I saw Black Swan the other day. I watched it in the O2 Arena, which is an eerie place, especially if there's a fun fair going on...with no-one on the rides. The bumper cars looked sad, the "daredevil" ride kept whizzing up and down, right to left with not one single person on it, yet the cranky speaker system would elicit a shriek and a howl from its soundbite archive.
It was a Friday night and I was sitting outside Las Iguanas nursing a pint and waiting for my cousin and her mate to show up. Usually by this time on a Friday night, I'd be necking my 8th pint and running down Leicester Square with my trousers around my ankles but this was going to be a civilised Friday night as I was really looking forward to watching Black Swan. This is not my usual type of film...I'm more into action, explosions, car chases and gratuitous shots of girls in bikinis (step forward every Michael Bay film), but beneath this facade of Bayhem I still love those slightly leftfield films. For every "Bad Boys 2" there's a "La Haine". For every "Die Hard" there's an "Audition". There's also directors and their films that I'm drawn too - Sergio Leone and his Dollars Trilogy, David Fincher with his films about the deconstruction of men (Se7en, The Game and Fight Club) and of course Darren Aronofsky.
I still remember the first time I watched Requiem For A Dream (it was in Leicester at The Phoenix Cinema) and I was hooked. Hooked from the very first split-screen moment - I had never seen editing, camerawork and performances so perfectly balanced and constructed as in Requiem. Since then loads of other film have used splitscreens as creatively as possible but Requiem is the yardstick. It wasn't even that, the film is such a breathless piece of work from start to finish it grips like a vice and never lets go. Watching Requiem made me go back to his first film, Pi, which is a good film but has that rough around the edges, student look which is part of its demented charm. I never really got into The Fountain. I remember being excited about Brad Pitt working with Aronofsky, but then Brad dropped out and the film had its budgets cut - who knows what THAT film would have been like. The Wrestler is heart-breaking...Mickey Rouke was robbed! One of the best performances ever of a guy trying to re-capture his past glory. You can almost smell the sweat, blood and tears of the lockrooms...which leads us to Black Swan. Aronofsky has always had a knack of getting performances out of actors who you'd think didn't have it in them. Watch Marlon Wayans performance in Requiem...thats right Marlon "Scary Movie cuz!" Wayans actually acting is earth-shattering. Ellen Burstyn's got Oscar nominated, Mickey got oscar nominated, Natalie Portman got oscar nominated - ya starting to see a pattern? You want Golden Globes and trophies to fill that mantelpiece, get your agent on the blower to Darren Aronofsky and start preparing that winning speech.
So as you can tell, I was pretty excited about Black Swan. Not because it was suppose to be grand operatic melodramatic, psychosomatic horror of the highest order, it apparently had a scene where Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis got it on!
So here's my review of Black Swan:
Natalie and Mila get it on! Its awesome!
And here's a slightly extended review of Black Swan:
A completely psycho, bonkers film of a woman on the edge pushed to the very limit. Great camerawork. Natalie should win an Oscar.
