Review of Black Swan (2010) by Diego T — 20 Feb 2014

This film was a load of old rubbish. The trailers made it out to be a psychological thriller/horror but, as usual, trailers lie to make up for the lack of a good film. The film we get is a poorly acted, cheesy, melodramatic, silly and quite frankly an embarrassing movie about a ballet dancer that no one cares about. I'm not even sure where to start with this. The 'descent into madness' was never there because Natalie Portman's character was never all there anyway so there's no descent to begin with. She's that generic shy meek girl that everyone picks on but is number one by the end because the script demands it, she was never able to conjure up an emotion that wasn't a scrunched up face that always looks distressed and the fact that she got an Oscar for this makes me sick. I just wanted to shake her character and tell her to grow up and stop being a baby. There is no way someone this unstable would ever last in a professional ballet production. Not that anyone else was any better, the people didn't act like people and the mother certainly DID NOT act like a mother, she was horrible. Everyone else was despicably cruel, I know we live in an imperfect world but you'd expect people of that age to be grown up enough to not act like they're twelve when something goes wrong.

I'm almost certain this movie was just an ego trip for the director and to get some kicks from the lesbian scenes. The movie just seemed like it was trying to be artsy but it just came off as 'Arthouse for dummies: by a dummy'. The camera work and the editing were absolutely terrible. NEWSFLASH: shaky cam is not supposed to make tension, it's supposed to add to the tension. The symbolism was so obvious it was borderline insulting.

The fact that this got nominated for a few Oscars makes my brain hurt. It surprisingly won 'Best Actress' really? Every other female outacted the hell out of her that year. I still cannot believe she won. Oh hell, I hate this I really do, would never watch again, I say its bad but I'm in the minority, as usual.