Black Swan, Objections Thereto

I'm a bit lost as to where to begin writing this post. I'd like to say a few words about Darren Aronofsky, if only because he keeps getting praise which I don't understand. But I'm not sure how to frame my argument so that I don't give off the wrong message. My issue with Aronofsky is not that I dislike the films. It's something else.

Let me try putting it this way. I've seen three films by Aronofsky. The first of these, I loved it, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. It was Requiem for a Dream, a harrowing, graphic tale about a group of people who are into the use of drugs and ultimately sacrifice themselves to them in the film's climactic conclusion. Next followed The Wrestler, a harrowing, graphic tale about a guy who is into wrestling and ultimately sacrifices himself to it in the film's climactic conclusion. And now Black Swan, a harrowing, graphic tale about a girl who is into ballet and ultimately sacrifices herself to it in the film's climactic conclusion. Are we beginning to see a trend?

Aronofsky has caught a virus which was supposed to belong to Guy Ritchie. Ritchie made one brilliant comedy in Lock & Stock, and then remade it in both Snatch and Rocknrolla by switching the ancient shotguns for a diamond and then for a valuable portrait. But it's still, essentially, the SDF (same damn film).

And then there's the fact that Aronofsky seems to be getting more popular the less his films become interesting. From what I understand, Black Swan (which abbreviates to BS but I don't have the heart for that) is the first of Aronofsky's films to win a major Oscar (Best Actress). The others have swept up the Baftas, the Golden Globes and other prizes, but have been ignored by the more populistic Academy Awards. Black Swan finally breaks the mould – and rightly so, because it's by far the most audience-friendly of his films.

I've stopped that old silly thing of exploiting gratuitious boobs to get hits on my blogs. It's Lesbo kisses all the way now!

One of the major problems I have with the film is that it's one of those old stories about art. The point being that an individual sacrifices herself for her art, and the parable shows how art takes everything from you, demands everything, etc. In other words, it's the famous (*yawn*) dialectic about art versus life. I liked Requiem for being a simple narrative about what happens when you take drugs, told with brutal efficiency and indelible power. But the points made by Black Swan are about two-hundred years old, and they're really beginning to feel stale. The ending, with the 'it was perfect' closing line, is one tired cliché (and it made me think of that abhorrent closure in Last Samurai, when the master sees the 'perfect cherry-tree' while dying in battle).

Of course, precisely because the story is so old, it's easy to recognize and easy to digest (hence so many people going nuts over the film's cathartic power, I guess) – even though it's false. When presented in this form, Nina's tragedy is meant to encapsulate an underlying dilemma – whether she should choose art or life (which is the Romantic form for the original choices of Hercules and Achilles between life and glory). And the audience is meant to be provoked into reflection because, y'know, they're weighing out the same question. But since the possibility of a positive response is conditional on her identity as an 'artist,' and since this identity is not assumed but born into (via another old myth, 'talent' – read, blueblood), there really is no question, and Nina is stripped of her tragic dimension as she simply follows through the struts and frets of her linear script.

With no sense of the tragic, all the gore and graphic details that we're constantly subjected to over the projection lose their weight, and become voyeuristic at best, torture-porn at worst. These graphic details are the things that normally make Aronofsky's films tough to stomach, even when they are so easy to digest. In association with the sensitivity denoted by the themes (a vaguely left-wing sensitivity, at times), and the intellectual aura which surrounds his movies, I am getting a real sense of what their target audience is. Aronofsky makes films for Young Men Who Think They Are Smart. They're the ones who can be expected to like old Darren's films most readily. Black Swan's most clever touch was to focus its story on female characters and concerns, thus broadening its appeal enormously – and this probably accounts for its popularity at the box-office (its US gross is ten times the total gross of his last film, The Wrestler, and it's still showing in the EU).


I've defended Inception in the past as one of the notable films of 2010, more so than Black Swan anyway (it goes without saying that this has provoked a few intemperate responses, as is often the case when your interlocutor is a Young Man Who Thinks He Is Smart). I'm not crazy for Nolan's picture, but it did have some effects I liked. It divided critics on whether the film is clever or hollow, on whether its technical set-pieces made for good story-telling, on whether it took any steps forwards with respect to its granddaddy The Matrix (and if so, how), on whether it was engaging science-fiction or just re-hashed Philip K Dick. In other words, it generated some waves. It caused some change. It posed some questions. With Black Swan, critical response has been pretty standardised. There's a few people who are calling the film for what it is, but even then, the disagreement is about the execution, not about the theme or the idea of the film. And how could it be any other way? Black Swan is a film made to generate consensus. It's a film which we cannot help agreeing upon (mostly).

Look, I want to make this clear. It's not that I didn't like Black Swan. I enjoyed it – how could you not? It's a well-crafted story, about an all-too familiar topic. It's like the intellectual version of family comedies – as long as they're properly executed, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the viewing. But it does nothing that hasn't already been done in Aronofsky's previous films, and it says things about art which have already been said, what, a billion times? As far as I'm concerned, if the next film by this guy doesn't show me a radically different synopsis when I google it, I'm gonna steer away. Peace out.

Of Tits and Zombies

The fact that I should have been born a girl is the consensus of all of my friends, or it would be if anybody agreed with it. Girls in particular get all WHATEVA when I suggest the pacate proposition. But in truth, the evidence on the subject is substantial. Consider: 1.) I am extremely sensitive (and I cry easy, too). 2.) I like sweet, cloying drinks, like Coke and Sambuca, which I've had to stop drinking because of all the people who scream faggot when I walk by with that pink shit in my hands, and conversely I dislike the most bitter and burly versions of beer (that stuff feels like throwing a hand grenade down your throat). 3.) I'm almost hairless. Even my beard grows sparsely. 4.) I love cooking. (whoops... faux pas there). 5.) And dancing. 6.) And Titanic. Fuck it. 7.) I'm more into literature and the humanities than into the sciences.

And though by this stage you're probably thinking OHMYGODHE'SGAY, I'm sorry to disappoint. Nope, I don't pack fudge. I was just given the wrong tag on the birth-processor.

So anyway, all of this dubious introduction serves one purpose only, and that's to introduce my subject-matter. In reality I wanted to write about Cameron's The Terminator, as I had some really brilliant things to say about that movie, but that article has been mooched by a film-site (I shall be linking it shortly) and you guys get STUFFED!! Instead of something really clever, you get this bullshit post summing up my thoughts-o'-the-day to avoid the blog falling into dis-use and growing jungle weeds, which would make it difficult to access again, and it would encourage gorillas to settle colonies here.

This image is about the Terminator. (No seriously, that lady is the TX from Terminator 3).

So the point I was driving at is that I now have another piece of evidence pointing to the fact that I should have been born boobied, and this is it: I don't like horror movies. I'm generally quite squeamish and seeing people slapping each other with their own livers is something that grosses me out to no end. I do make an exception for the Alien saga, but that's mainly because I grew up with it, kind of like other people with Biff, Parker and Chip or however the fuck they're called, and besides it's closer to sci-fi than horror.

Yet despite my comparative dislike of the genre, I've been pushed into watching a few of these movies as of late. Firstly, there's Chris with his blog on zombies who told me that if I watched Night of the Living Dead, he'd put all rounds on him next time we went out drinking together, so I thought, what the hell. I watched it. Remuneration will have to wait till I'm back in the rain-trench also known as England, but in the meantime, everybody and their dog is asking me – did I like it?



Uhm, so-and-so. I was relieved to find that the film is actually remarkably tame. I mean, zombie movies are usually some of the grossest shit you can imagine, but this one didn't have much more than people beating each other with their shoes, which used to happen to me all the time anyway with some of my housemates. I mean, it's a disturbing film psychologically, but they aren't tossing pints of blood around like Bavarians at the Oktoberfest for a change.

The film, for those who don't know, is the story about a young deer who grows up in the forest. As he matures, he gets to make friends with several of the other animals, acquire new skills, but one day the hunters come and he must learn to be brave like his father.

No wait, that's Bambi. What the fuck was I writing about again? Oh yeah, gruesome films. Actually I think Bambi succeeded in horrifying more children with its fucking Schindler's List finale than Night of the Living Dead ever did (there's a film for you to write about, Chris). But still. Night of the Living Dead is the story about BARBRA and another group of schlocks who barricade themselves into a house and try to survive while dead people outside are raised by an asteroid's radio-waves into cannibalism (I love how that sentence started out rational and slowly decayed into total WTF territory...). One of the film's main themes is the name BARBRA, because in the first ten minutes you hear the name BARBRA a lot (particularly for the immortal line: 'They're coming to get you BARBRA,' which particularly distresses BARBRA, presumably because she's tired of hearing her name said all the time. Like, ok I'm called BARBRA, I got it guys! This isn't a porn movie!).

Another of the film's main themes is death. Or I'm guessing, anyway. I'm not completely sure.

So anyway, to be serious for five seconds, the film is actually pretty good, if a bit rudimentary in its execution. It's got quite a few psychological layers which make it engaging, it was undisputably influential, and astonishingly, it has a black protagonist (1968? Jesus!). The story is good, but I think the technique and direction, with all its close-ups on faces and screeching music, sort of underlining for us 'This is when you have to be scared guys,' feels a little dated. So it's obviously a good movie, but one that has suffered aging more so than many other films of the time. The undead, for instance, are not very credible. You just can't get out of the sense that, eh, they're frigging actors! What are all these people panicking about??


The soundtrack is also a very famous feature of the film. This monotone, hysterical piano is one of the most distinct and recognizable aspects of Night of the Living Dead, and it was particularly successful in the subsequent concert that toured all of America, called Night of the Dead Live (sorry. I couldn't resist that). It was followed by numerous sequels, some of which as influential as the first: Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Afternoon of the Dead, Tea-time of the Dead, Evening of the Dead, Supper of the Dead, Clubbing with the Dead, Drunk-Driving with the Dead, Laid with the Dead and others. (Laid with the Dead is known in some countries as Twilight. Apparently the girl there gets in a threesome involving a wolf and a vampire... woof man, necrophilia up the ass and bestiality in the mouth and they're still wondering how this film got a PG13?).

The other horror film I saw these days that I wanted to write about... yo dude, what ho! I'm out of space! I shall discuss it in the next few days.

Stay tuned! And in the meantime, get this!

Skyline, the worst film of 2010

I don't know whether bad movie reviews ever have any effect other than encouraging people to go see the damn thing, so chances are I've just promoted this piece of shit pseudo-sci-fi flick, but you know what? If you wanna go see it, do. There's certain films which are so bad they make you lose even your basic sense of humanity towards other people which make you want to save them from wasting seven euros and two hours of their lives, and this is most certainly one of them. Besides, it keeps me off studying graph mathematics. So here goes.

Skyline is an alien invasion flick, one of those innovative emergent genres which you've probably never heard anything about before, and whatever issues of originality may arise from its choice of genre, they pale before the staggering banality of its execution. I suppose it's a good starting point if you've seen Cloverfield because, uhm, IT'S THE SAME FUCKING FILM. In both cases there's a house-party of rich wankers and top-models and suddenly aliens come and everybody dies, except that this new film loses what good there was in the original and fucks up the rest. By the way, Cloverfield is a pretty dreadful movie, so if I'm saying 'Skyline is the bad version of Cloverfield,' I'm really not paying a very high compliment at all. (If the claim needs explaining, Cloverfield wants to create an immersive film by means of that hand-held camera technique, but then it stuffs its plot and dialogue with so many screaming clichés to remind you that IT'S ALL JUST A FILM that you're pulled right out of the experience before you can even get into it).

But about the IT'S THE SAME FUCKING THING problem, it recurs often enough in Skyline that I'm going to create an acronym for it: TSFT. You'll see this appearing a couple more times.

So we open the film with the typical collection of clichés, from the white guy who is dissatisfied with his job to the loving wife who, whooops, is pregnant and tells him in the middle of the party and then goes into a hissy fit because he isn't leaping for joy (no shit lady, the guy can't afford his damn car and he's meant to take care of a child, let's throw a party - oh wait, too late). Right behind them we get the other two clichés coming out of a room where they've been banging each other: the black guy, who is the best friend of the white guy because the latter, you see, he isn't racist!, and whose destiny is death because he's black, and the pretty girl, whose role is that of whimpering throughout the film and whose destiny of course is death because she's a slut. Then there's the 'official' girlfriend of the black guy, who is a bitch (not in the profligate sense, she's just really annoying, which is meant to 'excuse' the black guy for cheating on her with the slut, although the slut is exempt from such moral generosity of course), and a generic, emotive white guy who is (presumably?) the actual boyfriend of the slut. Ten minutes into the film, and we've established three love triangles we do not care about. This is going well.

As though we didn't already know by this stage that we're headed into one massively inbred movie, the director gives us an appetizer of the kind of mentality that we're going to have to endure by a rabid assertion of homophobia. Emotive guy is 'entertaining' everyone at the party by pointing a telescope (connected to a giant TV) at the neighbouring windows and trying to catch someone having sex. I don't know how something so fucking perverted could pass for endearing party-games when they should all be locked up and hung on the nearest tree the next day, but anyway. He catches this guy's face who's obviously on the receiving end of a blowjob, and when the other head comes up, it turns out, hold your breath, that it's another guy. Personally it struck me as the most predictable thing, but still everyone at the party starts yelling and laughing and going all icky, because homosexuality is sooo funny and sooo disgusting (then why are you pointing your telescopes to it in the first place, you fucking morons) while Emotive guy stands there gaping like he's just seen aliens landing on earth. The irony isn't lost on me nor on anyone else, though when aliens actually *do* land on earth no-one seems half as surprised (the clichés are so powerful that even the clichéd characters themselves have gone dull to them).

So the aliens land at night, the blue light attracts Emotive guy to his doom, and we find out the 'twist,' guys, the thing that makes this film 'original.' The idea is that the aliens hypnotise you by means of this blue light. OOOOHHHH I SEEEE!!!!! The directors want to make sure we don't miss out on the particular cleverness of this, so they have the characters remind us. It's 'ingenious,' says Pregnant-girl, looking into the camera. Uwe Boll, take notes.



So the rest of the film is basically these guys trying to survive in the condo while the aliens wreak havoc. Their ideas are never much smart: first the black guy wants to take everyone to the yacht (rich sons of bitches, of course I'm supposed to identify with these assholes when I can't afford a hoover), Pregnant-girl vehemently disagrees and says they should not be doing that nor 'waiting here to die' either, not that anyone knows what the fuck else she's proposing, but the white guy agrees with the black guy, so they go out. There, half of them get sucked off, pardons, sucked *away* by these slimy bug things who suck brains out like it's TSFT as Starship Troopers and who fly around in capsules like it's TSFT as Independence Day (hard to believe anyone would go to the length of copying the creative ideas of that film, that's like trying to steal the dialogue from a silent film, there just isn't any). Then they all run back into the building, being saved in passing by the next cliché, the Tough Guy. Said Tough Guy is a bearded guy with a beer-belly who was the chief security of the building or something and who goes around insisting to our protagonist that 'this is real' and that he has to face up to the situation.

We get some shots of the military attempting to take down the aliens and failing (they throw an atomic bomb on them which somehow destroys the ship and leaves Los Angeles intact, which is absurd, but then the creatures inside the ship didn't even die, which is even more absurd, but by this stage we might as well be reading Beckett). Then the protagonist suggests they should all go back to the yacht, and the girlfriend looks at him bewildered, I mean, 'after what happened last time?' The protagonist looks at her with puppy eyes while muttering 'you say that like it were my fault' and he actually thinks it isn't, and meanwhile, just in passing, we're all wondering about a little detail: what in the name of flaming hell ARE these alien bug-things flying around?? What do they want? Where do they come from, why are they here? I mean, in the entire film they just land and kill everything and we're never told anything else as to what they are or want. They seem to have no civilisation, no culture, no coherent biology. They might as well be coming from the centre of the earth or from another dimension or from hell or from the projection of the human psyche or from the books of Armaggeddon or from some poltergeist gone wrong or from some ancient pharaoh's curse or from literally whatever. There isn't a single line of explanation.

Perhaps the only thing that seems to give them a casus belli is that they suck out human brains so that they can put it into their own creatures and make them live. Take a minute to soak in just how absurd this is from any scientific point of view. A species evolved in heavens knows which remote corner of which galaxy or temporal dimension is somehow dependent for its reproduction on, uhm, the human neurological system, which has only been in existence for a couple of hundred thousand years anyway? This is beyond any degree of stupidity!! And if they're so advanced as to create ships capable of spontaneously rebuilding themselves from an atomic explosion, wouldn't they already have brains far more bad-assed than ours? And then there's that process of 'instant transplant' where they just rip out a brain and insert it into their bodies and, hey presto, it's working for them just fine, what do you think it is, a phone card, and why the hell are they glowing like armbands when they're pulled from... oh FUCK IT.



So everyone dies but for the two protagonists, but not before the Tough Guy gets the single biggest cliché in the entire movie, because before dying he opens up the gas and when he's about to get sucked off, pardons, sucked *away* by an alien, he lights the match and says 'Vaya con dios, you son of a bitch.' You could hear the groans from outside the cinema, I swear.

What happens then? After the Terminator 2 TSFT mentioned above, the two protagonists get sucked up into the alien space-ship. We get a number of shots of different cities in the world run over by the aliens, so it's one of those depressing apocalyptic endings... but wait! We cut back to the inside of the alien ship, inside a gooey hive which is a blatant Aliens TSFT. The boy gets his brain sucked out while he's unconscious, and the girl is taken somewhere so her baby can be ripped out or something (yes, it's as disgusting as it sounds). But, when the brain of the boyfriend gets transplanted into the alien, for some utterly inexplicable and delusional reason it takes over the consciousness of the alien, and he runs to the rescue in slimy form. The girl recognises him, and we cut to credits as the 'man' gets ready to fight hoardes of aliens.

This is actually the most absurd, implausible, ridiculous and downright silly moment of the entire movie, but I'll say this if nothing else, that it's also the only bit which is kind of respectable. I mean, it's incredibly stupid, but at least it's stupid in its own way, a bit like Toxic Avenger or other splatter/horror films, rather than being a mere daguerrotype of other films seen before. It's a shade of another kind of movie, a movie which would have been wholly more stupid but also wholly more uncompromising and entertaining, one which I could have respected at least for what it was trying to be. Dostoevsky will have to forgive me for mentioning him in this review, but I think he was the one who said it's better to be stupid in our own way than clever in someone else's. Skyline doesn't have the courage to be either: mostly, it's just stupid in other people's way, a waste of your time and money and generally a disgrace to the genre, to the medium, and to the possibility of intelligence in the universe. Maybe we really do deserve to be invaded.

And with that, I've wasted my good hour and a half of the day. Now I'm off for some cookies.