Black Swan

[Drunk Monk]

Very engrossing and hallucinatory, and you know how I like a good hallucination, especially when hot ballerinas are involved. There's a good drug scene, a great psycho mom, some nice backstage cattiness and Padme delivers a textured performance. Desperately needed a sword fight though...

[Haggis Killer]

And with an EQ (Explosion Quotient) of....?

[Drunk Monk]

Unless you count orgasms. OQ=1. It's a hot lesbian scene too, so that should count for double. And there's some masturbation interuptus.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

The masturbation interruptus was the best!

I thought Portman did a great job as the fragile prima ballerina. I kept yelling at the screen for her to speak up. I thought the plot was pretty standard. Are we ever going to see the happy artist making great art or is it only the tortured ones who achieve greatness. I did like Barbara Hershey as the mom. She reminded me a lot of someone I know . . . And will Winona Ryder ever be the lead in a film again.

It was good but from all the buzz I thought it would be much better.

[cranefly]

I also thought it was a good movie but expected it to be far better.
The story seemed a bit too predictable because you know it will follow the contours of Swan Lake. But the bigger problem was Natalie Portman's character. Not Natalie the actress, who was superb, but the character she portrayed. I wished she was a more interesting person. She wasn't exactly the world's greatest conversationalist; she didn't have much of a sense of humor; she did not play well with others. She barely knew how to masturbate. No hobbies, no goals spare one. And yes, she was supposed to be an innocent neophyte, and I suppose her one goal should have been enough, but it wasn't -- not for me. She struck me as a cold limp fish in the beak of the swan she should have been.

I did enjoy the movie, by the way, and was very impressed by Natalie and also by Vincent Cassel. I just felt the main character was too single-dimensional to carry the story.

P.S. My favorite Aronofsky movie is Requiem for a Dream, which totally blew me away.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

P.S. "Requiem..." made me want to open a vein and kill myself. Meticulously crafted, spot-on acted, amazing storytelling about people who were a total waste of skin, their bad decisions, and the low-lifes who fuck them over. Basically, it was a genuinely beautifully made movie about people you wouldn't want to spend any time with.