dancer or any choreographer or any dancer about ballet and the extreme nastiness and pain they have to go through for the beauty of it and you will quickly realise. It's about pain, it's about never ending injuries, it is about stress and pressure as well. The ballet world is and has never been a pretty one.
This is why I feel you say the things you do about the film but the question is, do you need to know this to realise how beautiful a film it is? Of course not. You've taken the concept of art and aesthetics into some romanticised notion of glossy hollywood fantasy. The world isn't a pretty place and this is a film that has a lot of remarkable elements of struggle and motivation and strife which lead to a satisfying conclusion. You assume Nina is tortured, is struggling and is in a hard place but she achieves her dreams at the end of the film. She realises what she needs to invest to do this and she accomplishes it.
So I think a lot of what you say is juvenile and also at times lacking maturity. That men can't watch ballet dancers without being aroused. Do you want these girls to wear hijabs then? Would it be ok if they were removed from conventional ballet attire? You compare it, inaccurately, to expressions in film noir. Is it really necessary to try hard to give it an essence of vulgarity?
You didn't get it. Films aren't supposed to be broken. If you take them for what they are you won't need to make comparisons and then hopefully you can accept art for art.
and this:
Heyman showed a draft to a friend who'd been a professional ballet dancer: "Her reaction was that we'd done a very good job of showing the scary and intense parts of the world, and how *beep* up it can be. But we hadn't really shown why people do it, what's the draw, the beauty, the transcendent aspect of it."
It was this notion of perfection and transcendence that would ultimately fuel Natalie Portman's character's drive to be perfect while destroying herself in the process, making it literally, the "perfect" ending.
Source: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118028953/
NP was excellent, so was Mila Kunis, I just think that the last 20 mins when all it went a bit fantastical and arthouse meant that all the good work beforehand went to waste..IMO.
Not a masterpiece for me, and I'm not sure I'd bother watching it again.
The last 20 minutes were hardly arthouse. Definitely a fantasy sequence in parts but not as a whole. It was generally a realistic ending.
Also there is a good reason why there are some "fantasy sequence" bits in the film, but I don't want to spoil it for those who evidently have to watch it again.
Brilliant film. Natalie Portman was amazing and Mila Kunis really impressed me too.
That one fantasy sequence is one of the best parts of the film.
Esp the Black Swan part - which I thought they should have extended a bit longer, it was far too short.
I don't think it would be deserved tbh. What exactly did she do that showed supreme/magnificent acting?
She played the role she always plays in movies, the pretty bad girl.
Film festival.