"Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky, Film Review

"Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky, Film Review

The lesbian scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in Black Swan was highly publicized and leads to the suspicion that – rather than being essential for the structure and plot of the film – it was inserted as a ruse to persuade men to pay money to watch a film about ballet.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
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That's not entirely fair since it does show the pent-up sexual frustrations of the character, Nina, as well as expanding on the is-it-real-or-is-it-imaginary structure of the play.  It also gives a suitably climatic end to the nightclub scenes, which are nicely juxtaposed between the classical ballet, as well as making Nina late the following morning for a critical rehearsal.  But the lesbian theme doesn't really go anywhere in Black Swan.  Nina's sexual frustrations could easily have been shown another way, and this comes after the similarly tacked-on lesbian scene in Aronofsky's earlier film, Requiem for a Dream.

Requiem was way too melodramatic for my tastes and each of its strands unrealistically grim to the point of sadism. Black Swan is also highly emotionally intense but in my opinion is more successful overall due to its more developed characterisation and film-length single plot.

Review continues below...

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The inner lives of the characters are shown convincingly in Black Swan.  For example, we hear the older, pushed-out star in her dressing room saying "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" to herself.

The film uses the music of Swan Lake effectively and you end up wanting to see the original ballet.  This is all the more impressive when you consider that the nightclub scenes are also extremely realistic.

Once you accept that nothing you're seeing can be trusted, it gives a strangely liberating feel to the narrative.  It's a striking way to explore feelings, personal conflict and the 'truth' of characters without being tied to humdrum reality.  Aronofsky pulls off a kind of hallucinatory magic realism throughout the film.





It was good to see Natalie Portman getting her Oscar for this performance.  In the film, Nina is a perfect match for the white swan but until the end the jury's out on whether she can pull off the dual role of the black swan.  Of course, in real life, Portman didn't get to where she is today by being a wallflower and the Oscar-winning acting is surely what she's doing for most of the film as the repressed white swan.  The final scenes of smoking hot sexuality as the black swan must have been as easy for Portman to pull off as a walk in the park.

'Would you fuck that?' says the ballet director to her male partner earlier in the film during rehearsals.  The male dancer scoffs.  'No, of course you wouldn't.  No one would,' says the ballet director.  But in the final black swan performance, the same dancer reels away, dazed and confused by the force of the black swan's new-found sexuality.

Personal Score: 6/10

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This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," David Yates, Film Review

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," David Yates, Film Review

Who is the worst actor out of the three young leads of the Harry Potter films?  Daniel Radcliffe grins like a simpleton in a wind tunnel whenever emotion is required.  Emma Watson sleepwalks through every scene and then there’s Rupert Grint’s clueless gurning.  It’s hard to choose.  Grint has to take the prize though.  Nothing he does is believable and his performance consists of saying ‘bloody hell’ a lot.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

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After eight films it all gets a little wearing.

It’s beyond me how any Harry Potter film made it onto a Top 250 list, but to have just one on the list and that one to be Deathly Hallows Part 2 is bizarre.  Only the first few films of the series rival Hallows 2 for dullness.  At least episodes 6 and 7 it had the occasional memorable scene.  The only scene that works dramatically in Hallows 2 is the raid on Bellatrix's vault.  There are some nice touches of betrayal, magic and adventure there.  But the rest of the film is a grim flow of exposition and CGI battles between rival sets of pixels.

Near the beginning, Radcliffe interviews a number of characters while Watson and Grint hover mute in the background.  Come on guys, that’s not the same thing as dramatizing a scene.  They might as well have explained the plot points in captions for all the dramatic impact of these scenes.  It reminded me of certain mid-novel interviews in late Ballard novels.  There’s only one thing to do with scenes like that.  Cut them.

Despite being strung-out, Hallows 2 tries to tie up so many loose ends that nothing worthwhile is allowed to stay onscreen long enough to be interesting, especially the more memorable baddies.

Would it be too much to ask to have Hermione going to the dark side in cahoots with Bellatrix for a while, for example?  For a character-based film, the characters are curiously underplayed in this film.

But what about Grint and his acting?  Well, it’s a problem because he is the one who gets the girl.

I guess it’s the personalities of the characters and their various sexual tensions that explain the popularity of the books.  And of course every possible combination of lovers has been analysed into the ground by fanboys and gurls.  But whatever happens in the books (which I haven’t read) the screen versions of the relationships are ridiculous.  Ginny comes out of nowhere to snog Harry, and Hermione and Ron have got all the chemistry of a magnesium strip in a bottle of argon.  Surely it would have been better for, I don’t know, Harry and Hermione to get it together, only for Harry’s vocation to drive them apart, leaving Ron with the sloppy seconds.  Anything would be better than the unearned relationships that are inflicted on us in this film.

It gets an extra mark for not having a quidditch match.

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Personal Score: 2/10


This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer.  The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

"Jurassic Park," Steven Spielberg, Film Review

"Jurassic Park," Steven Spielberg, Film Review

Children are always going to be a problem in a Spielberg film and Jurassic Park is no exception.  There are two kids in the film, brother and sister.  Their foul gluttony, dangerous love of fun, and unauthorized ingenuity are all trotted out as though they were good things.  But the potential of seeing one of the little blighters chewed up by a dinosaur at least allows adult viewers to watch with a sense of hope.

WARNING:  CONTAINS SPOILERS

I remember one of the sequels to Jurassic Park (number 3, I think) had a direct correlation between the characters' moral fibre and their fates.  The goodies lived, the baddies died, and the one who showed some remorse for his evil only had his legs bitten off.  The vastly superior original has a bit of this – there's no way that naughty Denis Nedry (played by Wayne Knight) is going to get away with his greedy schemes, for example.  But good guy Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) gets injured and the park's mastermind, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) gets away unharmed.

Jeff Goldblum's character is a bit of an enigma.  He seems to be there primarily as male totty, often appearing bare-chested, and generally playing the libertine.  His love rivalry with dull Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) for hotty bone-botherer Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) never really takes off.  The main thing he does is to deliver killer lines such as 'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should,' and 'Life finds a way.'  He also serves to show the humourless, child-hating personality of the pre-epiphanic Dr. Alan Grant, who starts the film as dry as a bone.

It's important that the macho man isn't allowed to save the day.  A big deal is made throughout about women and children having to sort things out for themselves.

Related to this is the line 'Clever girl' as the pack-hunting raptor sneaks in from left-field to eat one of the hapless non-essential tasty humans.

Just as in The Day The Earth Stood Still, it's touching to see the respect that scientists receive from everyone in the film, as opposed to the contempt and envy they receive in real life.  Respect is surely due, however, to Dr. Alan Grant's supernatural ability to deduce behavioural traits such as intelligence, pack hunting and acid-spitting of different types of dinosaur, just from a pile of fossilized bones.  (Of course, each and every one of these traits are employed to deadly effect by the cloned dinosaurs in the park.)

But despite the ridiculous science, absurd gender politics, sentimentalized kids and Hollywood hacking ('It's a UNIX system!  I know this!') the film comes together rather nicely.  Its strengths are things such as the care to attention on the set-pieces (the kitchen/freezer scenes echo bizarrely with Kubrick's 1980 The Shining), Spielberg's instinct to inject suspense at every opportunity, the understated (yet spectacular) effects, the wild storm scenes and the knowing way that Jurassic Park builds on the dinosaur films of the past.  

Personal Score: 8/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer.  The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.

"Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood, Film Review

"Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood, Film Review

Vilely sentimental.  Has quite a few jokes, but most involve calling Asians racist names to their faces – for example, "I'll have a bit more of that good gook food."

WARNING:  CONTAINS SPOILERS

Its attempts to show that it is engaging hard with important issues in life involve the telling of horrific war stories and the sight of a studious girl being brutally beaten and raped.

So, is there anything good about it?  Well, a few things…

Nice touch that we only get to see the car being driven at the very end, having been present throughout the film.

"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone," is quite a memorable line.

Clint's character has the idea of nailing crime by the sacrifice of himself once he discovers he has a fatal illness, which is also quite a neat idea.

As is the fact that he is shot going for his lighter, after being repeatedly told to quit the cancer sticks.

But despite the odd nice touch of plotting, most of it is unwatchably bad.  For example, the teaching of the young lad into the ways of men, and the dialogue about how to do 'man talk' are terrible, ditto for pretty much all the scenes involving the priest.

Most of the time it feels like a Republican advert:  'Look after yourself and your neighbourhood.'  'Help out the poor people who live near you… if they prove themselves worthy of help by your own standards.'  'Work hard and earn possessions.'

Grim.

Personal Score: 1/10

This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on IMDB Top 250 films as a writer.  The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.

For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.