The nominations for the 2012 Oscars will be announced on January 24, but on this site we have still three predictions to make. Best Film, Best Director and, today, Best Actor. A tricky category. Last year the little golden fellow went to Colin Firth for The King’s Speech, while he should have received it in 2010 for A Serious Man. In that year, ironically, Jeff Bridges won for Crazy Heart although his 2011 performance in True Grit. The point I’m trying to make is that the Best Actor award, even more so than the Best Actress one, is a career prize. It is not about the specific movie you happen to be in, it is about it being yuor turn. That is why there is only one big favourite this year, although there are many Oscar-worthy performances.
The big favourite:
George Clooney for The Descendants.
The other ones:
Jean Dujardin for The Artist
Brad Pitt for Moneyball
Leonardo diCaprio for J. Edgar
Michael Fassbender for Shame
and
Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (my favourite, could easily work as a career prize)
The career thingy is also the reason that, while they might score a nomination, it is just still too early for Ryan Gosling (Drive), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (50/50)
Disclaimer: due to the usually late release dates of film in The Netherlands I have not yet seen some films that have already had their US/UK releases (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hugo, The Muppets). For the same reason some films are for me part of 2011 despite their first release in 2010 (True Grit, Black Swan). Finally there is one film I really wanted to see but did not get around to: Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive. I will pick it up on DVD or Bluray and get back in touch about it.
Who would have though that a Terence Malick film, besides ethereal whispers and meditations on the meaning of (a) life, could feature dinosaurs? Brilliant!
Another film in which the plot did not matter ebcause the visuals were so beautiful. Spielberg explored the possibilities of animation, motion capture and 3D and comes up with some of the most captivating action sequences and original transitions of the year.
A film that literally gives you the creeps. I was scared to sneeze, to touch my face, to touch objects in public places. Well, for an hour or so at least. Soderbergh manages again, after Traffic, to mix topicality with suspense and entertainment.
I called it the best comedy of the year, and Bridesmaids is the ultimate proof that, despite the inevitable toilet humor, American comedy is still very much alive. Also: despite the involvement of non-funny-man Judd Apatow.
The 2011 heir of Inception. A smart intelligent action sci-fi flick that only revealed its plot priblems upon retrospection, never during the movie itself. And upon finally seeing Duncan Jones’ previous film Moon (2009) one could argue that Inception is the heir of Moon…
Based on the Jasper’s Take Award winning trailer my expectations were perhaps set too high, and my disappointment inevitable. But Thomas Alfredson delivers a moody, beautifully designed and shot thriller with outstanding performances accross the board.
The best thing about True Grit is that it is not a typical Coen brothers film. It is first and foremost a gripping western and a great adaptation of the Charles Portis novel. The directorial peculiarities are restricted to the details, which is nice after the essential Coen film that was A Serious Man.
I called it the best comedy of the year. Polanski does Sartre, but with laughs. And the old master is getting a bit sentimental in his old days, considering the last shot. Furthermore Carnage had the best ensemble performance of the year.
A film that touched me, literally, physically. I could not get up at first when the ending credits started to roll. Aronofsky may not be for everyone, but for me he is the most consistently overwhelming filmmaker of the last two decades
It’s not original to think this is the film of the year, but it is. Especially for me, as I am closely studying both silent film and its musical accompaniment, and the aesthetic changes brought about by the introduction of sound. A film that forms a perfect tripple bill with Singing in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard. A feelgood film, a romantic adventure and a modern classic of the postmodern age, but without an ironic tone. The best film of 2011 was without a single doubt Michel Hazanavicus’ The Artist.
A few weeks ago the title and cast of the new James Bond film were announced. Daniel Craig will star again, this time in Skyfall. Ther cast members confirmed were Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw. The latter’s role was still a mystery though. By now, filming has started, and once in a while a picture of a clapperboard finds it way online. Also, some other things are now known about Skyfall:
1: It will be better than Quantum of Solace. That’s what everybody is hoping, but Daniel Craig is also promising it. In an interview with Empire he said that QoS was such a mess because the infamous Hollywood writiers’ strike of 2007-2008 started when there was hardly a script. Since movies as big as these don’t sinmply get shelved or put on hold unless it is absolutely necessary, the script was worked out – during filming – by director Marc Foster and Craig himself. No wonder that it feels lacking in story, and was more or less just an action-packed extension to Casino Royale. Quantum of Solace was never intended to be that much of a sequel, and Skyfall will not be a sequel (or threequel) either. It will be stand alone film, and not the end of a ‘trilogy’.
2: Q will be back. And he will be played by Ben Whishaw. This is quite a surprise. First of all because the ‘Bond-new-style’ of Casino Royale and QoS did not seem in need for any gadgets. Second because Ben Whishaw is kinda… young. At least in comparison to the iconic late Desmond Llewelyn and John Cleese, who played Q’s successor R in two films. But young Whishaw is a good actor, best known from Perfume. “Now pay attention, 007, for this is not an ordinary Eau de Cologne…” What could Q hide in a perfume? Feel free to let your imagination go wild and respond to this blog.
3: Roger Deakins is the cinematographer. If that name does not ring a bell; he is the genius behind the looks of so many Coen brothers films: True Grit, Fargo, No Country for Old Men. Deakins worked with director Sam Mendes before, on the also-gorgeous-looking Jarhead. So Skyfall will at least look good!
4: Talk about looking good. To make up for the rampant sexism of early Bond films, in which Sean Connery and Roger Moore treated woman as mere objects, Daniel Craig will please the men-loving audience by taking his shirt of once more. Or, if it is up to producer Barbara Broccoli, he won’t be wearing any shirt at all.
Forgive the pun in the title. But coming out of Contagion one can do with some mild-mannered, light-hearted tongue-in-cheeking. For Steven Soderbegh’s latest thriller is gripping to say the least. Contagion mostly calls into recollection Traffic, Soderbergh’s other multiple-plotline ensemble piece about a terrible disease keeping the world in a deadly grasp. And although Traffic’s drugs are referred to as a disease only in a metaphorical sense, Contagion is a about a real disease. A terribly nasty virus carried over from bat to pig to Gwyneth Paltrow and then the rest of the globe. ‘What if’ SARS, the bird-flu or the pig-flu had been as apocalyptic events as sometimes was predicted? Well, for a start the USA would run out of body bags within twelve days.
Soderbergh shows the spread of the disease, its impact on everyday life and the efforts of scientists and doctors trying to find a cure and containing the virus in a documentary-like fashion. He therefore uses the handheld cameras and unusual angles he also used in Full Frontal and Sex, Lies and Videotape. Soderbergh famously switches between such high-brow experiments and more traditional commercial fare (Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels) and Contagion is something in between. It is an enormous flick, in terms of cast, sets and scope, but it is delightfully devoid of cheap thrills and easy emotions. Soderbergh is one of the few directors – the only other one I can directly think of is Christopher Nolan – who get to make serious and intelligent films with huge budgets. Contagion gets to spend time in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Atlanta, London and Hong Kong.
And it stars no less than six big names: Matt Damon is the common citizen caught up in the epidemic pretty early and Gwyneth Paltrow is his cheating CEO wife. Laurence Fishburne is the head of the Centre for Disease Control that tries to find a cure to the disease, and Kate Winslet is his on-the-site organizer. Marion Cotillard is a WHO researcher trying to track the origins of the virus in China and Jude Law is a weasily blogger who makes money out of panic by selling fake medicines online. And if you’d think that wasn’t enough to keep track of: Elliott Gould, John Hawke and Jennifer Ehle also have substantial roles. The last one is even essential.
No surprise then that not everyone gets too shine. While Winslet, Paltrow and Fishburne are impressive, Cotillard and Law feel superfluous. Cotillard even disappears from the film halfway through, only to get a small payback at the end. Ehle on the other hand is only introduced properly, as anything else but a lab-coat, almost near the end of the film. But if there is any star to this film than it is Matt Damon. It is becoming baffling, the last two years, how he lifts up anything he does, how he squeezes real character out of little material, and how he fits in such diverse roles: The Informant! True Grit, Hereafter, now Contagion. Wow.
While the plot may feel fragmentary at moments – perhaps more suitable for a television miniseries – Soderbergh’s style is properly cinematic, combining wide vistas with close inspection of minute details. And to top it off Contagion boasts a stunning and sinister musical score composed by Cliff Martinez. Contagious, gripping, catchy. Forgive the puns that are my sighs of relief after finishing this film uninfected. Go and see, and for God’s sake don’t cough during the film: you’ll make everyone run for the door.
It is September. We’ve had the Oscars, Cannes and the blockbuster season, and this weekend saw the end of the Venice film festival. So, most of what was to happen in film this year has already happened. Time for a little overview then.
Last year I kept lists of the best ten and the worst ten films of the year. I’ve done the same thing for this year so far. And to start off on a good note: this year’s worst films aren’t that much worse than last year’s worst films. 2011’s Clash of the Titans was Conan the Barbarian, in terms of noisy nonsense, but Conan still offered some fun. Last year we had a Sex and the City sequel, this year we had the third Transformers movie. Those two cancel each other out. The same goes for Sucker Punch and Prince of Persia, and for Get Low and Fair Game. The ‘worst films of 2011’ list, for all the dreadful terrors that are on it, is not my main concern.
I have two main concerns. The first one is the list of films that should have been on the ‘worst film’ list, but aren’t there, because the list is already filled. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, of the superfluous The Eagle, of the failed Horrible Bosses and the incoherent The Rite (review forthcoming). That these films are now in the large bulk of ‘mediocre’ films is a problem.
My second concern is the ‘best films of 2011’ list. There are films on there that really don’t deserve to be there. Mainly because I am still to stumble upon anything resembling A Serious Man, or The Hurt Locker. True Grit, though good, was nowhere near the Coen’s best work, and Oscar grabber The King’s Speech felt strangely tame and artificial, despite outstanding performances.
So on this year’s ‘best of’ list, so far, we find such films as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Rango. For a film to be simply exciting (Rise…) or simply funny (Rango), and for it to showcase impressive technological advances (both) is now good enough. Just compare: In 2010 the one animated movie on the list was Toy Story 3. Now it is Rango.
Of course The Fighter was excellent, and so was Black Swan. And Bridesmaids was fantastically funny, despite the excessive vomiting and diarrhea. Source Code is the closest we’ll get to an Inception this year. But it is the closest to it, not a match. Furthermore Bridesmaids doesn’t hold up to Four Lions or Kick Ass. And I am yet to find anything as emotionally charged as Winter’s Bone or El Secreto de Sus Ojos. Harry Potter 7.2 was satisfying, but not much more than that…
Nothing to feel really good about then? Well, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were not as bad as I expected them to be. They were surprisingly entertaining actually, apart from the action scenes. X-Men: First Class lived up to its expectations, and Fast Five was an outrageous guilty pleasure. These films kinda make up for the big let down of Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides.
But in conclusion, all in all? Quite too many films did not live up to potential or expectations or the sheer common decency of meeting the lowest level of quality you can still get away with. 2011 is just not good enough. Yet.
What’s left to look forward then? Well, the award films will start pouring in, with strong contenders in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Martha Marcy May Marlene, War Horse, The Help, The Iron Lady, We Bought a Zoo and The Ides of March. And perhaps the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remake. But I’m looking forward most to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which really should see Gary Oldman pick up a long overdue little gold statue.
Best of 2011 so far: Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Rango, Source Code, Bridesmaids, Harry Potter 7.2, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Tree of Life.
Worst of 2011, so far: The Green Hornet, The Green Lantern, Paul, Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Unknown, Sucker Punch, Get Low, Conan the Barbarian and The Tree of Life.
Yes. Malick’s is in both categories. Everyone who has seen it will understand.
Four Weddings and a Funeral is for people of my generation (and taste; others might prefer Pretty Woman) the essential romantic comedy. I suspect it of being the main reason for marriage being fancy again (previous generations had their essential training in romantics in The Graduateor Last Tango in Paris). And for setting the template for each following boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-meets-girl-again-boy-loses-girl-again-boy-crashes-wedding-boy-and-girl-live-happily-ever-after type-of-film. In any genre
And that includes science-fiction. The Adjustment Bureau is basically Four Weddings and a Funeral, the twists being that he is American and she is English, and the Weddings have been replaced by chases while the Funeral becomes a wedding.
Based on a story by much-abused-in-Hollywood scifi writer Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau sees up-and-coming New York politician David Norris (Matt Damon) diverging from the meticulous planning of his life when he meets English ballet dancer Emily Blunt. Except that his plan is not written by his campaign managers (as he jokes in an early speech) but by a semi-metaphysical ‘Bureau’. The agents of this bureau, led by John Slattery (of Mad Men fame), subsequently pull all the tricks up their sleeves to get Norris literally back on track.
A pity the marketeers of this film felt they had to steal the Sunshine theme music for this trailer. It doesn’t fit the mood of The Adjustment Bureau.
Do you know these moments in films set in cities that you know well, where you immediately notice that the geography has been tempered with? Your protagonist turns a corner in a familiar street and suddenly finds himself at the other end of the city, yet continues his business as if nothing happened? The Adjustment Bureau mocks these moments, by inserting special doors in New York City through which the agents of the Bureau can quickly move anywhere: from the Yankees Stadium to the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building. It is up to Damon and Blunt to be awed by this phenomenon, and they do awe very well in this film.
As they do the film very well. There is an assured yet fresh spark between the two leads, and their romance is one the viewer really cares about. Blunt’s turn as a dancer repairs some of the damage done to that profession by Natalie Portman in Black Swan, whereas Damon convinces as a politician (even going so far as to include appearances on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in this film). Knowing Damon’s politics, no-one should be surprised if in a few years he does a liberal Schwarzenegger. Until then, 2011 is really his year. Dutch cinema audiences saw him, the span of three months, pull of show-stopping performances in True Grit, Hereafter and now The Adjustment Bureau. The combination of his three roles in these films shows him not only to be a Very Good Actor, but also one of those actors that have a chameleonic quality: Damon never looks the same in any film (apart from the Bourne series of course).
Meanwhile, debuting director George Nolfi (he previously wrote the screenplays for Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum) keeps the pace high, the action scenes clear and the exposition chatter to a sci-fi minimum.
With its light-heartedness, its likeable characters and its high suspense The Adjustment Bureau combines touches of Hitchcock with the sentiments of classic Hollywood cinema, and it convinces as perhaps the first rom-com sci-fi flick.
Hereafter is not a very good film. But it is not as bad as many would have you believe. It ranks amongst the lesser of Clint Eastwood’s films, and the fact that he has two lesser films in the space of a year (Invictus preceeded Hereafter) may be a bad sign, but just as Invictus, Hereafter is not really a bad film.
It is a remarkably sentimental film, although Eastwood was never shy for sentimentalism in the last twenty years (only Mystic River has no sentimentality in it at all I believe). The new thing is that Hereafter is so conventionally sentimental, and so convolutedly plotted. The film tells the three, ultimately intertwining, stories of French journalist-with-a-near-death-experience Marie (Cecile de France), San Francisco based former medium George (Matt Damon) and London street kid Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren), who saw his twin brother Jason die in a traffic incident.
One thing that these stories show is that Clint Eastwood, for all his liberalism and openness to the rest of the world, is an essentially American filmmaker. The segments of the film that play in San Francisco show Eastwood on amazing form. The American blue collar working class milieu and the more up-scale middle class downtown scenes are handled with a care and sensitivity that is lacking from the scenes in Paris and London. Especially a scene involving a cooking class, a blindfold and Matt Damon carefully flirting with Melanie is breathtaking. Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) is amazing as the damaged woman Melanie, who wants to connect to George, but stumbles upon the wall of isolation he has build around himself. Damon himself is on top form as well, proving once more that he is not just the most bankable actor in Hollywood, but also amongst the best of his generation, next to Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio. Giving this performance in Hereafter, just after his show-stopper turn in True Grit almost feels like bragging, or showing off.
Eastwood’s Paris however is superficial, and his direction in another language not as confident as it was in Letters from Iwo Jima. London is worse. Eastwood does not know which London he wants to show: landmark London, with its tourist highlights, or the underbelly of the East End. It does not help that the twins portraying Marcus and Jason speak as if they are at Hogwarts, rather than in 21st century London.
The biggest problem of the film however is the difficulty with which the three stories are forced to intertwine. This requires bringing in the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2004 and the tube bombings in London in 2005, and that is not a good sign. The whole affair feels forced and unnatural in a way that Eastwood films seldom are.
Which also brings us on the subject of the tsunami. I’ve just got to spoil this plot point. Marie has a near death experience when she falls victim to a tsunami in an Asian holiday resort. Hereafter was released last Thursday in The Netherlands, a day before the disaster in Japan. I saw the film yesterday. It is no-one’s fault, but it is shocking to see a natural disaster, the first images of which are showing on televisions worldwide, now also on the big screen. And to see it so well done. The similarity, the visual accuracy (perfection is a completely inappropriate phrasing) is unsettling. Especialy as the use of CGI is not apparent, apart from the shot of the initial wave. This happens in the first minutes of the film, and the audience does not recuperate.
I may easily forget most about Hereafter in the following years, as it is a quite unremarkable Eastwood film, but these images will haunt me.
Let us first just get the Oscar thingy out of the way: If you make a British film about British royalty in a wartime period setting, with big British (stage) stars in major and supporting roles, featuring a (socially) handicapped person who overcomes this handicap in order to serve his nation, whilst developing a special friendship with someone from a completely different social order, you’d do a bloody bad job if you would not get nominated for at least twelve Oscars.
Colin Firth obviously did not take a single risk, having lost out as leading actor to Jeff Bridges last year. Bridges’ award for Crazy Heart can be seen as the usual ‘oeuvre’ award; the stereotypical situation in which someone gets a deserved prize for just the wrong film (see also Scorsese and The Departed). This year Firth cannot miss, having already won all the minor awards for his role as the stammering king George VI. Paradoxically, he should have won last year for A Single Man, and then see Bridges pick up his career prize for True Grit this year.
But that’s the Oscar rabble, brought in to highlight how, occasionally, awards hipness does not reflect film quality. I mean, it is not the case that The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper) is a bad film. It is altogether quite acceptable. But it does not at any moment stand up against Black Swan, True Grit, or even Inception or Toy Story 3.
The story of the film is quite straightforward. British prince Albert stammers and, persuaded by his wife (Helena Bonham Carter), he tries to get rid of this problem by seeking the aid of unconventional Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, unrecognizable to those who only know him as Barbosa from Pirates of the Carribean). The abdication of his playboy brother and the looming war with Germany put an extra urgency on the success of the therapy, and a stress on the developing friendship between the monarch and the antipode.
The King’s Speech plays out as common melodrama, but for the first hour there is plenty to enjoy. During this hour the action is confined to small rooms: bedrooms, car interiors and Logue’s practice. This bears the risk of turning the film into a ‘televisional’ product, but the opposite happens. Through smart cinematography and wonderful set design (the wallpaper in Logue’s practice is hilarious) the feel of the film is utterly cinematic. This hour also contains all the initial battering and smart talk between the flamboyant Logue and the aristocratic prince which provides the film with most of its laughs.
But when the second hour moves the action into palaces, ballrooms and Westminster Abbey,, this effect gets lost and the looks of the film seem clichéd, tired and – pardon the Latin – quite cheap. It is also then that you lose the interest in and empathy for Albert. Sure I’m glad for him that he overcomes his stammer, but by abandoning the comfort of little rooms and bringing in the wider social context and real world international politics, Bertie’s stammer suddenly seems very, well, irrelevant. And when he finally is able to deliver that rousing wartime speech I feel uncomfortable: at the same time I’m supposed to delight in Bertie’s victory over himself, but his happens at the onset of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, while so much still had to be sacrificed, and not by the royals mind you, before one could speak of a real victory.
A final little issue-thingy: To cast as Winston Churchill the despicable Wormtail (or better: Timothy Spall, who played the weak traitor in the Harry Potter films) is a regretful miss, one that takes you even further out of the story.
But of course The King’s Speech is going to win those Oscars, and Colin Firth will win his deservedly for just the wrong film.
People should stop proclaiming the western dead. Really. It is just weird. Every time a new western comes out, people proclaim the genre dead and see the arrival of the new film as an incidental or ‘short-lived’ revival. Or a tribute. It’s like going to your grandfather’s 87th birthday and telling him that the fact that he still lives is (co)incidental. Apart from pretty weird this is actually really rude.
Of course, westerns do not get made as much as in the golden age of the genre, the 1930s and 1950s. But then again, after the introduction of film sound in the late 1920s people thought westerns would not be made anymore, as location shooting (basically the right of existence of the genre) had become difficult and expensive. Yet the western persisted. And in the 1960s, when the genre supposedly reached its climax with the spaghetti-westerns of Leone (he made five of them in total), Sam Peckinpah and John Ford were still making (their best) films. And John Wayne finally got his long-deserved Oscar, for the 1969 adaptation of Charles Portis novel ‘True Grit’.
Since then westerns have always been made, be it with lesser frequency. We’ve seen Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, Seraphim Falls, Appaloosa, the comic-book nonsense of Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex and more contemporary fare as Brokeback Mountain and No Country For Old Men. And later this year we will still have the genre cross-over Cowboys & Aliens.
So, the western is not dead, and the Coen Brothers’ new version of True Grit is not a tribute or an incidental film. It is a frickin’ good film. A great western. Not a typical Coen film, but filled with enough bizarre details, in-your-face violence and remarkable dialogue to be recognizable as a Coen product.
Jeff Bridges stars as Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn, the ‘Dude’ filling the boots of the ‘Duke’ (John Wayne) with ease and charm. He is a drunk, disgusting US Marshall, but a man of ‘true grit’. Therefore he is hired by 14 year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to arrest or kill Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father. But this Chaney is being pursued by Texas Ranger LaBeouf (Matt Damon) as well, as there is a bounty on his head for another murder. The three of them pair up and venture into Indian territory in a pursuit of justice and/or vengeance.
All the attention surrounding this film has gone to the Coen brothers, of course, and to Bridges and Steinfeld, who got Oscar nominations for their roles. But the real stand-out performance here is Matt Damon’s. He is nigh unrecognizable for those who recall the Bourne films, with his fancy manners and his big greasy moustache. He is at first an unlikable, full-of-himself macho, but in the second half of the film he opens up and shows a humanity and righteousness that is truly moving.
True Grit is a great western. The films looks gorgeous, the achievement of cinematographer Roger Deakins. The snowy winter landscape of Oklahoma-to-be has a barren-ness that is the absolute opposite to the sun-drenched Monument Valley of the classic John Ford films.
Touches of the Coen-esque can mostly be found in the old-fashioned, razor sharp dialogue (for instance in the scene in which Mattie outwits a horse trader) and in some absurd appearances of minor figures, like the dentist covered in a full bear fur, including head and teeth. The brothers don’t shy away from rough violence either. But unlike so many other action films, Coen films make the violence hurt, badly. There is no glory or ‘cool-ness’ about it. The Coens show the Old West as it was: a dangerous, violent and sometimes outright scary place.
Mind you: this film is no A Serious Man or No Country For Old Men. It is not one of the films that define the Coen borthers as film makers. But it is a very good film, and it is good to see the brothers develop and change themselves, still, after more than twenty years of film making.
“I just want to be perfect” says Natalie Portman’s prima ballerina Nina Sayers when company director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) urges her to let go and live and discover the black swan inside of her. He is convinced that she can do the innocent, perfect white swan, but the leading role in Swan’s Lake demands more from Nina.
“Their names were Tom and Jerry and I fucked them both.” The premiere of the ballet is nearing and it becomes clear that Nina has transformed, or is transforming. But whether this is a good thing…. She throws out her stuffed animals and the music box with the twirling ballerina figure on top. She locks out her over-protective mother from her room and indulges in sex, drugs and rock’n’roll with alter ego and rival Lily (Mila Kunis, from the That 70s Show).
The question is if Nina will really be able to pull of the black swan, the aggressive and seductive mirror image of the white swan. And if so, at what cost? Director Darren Aronofsky has made a true masterpiece out of Black Swan. Aronofsky, a controversial love-it-or-hate-it figure seems to have finally won over not only the critics that favored him already, but also the big film going audience. His previous work was marginal (Pi), excessive (Requiem for a Dream), misunderstood (The Fountain) and finally overlooked with The Wrestler, which gained respect because of its leading man (Mickey Rourke) rather than its director. But while (some of the) critics who did not appreciate Aronofsky’s work in the first place remain unconvinced, the master of psycho-horror has finally managed to produce a box office success Stateside.
With a hand-held camera that is often too-close-for-comfort to the characters, suggestive lighting, a thunderous reimagining of Tchaikovsky’s music by Clint Mansell and a breathtaking new choreography of the famous ballet Nina Sayers’ descend into madness and self-mutilation turns visceral and even tangible to the audience. Her strive for perfection, the pressures endured on behalf of Thomas, Lily and her mother and the discipline that Nina maintains with regard to her body are literally felt. The film leaves the viewer physically tired and overwhelmed. And delighted with joy and admiration.
And how wonderful has Natalie Portman grown up. From a wunderkind in Leon to a spunky youngster in Garden State and passed a political coming-of-age in V for Vendetta she is know with right one of Hollywood’s leading ladies. And when she grabs that well-deserved Oscar for Black Swan she will be there with the likes of Streep, Roberts and Kidman; the true – deserved – divas of American cinema. That her career survived the agony of the Star Wars prequels, unlike those of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen, is just another diamond to her crown. In Black Swan Portman goes all the way. She transformed physically into a dancer (losing 10 kilos and learning to do the ballet scenes herself) and puts her character through the murkiest depths of psychological horror and disintegration. Only to transform into something even more beautiful than the white swan and transcend all darkness in the end.
Black Swan is one of the top movies of the year, deservedly nominated for 5 Oscars. And although Best Film might be out of reach with the competition of the likes of The Social Network, True Grit and The King’s Speech, and although Inception might pick up Best Cinematography, Natalie Portman is a shoe-in for Best Actress, Aronofsky has a shot for Best Director, and the ballet sequences deserve an award for Best Editing. Whether the Academy agrees is to be seen, but American audiences loved the film, I loved the film and I hope many of you will too.
The nominations for the 2012 Oscars will be announced on January 24, but on this site we have still three predictions to make. Best Film, Best Director and, today, Best Actor. A tricky category. Last year the little golden fellow went to Colin Firth for The King’s Speech, while he should have received it in 2010 for A Serious Man. In that year, ironically, Jeff Bridges won for Crazy Heart although his 2011 performance in True Grit. The point I’m trying to make is that the Best Actor award, even more so than the Best Actress one, is a career prize. It is not about the specific movie you happen to be in, it is about it being yuor turn. That is why there is only one big favourite this year, although there are many Oscar-worthy performances.
