First things first – do we really have to sit through the new “Home” music video before every movie starts these few weeks?
There’s no easier way to turn an audience against a song than by force feeding it to them ad nauseam.
Just look what happened to the Dim Sum Dollies on the MRTs.
…
Just some quick thoughts.
I didn’t intend to watch this, but because my friend strongly recommended this to me, I decided to give it a shot.
Besides, I wanted to be able to make a fair comparison as to whether “The King’s Speech” or “Black Swan” was more deserving of an Oscar.
Thrillers aren’t exactly my kind of thing.
I don’t like scenes where the protagonist is minding her own business in the bathroom or whatever, but the underlying music hints to you that something sinister is brewing, and you’re like “Something’s coming! Something’s coming! I just know it!” and just as the music builds to a crescendo…BOOM!!!…someone appears in the most frightful way.
And “Black Swan” had plenty of those.
It’s basically a psychological thriller portraying a ballet dancer and how she tries to embody the most challenging role of her life – that of playing both the white swan and the black swan in the lead role of ”Swan Lake”, and how this role seems to consume her to the point of obsession.
The writing isn’t exactly the greatest (“Black Swan” isn’t nominated in the Best Writing category for the Oscars), and the plot is nothing much to speak of, because you more or less could tell what was going on most of the time.
I was reading a lot of the online reviews and the comments made on sites such as The New York Times and The Guardian, and I was intrigued by the extreme viewpoints made by various people.
Some said it was 5-star brilliant, and not a few others criticised it harshly.
Here’s what I think.
I thought it was definitely an amazing experience sitting through the film.
It was gripping, chilling, visceral, grotesque, and puzzling at times.
It was one of those films where after watching you wanted to just put your hands together and applaud it for its artistry.
But a few hours after watching the film, upon further reflection, I felt that it didn’t really leave much of an impression in me.
It was as if the effect wore of quite quickly, and that the film didn’t leave me with much in my mind to take home.
I felt the film didn’t necessarily have a great deal of depth to it.
I thought the acting by Natalie Portman was supreme.
If a performance like this doesn’t win you an Oscar, then it’s hard to imagine what would.
The directing was amazing, in the way that the camerawork brought out the tension in the film, and the way they managed to film what they did despite the heavy presence of mirrors throughout the film.
The opening scene alone, in my opinion, was an incredible work of art in the way the camera managed to capture the movement and poetry of the dance in such a dramatic manner.
As you would imagine in a film like this, music was paramount, and I thought the film was scored brilliantly as it certainly played an enormous role in bringing out a lot of the dramatic moments in the film.
It didn’t hurt that the wonderful genius music of Tchaikovsky was heavily used either.
I thought the casting of Winona Ryder as Beth was slightly ironic, as her dynamic with Natalie Portman in the film did seem to mirror her situation in real life in some cruel sort of way, i.e. that she is kinda washed up and no longer the darling of Hollywood, in the way Natalie Portman now is.
Lastly, just a final point that the finale to the film was indeed one of the most dramatic finales I’ve seen in a long long time, fitting for a film such as “Black Swan”, which essentially was a mirror to the grand but tragic “Swan Lake” ballet.
