forever & always

Watched the movie Black Swan…oh my gosh…this movie is bloody slow…very very slow…I was already yawning…and the movie is not even quarter-way through yet. I find it to be a low budget movie too…the cast don’t have to film the movie in a foreign exotic location…because it only requires the dance studio, the apartment, in the train, at a night club and on the stage. The costumes are simply down to earth where it does not require epic-like designs. I guess the only huge budget portion is to pay for Natalie Portman’s wages and every dollar is worth it because I understand why she deserve the Oscar award for the Best Actress category but I have no clue as to why this movie was Oscar nominated as well.

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman’s character (Nina Sayers) that is nothing short of heroic, and mirrors the conflict of good and evil in Tchaikovsky's ballet ‘Swan Lake’. It is one thing to lose yourself in your art. Portman's ballerina loses her mind. It’s easy to play bad guy roles, but the real challenge is playing a tortured, miserable & confused soul. Nina was perfect for the role of the delicate & innocent White Swan - Princess Odette because her character is also like that but it was challenging to bring out her evil character to play Odile; the Black Swan. She dances with technique, not feeling. The Black Swan’s character is bold, loose, confident and clearly a sexual being; everything that Nina is not. It was a professional challenge & a personal rebuke. This creates a crisis in her mind: how can she free herself from the technical perfection and sexual repression enforced by her mother, while remaining loyal to their incestuous psychological relationship? It requires a balancing & delicate act to play two very contrast characters.

The main story supports of Black Swan are traditional: backstage rivalry, artistic jealousy, a great work of art mirrored in the lives of those performing it. Aronofsky drifts eerily from those reliable guidelines into the mind of Nina. She begins to confuse boundaries. The film opens with a dream, and it becomes clear that her dream life is contiguous with her waking one.

The tragedy of Nina, and of many young performers and athletes in today’s society, is that perfection in one area of life that has led to sacrifices in many of the others. At a young age, everything becomes focused on pleasing someone (a parent, a coach, a partner), and somehow it gets wired in that the person can never be pleased. One becomes perfect in every area except for life itself.

Anyway. I really liked it! It has cool story, a strong cast and the characters were all great.
You know, we should live our life like the Irish Spirit - happy, carefree and never take oneself too seriously :)