[djinjis]

How do you destroy a ballet thriller? Start by hiring Darren Aronofsky, continue by casting non-dancers

Portman was lacking in the lead role. For any one of you who have experienced the aura surrounding a prima ballerina, then you know of what I speak. There is an elegance about them that transcends all cultural boundaries, a sense of grace divine if you will.

Self indulgence from the director flows' the camera moves no more than a yard from Portman throughout the movie, constantly circling her and leaving everything else out. They may as well have not bothered with a set at all. Hang on...Was there a set?

A conflation of the *worst* parts of THE RED SHOES performed without actual dancers (three minutes of details of ballerinas working on their toe shoes do NOT equal 30 seconds of actual DANCE)

We fought our way through the season's first serious snow storm in New York to see BLACK SWAN, much praised (in some quarters) for reasons which I can only conclude have something to do with the silent movie style reliance on close-ups - one gathers a Darren Aronofsky trademark - to disguise the fact that this "ballet" film has almost no actual dancing except in the background because the leads *can't* - getting there and home again was the fun part. For anyone with any actual frame of reference either in the ballet or modern film, the movie was simply dreadful.


Even the MUSICAL direction is poor, frittering away the great Tchaikovsky themes in Clint Mansell's lame adaptation which rarely was allowed to soar except in the movie title segment of the actual performance of SWAN LAKE (leads only shown from the chest up) to help give the impression Ms. Portman's acting is supposed to, and scared far less than even middling work in an average Hitchcock film.

She is a one note pony, this swan. Her facial expression never varies from sad, purse-mouthed and leaky eyed. I got so tired of looking at her face. To top it off, I felt absolutely no interest in any of the cast as the movie wound excruciatingly along on its hopeless execrable way to nowhere.

However, it wasn't clear to me why choreographer chose this brittle virgin for the part, taking an enormous risk in an enormous spotlight when it was clear that she wasn't up to her sensual counterpart, that she was increasingly unstable, and I got tired of the constant rehearsals where this was pointed out.

Portman does her usual dance between two poles - anguished to stony faced, which she has been doing since Leon. Literally she used the same expression as she did at the door in Leon several times here. She was not convincing in this part for me at all. I also found Winona Ryder to be quite ridiculous and a little like the Wicked Midget Witch of the West

I felt as if Aronofsky and Natalie Portman could only visualize two sides to Nina : the "white" swan and the "black" swan

After watching the trailer for the first time, I asked my friend "Do you think Natalie Portman's character has split personality disorder and the "horror" scenes are simply imagined?" Turns out, I had figured out the plot before I had even watched the movie.

The lack of script is a serious flaw: she vomits, she slashes herself, she lives with her mother, she has lesbian sex - sorta, but she has no background, no character, apart from mommy's girl, no friends, no interactions with others apart from the briefest of convos about ballet. The mother is cardboard - with a standard melodramatic dialogue - "I gave up my career for you, boo-hoo me".



si asa mai departe.