BLACK SWAN

An artistic work of severe passion and visual splendor. Some will find it superb and depressing at the same time, most others will be awestruck and exhilarated by the way it creates a sense of fatalism within the world of ballet. Black Swan is very much about paranoid schizophrenia as it is about ballet. True followers could not possibly doubt its director Darren Aronofsky, famous for “Requiem for a Dream” and “The Wrestler.” But it would be easy to walk in and doubt the abilities of Natalie Portman, whose “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium,” “Garden State” are decent films for their core audience but hardly a stretch. Portman’s performance though is simply amazing, she not only raises the squeamish dread of the piece but she brings a delicate beauty to the stage.


Nina (Portman) has never been a headliner for the New York Company ballet but she is approached by its impresario director Thomas (Vincent Cassell, a coup in casting) who lets her negotiate for her big break. Thomas turns everything from ballet, to cocktails, to individual coaching into an opportunity for sexual innuendo – he forces kisses on his menagerie of girls. The other girls are inherent competition.


Former ballerina star (Winona Ryder, puffy but intimidating) is dropped by the company – an implied decision by Thomas – paving way for bright future stars such as West Coast arrival Lily (Mila Kunis, a princess bitch who likes to party). Nina becomes guarded with Lily’s arrival, convinced that she wants to steal her role. Lily’s “friendliness” is a threat because there could be a shroud of duplicity as part of her confident personality.


It’s a life in a bubble for ballerinas who practice 12 hours a day, stick to a strict diet, pedicure their toes, and go to sleep early only to day after day repeat the cycle. Even for that lifestyle, Nina is a case of extreme discipline. Not one to require a boyfriend, Nina lives with and obeys her mother (Barbara Hershey), who lives vicariously through the success of her daughter. Some people aim so hard for perfection that no variants can be allowed in a routine.


Early on in the film, she is bothered by a rash that is getting bigger on her shoulder blade. The mother takes such concern that she watches Nina in every room of her house. When Nina awakens in the morning to masturbate, only to be startled, it is not a delusion that her mother is resting in the love sofa placed on the opposite side of the room.

But Nina starts seeing delusions as part of her obsessive-compulsiveness (she has a bad compulsion with her hangnails, too). She sees different versions of her own self in the mirror, sometimes a morphing of Lily who she fears, idolizes and fantasizes about all at the same time. The ballet requires a two-fold performance from Nina: To possess the pure graceful qualities of White Swan, and the tumult and fury of Black Swan. Nina is an expert of the former, and Thomas spends weeks of rehearsal razzing her so she can build up a wilder persona which the Black Swan part requires. Self-doubt feeds Nina’s paranoia, but is there some truth to her fears that Lily wants to seduce Thomas in the off-hours so she can replace her? Perhaps Thomas was right, and Nina needs to learn how to become the seductress.


Aronofsky designates his heroine with masochistic qualities as similar to his characters in his previous films. This isn’t the kind of romanticized ballet that was seen in “The Red Shoes” (1948) which had its tragic elements but was primarily embodied with an ornate beauty. “Black Swan” doesn’t always have a conventional beauty but it certainly is eye-popping. Aronofsky does have a beautiful way of photographing Portman as a pirouette. And as truncated as the final performance is for sake of running length, you still get an idea of what “Swan Lake” is all about if you have never seen it. Backstage disturbances mirror the drama of the stage performance like an unwise partnership between naïf and some version of Lucifer.

Grade: A

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS

Features Jim Carrey in a corrosive black comic performance, yet at the end this is a dubious accomplishment. I Love You Phillip Morris has Jim Carrey as a con man and Ewan McGregor as Phillip Morris, disguising itself like feel-good entertainment for a few minutes until you see the undertow. It’s a gay love story with an unsympathetic and dishonest protagonist at its center. Lies and deception are not traits of his character; it is his character (it’s also based on a true story). All this might have been okay if it had taken a hard and perceptive approach in chronicling a pathological con artist. But it wants to be comical and quirky, and with that method, it comes out as real slimy entertainment.



Not all of it is boring, but it’s not comforting either. Steven Russell (Carrey) is a half-hearted policeman who does the dirty deed (sex!) with his wife Debbie (Leslie Mann) one minute, and then the dirty deed with another man the next. After Steven leaves his wife and quits his job, admitting dissatisfaction, he relocates to Florida to pursue a roving homosexual lifestyle. He wears gold watches, drives convertibles, and he lives in swank flats at adjustable low prices. Acts of fraud land him in prison.


While in prison, he falls for Phillip Morris. The most versatile and concentrated of actors, McGregor doesn’t do much in this movie other than act fey – it is not one of his more creative performances. Steven offers him the skies and the heavens, and as the dominant man he pretty much delivers. While they start out on different cellblocks, Steven soon fixes it so they can share the same cell. The movie is preoccupied with talking about oral sex a lot, which they both seem to share an affinity for its pleasures. But Steven gets a transfer to another prison which means they will have to acquiesce as pen pals. It’s not over, though, because when Steven gets out he educates himself on the law and figures out a way for Phillip’s case to be repealed.


Once they are both on the outside they are able to move in together. Steven desires for the both of them to have a grand and luxurious lifestyle. Steven becomes a lawyer imposter and gets himself a great big six-figure job at a fancy law firm. He doesn’t know what he’s doing at first but he soon masters it (these are among the most entertaining parts of the movie). But a great job is not good enough so Steven starts to defraud the law firm. New house, new cars, new jet skis – the spending doesn’t stop. But Steven is soon on the run from the law.


Steven keeps getting caught and then keeps fleeing, over and over again, for the rest of the film. Phillip is a flustered romantic object who gets tired of waiting for Steven, and then eventually, stops trusting him. Can Phillip love Steven back even through all that distrust? The film arrives at the most distasteful con, involving terminal disease and bilking the system, you will ever come across in a movie – if it fooled me it will likely fool most of everybody. This isn’t funny. This is about deep mental illness of a protagonist with sociopathic profiling. But the filmmakers want you to laugh it off. Take a shower at home afterwards and scrub off the muck.

Grade: C-