Skip to main content

Black Swan: The Best Psycho Body Horror Ballerina Movie I've Seen In My Entire Life!!

What can I say about this movie? It was good, and it was absolutely worth watching. Natalie Portman (playing Nina) looks like a ballerina, and plays perfectly into the role of the socially awkward perfectionist with an extremely repressed passionate side. Mila Kunis (playing Lily) also did a great job as her more carefree rival in the company. I thought Winona Ryder was an inspired choice for the older dancer forced into retirement, and I was sad that she was featured so little.

Okay, I've got that out of the way, what can I tell you about the plot that won't give anything away? So, it's about a ballet company, whose star dancer has just retired (forcefully) and they're now going to move on to a new show, featuring a new dancer from the ranks moving to prominence. The show that they are going to perfom is Swan Lake, (please follow that link if you want know anything about it, because I'm only working on what I learned from the movie) But! They're going to do something different with it, something a little edgier, before the roles of the twin sisters, the white and black swans, have always been protrayed by two different dancers. With this show though, they want to have them both protrayed by the same person.

The drama comes in that Nina represents the prefection and grace of the white swan, while Lily embodies the passion and recklessness of the black swan. I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that Nina is the one who gets chosen, but she has a hard time tapping into her passionate side. And the end result is an eventual destability that is very painful to watch.

Also painful to watch, as I mentioned body horror in the title, is the surprising amount of blood and gore that your forced to see. It's nothing like seeing someone disemboweled, or ripped apart. But Nina has a tendency to scratch herself apparently, to the point of drawing blood, at which point her psycho mother (I know I never mentioned her above, so she's got a mom that was a dancer, but then got pregnant with Nina, and basically blames her for ending her career, and expects her to live out her dream as penance, or something. PSYCHO) comes in with a pair of scissors and starts hacking her nails off, only to cut too close and draw blood.

Now, I've endured my fair share of pain, and I can handle watching people get blown apart, shot, stabbed, beheaded, gutted, all kinds of gruesome things, but something about the subtle yet painful injuries on display in this movie, if you can watch it and not cringe, you've got a much higher threshold for pain than I .

Anyway, it's in theaters! Go see it! Or wait for the DVD! Whatever, just watch it! You won't regret it, or maybe you will, but at least you'll be thinking!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket

Final Fantasy XIII: I may not finish this

The latest installation in Square Enix's flagship series, Final Fantasy XIII does a number of really cool things. I don't want to take a lot of time going into the mechanics under the hood, but you need to get the basics in order to get a feel for the game. The battle system is real time, the battle constantly goes on even while you're deciding what to do, you're only in direct control over the party leader though, keeps you from being overwhelmed, the other two party members are only controllable only insofar as you can dictate what class they use. Class management is an important part of the battle system, only commandoes can physically attack enemies, and ravagers deal elemental damage, along with a myriad of other classes, each character starts off with access to a small selection, and by the end of the game will have extensive access to three classes, as well as marginal access to the remaining classes. Which classes you use are determined by paradigms, sort of pre

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig