By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Darren Aronofsky’s dark Oscar-winning ballet drama Black Swan.
Is it just me, or does critical darling and all-round hipster poster boy Darren Aronofky’s new movie Caught Stealing look and feel suspiciously like Joe Carnahan’s 2006 Tarantino-flavoured turkey Smokin’ Aces? Either way, this new crime flick just serves to remind me of how much I hate Darren Aronofsky’s films. They all suck, but his Oscar-winning ballet blow-out Black Swan might be his worst.
Though the Oscar winning, much loved Black Swan is, in fact, a dud, it is something of a rarity for director, Darren Aronofsky. Why? Well, it actually makes sense…kind of. Let’s look at Dazza’s past work. Outside of the awful The Whale, in which Brendan Fraser is – big deal! – a very fat bastard, Aronofsky’s films are pretty much a confusing, nonsensical shambles.
Does anyone really know what the hell The Fountain is all about? Or Pi? That’s a film about maths, for god’s sake! Requiem For A Dream kind of makes sense, but it’s got a talking fridge in it, which is pretty funny and kind of stupid, even if it was just Ellen Burstyn’s drug-induced hallucination. Yes, okay, the story of The Wrestler made sense, but what didn’t make sense was why Aronofsky would want to resuscitate the career of a burnt-out, b-grade (anyone seen They Crawl? Or Exit In Red? Don’t whine until you have), plastic surgery-smashed mess like Mickey Rourke, who has since proven that his big “comeback” was a total flash-in-the-pan. Mother! Say no more. And the less said about the ridiculous Noah the better.
So yes, Black Swan does kind of make sense, but that doesn’t make it very good. In this shrill, over-directed, hammily acted arthouse thriller, Natalie Portman plays Nina, a baby doll ballerina with a bossy, spirit-breaking mama and a sleazy French director who gives her the lead role in his production of Swan Lake. Unable to cope with the pressure (boo fucking hoo!), Nina starts to mentally unravel, imagining that she’s starting to grow wings and that she’s being stalked by one of her pirouetting colleagues.
In one hilarious scene, she imagines that she’s getting head from said ballerina, but then looks down to see that she’s getting head from herself! Huh? Though this scene is played out as some kind of nightmare, wouldn’t most people be amped by such an ability? Anyhoo, what’s so truly crap about Black Swan is that we’ve seen it all before, in everything from Fight Club and Single White Female through to that modern masterpiece, The Roommate. The bottom line here is this: if Black Swan wasn’t set in the la di da, high falutin’ world of ballet, wouldn’t we all recognise it for the b-grade junk that it truly is?
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his slaying of Gladiator, his bashing of Chopper, his scratching of I’m Not There, his exploding of Interstellar, his take-down of Marvel Studios, and his carve-up of that other cinematic shit-show Citizen Kane.
