She's After Me!

"After Beth, do you need another controversy?"

- Nina (Natalie Portman) to Thomas (Vincent Cassel) in Black Swan.

Remember Sarah Lane? The lady who keeps messing with Natalie Portman's "dancing" in Black Swan?

Well, she's back! Not satisfied with Darren Aronofsky's recount of the dance shots Portman did (he said 111/128) Lane had the film's editor, Andy Weisblum, do another count of long shot scenes in which you see Nina's full body, not just Portman's gorgeous face.

Weisblum confirms that in fact out of those full body shots, almost 70% are Sarah, but wait, why is she doing this again?

According her she doesn't want "the fame, the recognition or anything" yet she keeps on making a big deal and blabbing on and on about her important part in the role to whoever lends an ear. the truth is that anyone in their right mind knows that Portman didn't become a ballerina in less than two years, it's just impossible! Even if out there, there might be a potential movie from the makers of The Blind Side that might try to prove me wrong.

Lane was interviewed by ABC News where she went on and on and on and on and on... (read full interview here)

The one thing that remains clear to me about this whole thing is that,

I also have been thinking what would happen if ALL people who inspire characters, went on to seek recognition for their influence and the ungratefulness of the actors?

Oh Meryl Streep, you'd be in deep shit...

Holocaust Survivors would demand she endured Auschwitz before making Sophie's Choice.

Catholic school survivors would send her to a convent before she even dared take on her role in Proof.

She'd have to be Anna Wintour's intern before taking on The Devil Wears Prada.

She'd have to be exposed to radioactivity for Silkwood, have an affair with a photographer for Bridges of Madison County and well, die for Death Becomes Her.

Isn't it ridiculous that some people have forgotten that actors, act? I'm buying Portman as a psycho ballerina and if not even the documentary in the Blu-ray lessened the impact of her performance, this lady keeps losing her time...

Got any more examples of actors that would have to redo their filmography to please Ms. Lane?

(My) Best of 2010: Picture.

10. Somewhere

Like Lost in Translation before it, Somewhere is a non-story that evokes beautiful nostalgia. Once again set in the world of Hollywood (stick to what you know, right?) Sofia Coppola delivers a delicate portrait of a movie star (Stephen Dorff) and his down to earth relationship with his young daughter (Elle Fanning).

Dialogs are limited, "actions" are sparse and yet, coming out of it, you can't help but feel that the world has been shown to you for the first time. Coppola's ability to find beauty in the quotidian has made her a true master.

9. Undertow

The year's best love story (sorry Never Let Me Go), had fishermen, photographers and ghosts. As delivered by Javier Fuentes León though, the film is able to avoid extreme quirkiness and/or melodrama, instead becoming a remarkable exercise of how to transport Latin American magical realism, into seamless visual narrative.
Manolo Cardona and Cristian Mercado will break your heart as the star crossed lovers, who must cope with denial, secrecy and death.

Kudos for being a love story between men that doesn't scream "gay movie". Love after all should transcend sexual orientation.

8. The Ghost Writer

Done with gleeful mischief by Roman Polanski, this was the year's most entertaining political thriller. Its layers and secrets more fun, not because of their real life parallels (Tony Blair mostly) but because they transport us to a time and place where movies could be entertaining and smart.

Ewan McGregor and a remarkable Pierce Brosnan take their game to splendid levels but it's Olivia Williams' role, straight out of The Manchurian Candidate, that gives this film its final laugh.

7. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Icy, distant and furiously feminist, this adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel was a stunning throwback to suspense thrillers at their best. Noomi Rapace gives an iconic performance as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander but the movie's best asset is its straightforward approach to its genre.

It's not reinventing the wheel but it never pretends to, instead it throws us sepia flashbacks, newspapers clippings and gasp worthy moments, with full understanding that it's main purpose is to entertain and seduce its audience. Action flicks are rarely this sincere.

6. I Am Love

If Luchino Visconti and Sergei Eisenstein had a baby, it would be I Am Love. Luca Guadagnino's epic work is a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of a collapsing world.

Tilda Swinton plays a Russian immigrant married to an Italian heir. The way in which love falls with violent aplomb onto their lives makes for a subtle political statement that leads us to ask questions cinema hasn't made us since the 1960s.

Is capitalism a force that opposes love? Can personal history be adapted in lieu of social class upgrades? Is there anything Tilda Swinton can't do?

5. Carlos

Olivier Assayas and Edgar Ramírez deliver one of the few biopics that can be called complete. This encompassing study of Carlos "The Jackal" forgoes ridiculous mentions of childhood traumas, facile Freudian diagnosis or unnecessary romanticism to tell the story of the world's most notorious terrorist. Assayas himself begins the film with a disclaimer saying that parts of the film are complete fiction, yet his assured direction and Ramírez's star making performance make us disbelief this. If this isn't the real Jackal, they could've fooled us.

4. Toy Story 3

People who attribute the success of this installment to nostalgia for the first two chapters, might run into a dead end when they bump into my Toy Story experience.

I'm most definitely not a fan of the first two and never held any high regards for Woody, Buzz or company. However nothing prepared me for the emotional punch of this film.

Who would've thought that Ingmar Bergman's explorations of mortality would live, not through Eastern European art cinema, but through computer animated toys?

3. Dogtooth

One of the year's funniest comedies and also one of the best horror films, Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth is a remarkable work of originality that thrives in spite of its tendency to push the level with every minute of its running time.

A morality play, a modern interpretation of Plato, a sexual comedy and much more, this film roots its perverse power in the best and worst of human nature; in our need to protect the ones we love and the fear of never living up to satisfy the universe that created us.

2. The Social Network

The Facebook movie proved to be much more than what anyone expected and delivered the thrills in more than one way.

As a comedy, it recalls some of the bitterest satires put on the stage. As a drama, it's a heartbreaking story of how money and power are never enough when it comes to eradicating loneliness. As a court movie, it's an exemplary work of how to push genres into fresh directions, as auteur work it's an unmistakable masterpiece made only better by David Fincher's ability to turn a great screenplay into an intimate, personal work.

Jesse Eisenberg delivered the best male performance of the year as Mark Zuckerberg and the film's stunt casting made a case for how its characters' values are the sad faces of an entire generation. Those who have compared it to Citizen Kane, are not using hyperbole.

1. Black Swan

In Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky explores the nature of creation while exploiting his very own creative sense. He creates an imperfect world within our own, where high camp, terror, psychological drama and insanity coexist with such balance that they make us wonder about the elements that conform our existence.

Natalie Portman gives the year's greatest performance as ballerina Nina Sayers: a fragile beauty trying to find perfection within chaos. Like the actual black swans, which remained a myth until they were discovered by explorers a few centuries ago, she undergoes a Kafka-esque process in which she discovers that she's becoming that which she once feared and thought impossible.

Her quest for perfection mirrors the film's own search for artistic sublimity, yet as an organism, the film seems to "learn" just in time that in order to achieve perfection, it must compromise with itself.

As Nina surrenders to insanity worthy of the most tragic Catholic saint, the movie takes an alternate path and observes Nina's quest, while it develops its own route. There's a moment in the film, where it stops being Nina (after following her path through most of the running time) and decides that perfection is perhaps too much to aim for.

That the film ends up being perfect in its own sense, makes for an interesting dichotomy between artistic expectations and actual aesthetic realities.

Black Swan was a reminder of why people go to the movies: to be transported to different worlds, to know people they could never meet in real life, to see the world from a different perspective, to bask in the face of the incomprehensible and metaphysical, and sometimes to be shaken to our core so all we are left to say is just "what the fuck?".

(My) Best of 2010: Director.

5. Olivier Assayas for Carlos

The scope of his film! Carlos was perhaps the closest we came in 2010 to having an "epic" film.

A multi-country, multi-cultured, multi-decade drama that focused on the life of a single person. Combining classic Hollywood filmmaking with 70's political cinema and filtering it all through his truly unique personal vision, Assayas made of Carlos "The Jackal", someone we could comprehend for a moment.

The fact that the movie originally was supposed to focus on one specific episode and was extended after Assayas realized he wanted to say more, is an impressive commitment on its own.

4. Roman Polanski for The Ghost Writer

As his world became more controversial and many expected him to slip into quiet retirement, the incredible Roman Polanski delivered one of the greatest films of his entire career.

The Ghost Writer had the balls to address current issues while recurring to political allegories that recalled The Manchurian Candidate and thrills worthy of Hitchcock's best work.

You can feel his hand the second the film begins and as it evolves you see how this seemingly simple film, ties up many of the themes he's explored in over four decades.

Best of all? The utter joy that exudes from the darkly mischievous film. Watching it you can feel Polanski's smile while he shot it. He truly loves the movies!

3. Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan

It's taken Darren Aronofsky a while but he finally delivered the movie worthy of his talents. After exploring the machinations of the human mind through addiction (whether it be to drugs, love or perfection) and trying out more intimate dramas, he grabbed all of his obsessions, techniques and styles and threw them together to create Black Swan.

This psycho-sexual-character study not only proved he's a master at directing actors (Natalie Portman will have trouble topping off her role here...) but that he's at his best when he loses some control himself.

Black Swan sometimes feels confused and misleading, but for the first time Aronofsky (who's known for his meticulousness) delivered something messy that might've lacked the firmness of his previous works but felt like a breathing, living organism.

2. Yorgos Lanthimos for Dogtooth

Making weird films is certainly easy. Making the weirdness feel coherent and achieve verisimilitude is on another different level though and that's precisely what Lanthimos does in his wickedly brilliant Dogtooth.

He creates a unique universe located within a house, but makes it work in relation to the world around the characters. Watching the precision with which all his means achieve diabolically funny ends, you can't help but think that he either lived something as insane as what goes on in the film, or he began writing it at age six.

Such is the level of encompassing power provided by Lanthimos that it makes sense that in some circles (and languages) a film director is also known as a "creator".

1. David Fincher for The Social Network

Even if he's accused of being cold, insensitive and too technical, David Fincher is truly one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers. His style is perhaps too European for Hollywood and this is why his attempts at creating fascinating essays are botched by middlebrow studio sensibilities (Benjamin Button anyone?).

It was a true delight then, to see him work at what seems to be complete freedom; in The Social Network he displays a mastery of the cinematic form that baffles in its effortless brilliance.

First, he created a movie that deals with lawsuits over a website, yet managed to make it more layered and intricate than anyone would've expected.

Second, his lead character is a complete asshole, yet like Welles in Citizen Kane he managed to make us look past the surface and created the most effective portrait of loneliness in ages.

Third, even if he says he didn't do it on purpose, he did capture the zeitgeist! The Social Network is a movie that encompasses an entire generation with such effortlessness that some out there still wonder what's the big deal about it. Others just surrendered to its perfection.

Fourth, his mastery of the cinematic form is such that it takes one several screenings to realize what a tight film this is. There's a million things going on at the same time, several times narrated and yet every single thing about The Social Network is united and flawlessly put together.

His work here is worthy of all the likes, shares and pokes anyone might think of, but perhaps his greatest achievement is that he gave us a movie to discuss over decades to come. Fincher seems fully aware that the greatest cinema doesn't stop living after the credits end, it moves with the audience who take it with them for the rest of their lives.

Black Swan ****

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis
Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Benjamin Millepied

Once upon a time black swans were thought to be a myth. White swans had been considered the epitome of royalty and beauty since times immemorial but its dark counterpart was thought of as a representation of utter evil; the antithesis of the pure, uncorrupted beauty in the white swan. What must've been the surprise of explorers when they stumbled upon the actual species in the Southernmost part of the world during the seventeenth century?
What could it mean that this creature did exist?
This uncertainty and eventual shock are the central dilemma of Nina Sayers (Portman) a New York City ballerina desperate to be cast as the Swan Queen in her company's production of Swan Lake.
Nina has perfected the graceful technique to play the White Swan but she is told by ballet director Thomas Leroy (a slimy Cassel) that she completely lacks the sexual energy and imperfection needed to portray its evil counterpart.
She struggles to win the part and gets it just as a new dancer joins the company; Lily (Kunis) from San Francisco arrives exuding the raw sexuality Nina can't muster, soon she becomes convinced that Lily is after her part and the only way to keep this from happening is for her to find the black swan within.
She descends slowly down the kind of, not-so-subtle, spirals Darren Aronofsky usually throws his characters into but unlike some of his other creations, Nina's breakdown has a flawless structure.
On the surface Black Swan feels like The Wrestler meets Suspiria by way of Cronenberg but once you look at it carefully, it really has more in common with Carrie than with Argento's horror film.
Like Stephen King's character, Nina's breakdown is parallel to her discovery of things until then unknown to her. While Carrie unleashed her telekinesis in a terrified attempt to exert some control over the unexpected changes brought over by womanhood, Nina begins to be terrorized by her doppelgängers who walk by her on the streets, haunt her house and spy from beyond mirrors as she finds that deep within she can also be dark.
Nina has decided she wants to achieve perfection and in her limited world view this can only be obtained with control; therefore when Thomas asks her to "let go" she doesn't know how to handle this.
It's as if she's been living in a fabricated world all along and has no awareness of the evil that exists in the world. This is represented by Nina's home which she shares with her possessive mother (Hershey) a former ballerina living vicariously through her daughter.
Watching their softly lit blood tinted apartment, where even the hallways seem to constrict Nina, we understand that in a way she has never left the womb, not because she doesn't want to but because it's what she knows best.
Black Swan is anchored by Natalie Portman's fierce performance. Like the movie, she first deceives us with her fragile beauty and we are led to assume this will be yet another of the actress' performances in which her delicate features harbor contrived fear and contempt.
Soon we learn that this isn't the case and we see her shatter before our very eyes. Beyond her method immersion into the character (her ballet technique seems outstanding!) there is something transcendental in the way in which she lets go of all vanity.
We see Nina's transformation from outside (Aronofsky's technical team does wonders showing bizarre wounds as Nina literally begins to think she's becoming a swan) but we also detect that something has changed inside her. It's something in her eyes that demands our attention in the way her body can't.
In the final scenes of the film, the Portman we are watching isn't the one we started with. During one particular scene as Nina finally becomes aware of what the truth is, she makes a choice. This moment isn't highlighted as much by the external elements (although the movie owes itself to Tchaikovsky) but by a heartbreaking look Portman throws at us, seemingly out of nowhere. How she's able to encompass fear, resignation and something that scarily resembles pride is what makes her decay so beautiful to watch.
In her search for perfection we could draw parallels about seeking artistic accomplishment but on simpler terms the film discusses this search in life as a whole. Therefore we are left wondering if Black Swan is a cautionary tale about the peril that comes with perfection (and if so, is it an ode to mediocrity?) or is it a reminder that everything that's worth something comes through a certain amount of pain?
Structurally Black Swan resembles a Russian doll, each containing a miniature double of the one before it. In a way, Swan Lake is Black Swan is Nina Sayers (again with the doppelgängers).
One of the biggest mysteries about Swan Lake is the fact that we never know why the evil sorcerer casts the spell on the princess. Why is he turning her into a swan? When the ballet begins this just is and we rarely get time to even question it.
Why are we to assume that this spell isn't some sort of deserved punishment?
Similarly in Black Swan we are never really sure of who is casting this spell on Nina, is the movie perhaps a prequel of sorts to the ballet in which we are to assume that maybe the princess had an insane mother or couldn't cope with homosexual thoughts?
Or is it finally a questioning? Is the Swan Queen actually fulfilling her fate? However twisted and tragic we might perceive it as.
It should be noted that Black Swan is a completely self aware movie. There is not a single camera move Aronofsky hasn't meticulously planned. From the way in which sometimes we follow Nina as if the camera is afraid to look into her face and see who she's becoming to the film's mirror motif, one that's not in the slightest original but the film doesn't really brag about inventing anything new.
It's also a selfish movie for it never pretends to worry about creating some sort of universal code we can use as metaphor. We are not supposed to identify with Nina. We either like her, hate her, pity her but we are not supposed to love her. After all the Swan Queen is never truly able to break the spell.
Structurally the film itself mimics Nina or at least the version of Nina it's letting us see and then it reaches a point where just like the ballerina in distress, the film too realizes that it doesn't know how to become the black swan. But how do you make a movie that loses itself?
In practice this would perhaps mean the director recurred to some robotic device or simply let the cameras roll without choosing what happens in front of the lens. Symbolically though Aronofsky settles on making it dangle dangerously between melodrama, camp and horror. Up to the very last shot the film seems to be trying to decide which one it will become and by then audience members will have made their minds about what kind of movie they just saw.
And whether it is high art or trashy exploitation, by letting each one decide, Aronofsky has created the perfect finale: the one that goes beyond "the world as a stage" conventions and bluntly reminds us that in the end we might be the only ones applauding our own curtain call.

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming films.


If someone had told me I'd be looking forward to a Paul Haggis movie I would've punched them right in the nose. However this is precisely what the marvelous posters for The Next Three Days have been doing for me.
This one sheet in particular looks like a lost piece of advertising from a Steve McQueen movie and as such it's perfection.


And the award for best campaign of 2010 has got to go to Black Swan.
I'm not crazy to see the movie as most are but I'd surely hang any of the posters all over my house. Such beautiful works!

Excited to see either of these?

High and Dry.

I have to confess that before writing this post I had never been able to make it through an entire viewing of Requiem for a Dream, not because I found it too bleak or gruesome or whatever (Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke are two of my favorite filmmakers...) but because I always felt it was entirely over hyped and to be honest not that good a movie.
Things haven't really changed in the nine years that have gone by after my first attempt to watch it, so don't think this will include a change of heart.
In fact I never got what the buzz about Darren Aronofsky was all about until I saw The Wrestler...but that's another story.

Given that I had to choose my favorite shot of the movie this time I had to look at it with a more critical eye and in doing so I realized that the thing that has always bothered me about this movie was how obvious everything is.
It's nothing but a morbid look at drugs disguised as a cautionary tale, Aronofsky's direction in fact is almost reactionary in the way he condemns and judges all his characters.
This was never more obvious to me than in the film's opening scene where we see Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) lock herself in a closet when her son Harry (Jared Leto) arrives at her house.
At first we have no idea what's going on and assume he will beat her up.

She looks through the keyhole terrified as Harry bangs and throws a tantrum. Then we see what he's after; he's trying to pawn his mother's precious television set once again.
He's done it so many times before that she has chained it to the heater.
In this precise shot where through split screen we see the terrified woman looking at her son's behavior and his attempt to steal the chained TV, we have the essence of the entire movie.
Notice how beyond Sara and Harry there's someone else in the shot: the person looking at Sara.
In this case the camera serves as Aronofsky's eye as he lets us know that the movie to follow will be his look at how people who succumb to drugs are chained to addiction.
The use of the word "chained" is by no means a pun, given that Aronofsky's visual language, and well, the chain tied to the TV, make it clear what he's referring to.
Throughout the whole Requiem for a Dream we are reminded by the director of how monstrous this people can be, he wears his sensibility on his camera and the movie suffers greatly because of it.


A following sequence of shots proves Aronofsky's judgment (or perhaps a slight attempt at some sense of humor) when we see Sara give Harry the keys to the TV lock.
She carries it in a chain (another one...) around her neck and when she gives it to Harry, for a minute we have the impression she's handing something sacred.
It's no coincidence that for a second the shiny balls of the chain remind us of rosary beads.


After all, addiction, is their religion.


This post is part of the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series, hosted by the fabulous and quite addictive, Nat of The Film Experience.

The Wrestler ***1/2

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood

You may never have seen a wrestling match in your entire life and you still will be rooting for Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Rourke), a professional wrestler who is way past his prime and looking for a comeback in Darren Aronofsky's touching character study.
"The Ram" was big in the 80's, where he even had an action figure shaped after him (and which he carries in his car with him), now he's living in a trailer, working part time at a supermarket and doing small venues aware that he's old news in the modern wrestling scene while trying to rekindle his relationship with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Wood) and trying to initiate a romance with a stripper named Cassidy (Tomei).
If everything about the film sounds like a cliché it very well should, the surprise is in how after watching it, it's been everything but that.
Centered on the remarkable performance by Rourke, "The Wrestler" takes a harsh look at a society where the underdogs only get their due in films like this (one of the "best" compliments you can give the film is thinking it was inspired by a true story).
Rourke disappears into Robinson, with a bulked up body, blonde dyed hair and the remains of what one was a face he embodies the pain the man has put up with for so long.
The only thing that reminds him there is a world outside his career is his ailing heart, which both physically and emotionally bring him down to Earth for a moment where he faces that he has to change in order to remain alive.
What Rourke preserves is an intense charm, aided by a sweet, almost paternal voice. When we see him playing a video game with a child, we don't find it surprising that the kid isn't terrified of him and when later he has to work behind the deli counter, the women he serves are enchanted by his brutish kindness.
Yet all of this hides a pain that he doesn't know how to channel. He is a bad father because he doesn't know how else to be; Rourke shines in his scenes with Wood, who gives an affecting performance containing her adolescent resentment until exactly the right moment.
Sometimes you wonder why Robinson chose this job and Rourke makes us understand that it might be perhaps because within it he has found the only place where he can control the pain he receives and the one he inflicts upon others.
Because if this kind of selfish sacrifice, his performance is almost sublime.
Tomei plays his emotional counterpart, at first being almost some sort of a twin. They both play entertainers who must submit to the fantasies of their customers (one remarkable scene cuts between the two of them tidying up for their jobs), both have to be careful in establishing the limit where the job ends and the life begins.
The actress, one of the few who can be completely nude dancing on a pole and stir feelings of kindness, avoids playing her as the stripper with the heart of gold and goes for a raw approach where not even she's sure she'll end up.
"The Wrestler" is shot in verité style by Maryse Alberti, who gives it even more of a documentary feel. The cinematographer's work with the camera is also a wondruous thing to behold, most of the film the camera follows "The Ram", reminiscing the moments before the wrestlers are sent off into the stage and also giving everything a rare kind of sadness making us think that perhaps everything good about Robinson has been left in his past.
Aronofsky details the behind the scenes of wrestling, where we are witnesses of the tricks and maneuvers they plan to put on the show we end up watching. In a way it's as if we're watching the movie being made in front of our eyes, because even when we know for a fact everything we're about to see has been prepared for our entertainment, there is an amount of truth within this that makes it remain compelling.
Those who aren't fans of wrestling will surely wonder what is there to see in a fight where the winner has been resolved before it even begins, where the pain and blood have all been calculated.
What is it that charms viewers about this showcase of artifice? Those who care to see beyond this will find a beautiful metaphor within the spectacle they're witnessing, as wrestling becomes comparable with cinema where the fates of the characters involved have been resolved way before the projection begins, but the journey can't help but feel thrilling nevertheless.
When talking about a match with some of his fellow wrestlers, "The Ram" asks them if they enjoyed it, after getting an affirmative response he stops for a while, points to the audience and remarks "more important, they liked it".