© 2010 Twentieth Century Fox

  
With psychological plainness, “Black Swan” (2010) director Aronofsky lifts the curtains to a spinning ballet nightmare, focusing on the inner fight between a delicate White Swan and its deathly black alter ego.

The performance of Natalie Portman, however, is overcoming narrative conventions between good and evil.

Inner demons are hard to fight as they rarely show their true faces. Black feathers and demonic red eyes emblematize what appears to be a fragile ballet perfectionist, Nina (Natalie Portman).

After winning the lead role in “Swan Lake” for her delicateness and sweet performance of the White Swan (Princess Odette), Nina pushes herself to get in touch with her inner Black Swan (Odile, daughter of an evil magician). As prima ballerina, she will have to dance both.

And immediately her dark side appears along with a new dancer.

Wild Lily (Mila Kunis) eats greasy burgers, smokes, drinks and plays with her sexuality. Also, she has black wings tattooed on her shoulders. “Live a little”, she seductively aspirates. This sensual girl is not only competition for the role. In her pure passion and guile, Lily is what Nina fantasizes about – the incarnation of the Black Swan, her alter ego, her photo negative.

Centuries of story telling, and Hollywood still clings to mythology of good and evil. Now, however, the horror stands on ballet shoes, dressed in tutu.

White is innocent, black is destructive. It is all over the mise-en-scène. So, is it too simple to be thrilling?

In one word: yes. The movie as a whole is like Nina, too slick to achieve greatness. When the subtext screams at you, it simply becomes vulgar text.

Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” (2000) was different, subtler and yet more shocking. His more recent movie, “The Wrestler” (2008), put human meat and flesh right in front of your eyes, allowing the audience to peer through the peephole of society’s margins.

Actually, it is the Portman’s interpretation breathing new life into Tchaikovsky’s piece on celluloid. Apparently as much as Aronofsky throws all dualities and polarities into the Thaikowsky ballet to up-front the audience (in a “Psychology 101” manner), he stipulates the transcendent performance of his actors on stage. Five Oscar nominations are proof enough. A pregnant Portman already carried her Golden Globe home.

When Portman’s toes stand fully erect and carry her one-year trained and starved body’s weight, this one movement reflects all the inspiring grace and harsh discipline of the art of ballet.

© 2010 Twentieth Century Fox

Her close-up captures the anxiety of a child who sleeps among pink teddy bears. Her character is a real virgin on the social playground of adults. Her life is ballet, incarcerated by her obsessive former ballerina mother, falling apart under the pressure.

The stereotypical anorexia and bulimia appear to be her softest enemies. Nina gets blackouts. She awakes with broken nails, and red streams on her back – stigmata. The closer the opening night of the “Swan Lake”, the more brutal becomes her delusion - right up until black pinfeathers suddenly grow from her shoulders.

Skin and nerves are entirely shredded along the transformation of the White into the Dark Swan. As the script does not allow a Grey Swan, Portman carries her character all the way to the abyss and brutally pushes her in.

The fight between dream and madness is in her Bambi eyes from the very first second her face appears on screen.

It is suppressed sexuality, and shy purity bursting into flames, and this right at the 21st century New York City Ballet. Self-destruction is timeless.

With a piece of her mirror image, Nina kills a part of herself. It is finally decided which part is the stronger one – the White Swan kills the Black Swan. So it seems at first. But while stabbing the "Lily" inside herself, she also kills her delicateness, her sweet vulnerability; her innocence. A flash of true awakening – but the show must go on.

The White Swan weakly glimmers and then collapses.

On stage, the perfection burns. The Black Swan takes over. Guile and passion and blood on white tutu. When Nina throws herself down the abyss into the white soft mattress, she escapes the madness.

The dance is over, finally. And Portman can go to the Oscars.

The "Black Swan" (Aronofsky, 2010) trailer tells it all:

© DreamWorks

“This is Berk. It snows nine months out of the year, and hails the other three. What little food grows here is tough and tasteless. The people that grow here, even more so. The only upsides are the pets. While other places have ponies, or parrots ... we have dragons.”

It is the spirit of Cressida Cowell’s children’s book that might surprise biased professors in comparative literature who will need to clean their glasses when they latch onto their seats and join Hiccup’s ride.

It could have been a lame ride, from zero to hero in 98 minutes.

But even from our stable continent at the Nordic Sea we can see that this could have only originated from a miscarried two-dimensional perspective on characters and storyboard. Adding depth (literally and figuratively), quite the opposite is true.

The children's book by Cressida Cowell

At the movie’s core, beating as strong as an enormous dragon heart itself, lays the acceptance of being different. Believing in your unique strengths turns a geek into a genius, and so it happens that the boy not only hits a dragon with his own invented catapult machine but also makes friends with the same, whom he confidently dubs Toothless.

When Hiccup reaches out his hand to touch the most dangerous and intelligent dragon species ever, the pitch black Night Fury, we are reminded of one of the most famous scenes between a boy and his pet in Hollywood history: E.T. (1982).

Hiccup could have killed the creature when it was lying wounded in its shreds, but he saw into the luminous yellowish eyes filled with “living being” and just couldn’t do it. The Night Fury himself was also too intelligent to simply go for the kill after being freed. So both challenge the tradition of natural enemies – and together they free both species from an even bigger threat.
The popularity that the animated version of the friendship between human and “alien” reaches actually the same high peak as Spielberg’s Oscar winning movie nearly three decades ago. The spark of congeniality is consciously put into every bit of the dragon adventure by the team directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois (known from Disney’s Lilio&Stitch with a striking similarity in creating adorable monsters). It surprises how few reviews are out there. None of them truly reflect on the soul of this movie, which might even be Oscar material.

© Creative Commons

Nine years ago, when the award for Best Animated Feature was established, DreamWorks got the first one. Since then, Pixar the long-lasting rival of Jeffrey Katzenberg (former CEO of the Disney Company and co-founder of DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen) took the stage with its recent blast “Up” (2009) – the only animated film ever next to Beauty and the Beast (1991) to be nominated as Best Picture. Now could be the time for Katzenberg to reap what he sowed in 2001.

For the younger audience (and those longing at the Nordic Sea continent for some real adventure), there is no moral tattooed in the pictures. It is as light-hearted as sending your paper dragon up into the clouds. This might well be the real gift DreamWorks has to offer this time. The dream works, finally.


See below 'How to Train Your Dragon' official trailer:

This article was first published 20/04/2010 on thekosmo.org.

By Beatrice Jeschek
Tim Burton draws before he makes movies. Beatrice Jeschek discovers his grotesque fantasy art in the Museum of Modern Arts in NYC.

Tim Burton's first drawings of "Edward Scissorhands"

Under his fabulous mountain of movies are countless pieces of fantasy buried that are brought into daylight in this major exhibition in New York, running until the end of this month.

Mr. Magliozzi stated: “There is no other living filmmaker possessing Tim Burton’s level of accomplishment and reputation whose full body of work has been so well hidden from public view. Seeing so much that was previously inaccessible in a museum context should serve to fuel renewed appreciation and fresh appraisal of this much-admired artist.”
However, in his recent movie productions he offers Disney a bit of his inspiration back. Skinny arms like pencils, a grim whitish face with a hairy explosion carrying a small crown – this was Burton’s vision of the Red Queen before he gave “Alice in Wonderland” an edgy appearance on 3D screens. Drawings like these trace the current of his visual imagination back to his childhood.

Tim Burton's vision of the "Red Queen"

The MoMA visitors in New York can get lost in 700 examples of rarely or never-before-seen paintings, storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, costumes, and cinematic ephemera.

The exhibition is a ground-deep bow in front of a moody visionary in bright colours, who loves to sink into his self-drawn world.

He surrounds himself with his visions for constant inspiration, at home and in his studio in London he said in the following face-to-face interviewing session. "I didn't grow up in a real museum culture" Burton confessed. "I think the Hollywood Wax Museum was my first museum."
Some extroverted reporter in the background of the cozy MoMA cinema asked with a cheeky smile, hidden behind the microphone: “So, Mr. Burton, what would your mum think about the fact that you are being compared to Warhol?” Burton pretended to think about it, and responded with an even bigger smile: “She would ask: ‘Who is Warhol?’”

Major Retrospective on the Artistry of Filmmaker Tim Burton
Exhibiton Dates: 22.11. 2009 – 26.04. 2010.
MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019

Video: Tim Burton at MoMA, NYC.

This article was first published 05/04/2010 on thekosmo.org.

By Beatrice Jeschek

© Disney

It is a mechanical detail that his eye colour changes throughout his mood swings, but it blends well with his shattered appearance.

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway as they look in Burton's rabbit hole. © Disney