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Natalie Portman, a deeply dark ‘Black Swan’: movie review.(The Culture)(Movie review)

The Christian Science Monitor December 3, 2010 | Rainer, Peter Byline: Peter Rainer “Black Swan” is a love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky’s movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that’s out there.

But being different isn’t the same thing as being good. Watching this willfully deranged quasi-horrorfest, I would gratefully have chucked it all for a revival of “The Red Shoes,” which was also pretty flagrant, though less deranged. this web site black swan movie

The Powell-Pressburger “Red Shoes” (1948) inspired an entire generation of girls to become ballerinas. “Black Swan” is likely to have the opposite effect. Scrape off the film’s heebie-jeebie folderol and you’re left with this: Become a dancer, go mad.

Portman’s Nina, a virginal young thing with a benevolent-despot stage mom (Barbara Hershey) and a mania for perfection, lands the role of the Swan Queen in an upcoming, daringly “revisionist” (i.e., sexy) production of “Swan Lake.” The problem is, Nina must also dance the ballet’s bewitching Black Swan.

Because the stud-Svengali artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is skeptical that Nina can make it over to the dark side, he brings in a rival dancer, the sexed-up Lily (Mila Kunis), to act as both goad and back-up. (She also becomes Nina’s fantasy lover, or maybe it’s just another one of those now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t dream sequences.) Working from a script by Mark Hey-man, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin, Aronofsky plays up the thematic parallels between Nina’s dissolution and the narrative of “Swan Lake.” He dresses Nina in white and her co-players in dark colors, just in case we missed the point.

He blurs the line from the get-go between her reality and her rapidly accelerating fearful fantasies. A split toenail in this movie is never just a split toenail. It’s a portal into horror, or, to be more specific, artsy B-movie horror shenanigans.

The technique of visually connecting a crazy person’s interior and exterior worlds has been in the movies since at least “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920). But Nina has so little psychological substance in “Black Swan,” and Portman’s performance is so glaceed, that watching her come apart seems like an exercise in voyeurism. Or sadism. It doesn’t even matter, on some level, if Nina is a dancer. Her obsession with ballet has very little to do with artistic expression – it’s obsession for the sake of obsession (an Aronofsky specialty – see “The Wrestler” and “Pi”). this web site black swan movie

Aronofsky doesn’t exactly demonstrate a reverence for the art himself. He uses the ballet world, with its notoriously grueling physical and psychological regimens, as an excuse for a Grand Guignol meltdown. (The ballet’s score in the film, by the way, is not 100 percent Tchaikovsky, which means this is the second time in a month that Pyotr Ilyich has gotten the bum’s rush in the movies – the other being the execrable new “Nutcracker 3-D,” which doesn’t even feature dancing.) It was around the time Nina sprouted feathers that I decided “Black Swan” was either a vast put-on (too obvious) or vastly pretentious (more likely). Many moviegoers, especially high-toned ones, will believe otherwise. For them, anything this feverishly absurd and obviously made by smart people must be a work of art.

You can pick out all the references in this movie to other movies, not only “Red Shoes” and “Caligari,” but also, for starters, “Phantom of the Opera,” “All About Eve,” “Repulsion,” and Aronofsky’s own dreamy-druggy freak show “Requiem for a Dream.” In the end, however, “Black Swan” has the distinction of being its own beast. It’s a dubious distinction. Grade: C- (Rated R for strong sexual content, violent images, language, and drug use.) IN PICTURES: Natalie Portman’s roles —– More Monitor movie reviews:

The King’s Speech Tangled Burlesque Rainer, Peter

Colacello takes audience inside Warhol’s psyche

The Gazette (Colorado Springs, CO) October 21, 2005 | MARK ARNEST THE GAZETTE Author Bob Colacello shed light on Andy Warhol — and Ronald Reagan — in a lecture at the Fine Arts Center last week.

In “From Warhol to Reagan,” Colacello drew parallels between the two men; the former was Colacello’s employer for for 13 years, and the latter he’s written a two-volume biography about.

Colacello made two important points on Warhol’s art. During the lecture, he pointed to the influence of Orthodox icons on Warhol’s portrait style. He saw them for hours a day during his childhood, when his mother was a member of a Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh — basically an Orthodox church that recognized the pope.

An anecdote about Warhol’s portraits highlighted the artist’s basic seriousness about his work — a seriousness that’s sometimes obscured in the pop-art subject matter. Although he was flexible about the colors and composition of his numerous commissioned portraits, Warhol insisted on a standard 40-inchby-40-inch format. He told Colacello that someday the Metropolitan Museum of Art would do a retrospective of his work, and the portraits would look better as a group if they were the same size. web site art of war quotes

AT CAMP CASEY: A weekend art show at Camp Casey — the makeshift Iraq war memorial in front of Toons at Nevada Avenue and Dale Street – – was modest in size but provocative in content, displaying a range of ways artists react to war. go to website art of war quotes

“I Still Like Ike,” Kim Sayers’s collection of anti-war quotes by Eisenhower, proved that it’s possible to make a powerful statement with a light touch. The quotes were printed without comment on wallet- sized pictures of the former president, letting Eisenhower speak for himself.

A light touch is not Daniel Lowenstein’s goal in his sculpture, “Feeding”: A skeletal figure feeds gasoline to an infant George W. Bush, who’s wrapped in swaddling clothes of the flag. It’s blunt — and not everyone will agree with the artist’s assumptions — but the conceptual consistency gives the piece great power.

The class of the show — for its subtle craftsmanship, its audacious blending of contrasting textures, and its complex message about the relationship between fear and violence — was Pat Musick’s “ForgetMeNot.” This heart-shaped piece takes the viewer on a journey. It begins with a plush, vulnerable exterior, continues through a desolate layer of barbed wire and jagged, shattered patterns (in which drops of blood pick up the red border), and ends in an exquisitely crafted interior, in which a tiny naked male figure cowers, protected by his gun and helmet.

MARK ARNEST THE GAZETTE