Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/14/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, June 14, 2019

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.