Cineplexus

Black Swan ★★★★

Calling Black Swan a psychological thriller might be an understatement.

Sure, it's about ballerinas. But putting these two phenomena (thrillers and ballerinas) together was a stroke of genius. So much about ballet is a dichotomy between beauty and ugliness. All the tutus and pliés and pink ribbons mask the tortured feet, the bulimia, the years of physical rigor that is often a part of ballet culture. Nina (Natalie Portman) knows both sides, but is so obsessed with being perfect in her technique that she thinks of little else. When her naiveté about life in general (and letting loose in particular) threatens to coat her a dream role (the White and Black Swan in Swan Lake), something inside her snaps. She begins to take the whole ego/id clash (which swan lake's lead dual role embodies) to a Jekyll-and-Hyde level. Nina's mother (Barbara Hershey), who still sees Nina as a sweet little girl, isn't helping things. Half the time she seems like the ultimate devoted mother; the other half, her obsession with Nina is downright scary.

Nina both hates and envies the easy-going, fun-loving style of new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis). Her obsession with Lily is due in part to the way she wraps men — including ballet company director Tomas (Vincent Cassel), who Nina has a bit of a thing for — around her little finger. But Lily is no villain...or is she? The film keeps you guessing, even after the drive home, about what Lily did and what was just a figment of Nina's dreams or imagination, pulling something dark and demonic from the depths of her soul — discovering, if you will, her Black Swan.

The film has a few irksome points. At times it seems like sex is used just to titillate – hardly a crime, but it feels beneath this film's level of sophistication. At other times, there is a weird demonization of sexuality; if Nina can't sex it up a bit, then she'll never be as free a dancer as Lily. These are minor details however, and I'm sure many arguments in favor of the sexual aspect of the movie could be proposed.

Fact is, Black Swan is a crazy, surprising, strange, and scary story with riveting characters and a beautiful synergy with its would-be source material, Swan Lake. The concept of a split personality doesn't easily translate into great art, but this time art has made an exception.

August/September Movie Roundup & Announcement

I have been a little busy with something super awesome. Something movie-related, even. In fact, it could not be more movie related, because it's a movie! Yes, I'm finally finishing my showchoir documentary, which is aptly titled "show/choir." Needless to say, I have been a bit remiss with my updates, but I HAVE seen many movies. Hopefully I'll get to their review, but for now:

Exit Through the Gift Shop ★★★★
Inception (!) ★★★★★
The Last Airbender ★ (M. Night Shyamalan, you are dead to me)
The Other Guys ★★★½
The Kids Are All Right ★★★★½
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World ★★★★★ (I saw it twice)
Machete ★★★½ (Pretty awesome, but how can a movie that's trying to be bad get an A+ review? Or even a B+?)

Old movies I've seen this month:

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier ★★ (Basically a really, really long episode of the original series. This movie score points for having a sense of humor, but little else.)
Hey, It's on Netflix Instant Watch.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) ★★★★

Diabolique (1954) ★★★★½ (I love how this one is in turns a thriller, a mystery, and a horror film. Yay.)
Hey, It's on Netflix Instant Watch.

The Room ½ (Yes, I've seen it now. And as I told Ryan, it is truly the Manos: The Hands of Fate of our time.)

More soon.

Movies in May

Things have been pretty nutty for the past month or so. I saw, but didn't review, Iron Man 2, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Hey, It's on Netflix Instant Watch), or Clash of the Titans (2010), so here goes, respectively: ★★★½, silly at times but lots of fun to watch; ★★★★, amazing but at times very hard to watch; ★★, dumb at all times and silly to watch, especially when I noticed that the screen often looked the same with or without my 3D glasses on.

I will try to have a more diligent June in terms of actually writing my reviews instead of just seeing the movies and thinking about them. One of my personal goals is to see more potentially bad movies. You know, to round things out. I'm also going to be writing "chick flick" commentary over at Gals' Guide, so I guess I'll be seeing some movies that are purportedly for ladies. If they're bad, I could be killing two birds with one stone. (My uncle used this phrase yesterday and followed it up by saying "no, don't kill em!" Just thought I'd share.)

Love,
Marissa

P.S. While the 2010 version of Clash of the Titans isn't on Netflix Instant Watch, the original (from 1981) is there. While you're watching it, think about how groundbreaking those claymation effects were less than 30 years ago. Hey, It's on Netflix Instant Watch.

Public Enemies ★★★½

There's always a sheepish excitement in the air when a movie is filming in town. For those of us that live outside of Hollywood or Toronto, it's kind of a rare thrill that reminds us of the glitz and allure that cinema has had since it's early days. There's that goofy feeling that only a brush with fame can provide. In Chicago, the experience is surprisingly rare; any major films shooting in the city are typically heard about more than seen, as they do their business on the outskirts of town, late in the evening, or otherwise out-of-sight.

Not so with Public Enemies. Shot in several different locations, the film used the Windy City as it's home base, and appropriately so, as John Dillinger did live and die here. When the film was shooting, it did so on largely his real home turf, meaning that tons of Northsiders had to avoid walking onto the set for several weeks last year as they went about their business. A nuisance for some, I know that many were willing to overlook it because of the sheer cool-factor of having Johnny Depp hanging out on your street corner, not to mention Christian Bale's exodus from the dark depths of Lower Wacker to the relative sunniness of Lincoln Park.

Grim and dangerous, there's little sunny about Public Enemies, but it certainly has a cool-factor of its own, thanks to the great performances we've come to expect from actors like Depp, Bale, and Marion Cotillard (see La Vie en Rose, please). The costumes, makeup, and music are all spot on, and the added effect of the sets make one wonder how the producers were able to afford a time machine to send the cast and crew back to the 1930s. This is even true for scenes set in Chicago, where somehow the most familiar streets have lost their modernity. It is truly something to behold.

Perhaps it is this high standard the film has set for itself visually, and for its nuanced characters, that left me wanting more overall from the script and editing. We're told the story of a stretch of John Dillinger's life that's interesting, but so long that it must be recounted through often disconnected anecdotes. He's in prison, he's out of prison, he's in Indiana, he's in Chicago, he's in Florida, he's back in prison again, he's…well, it's not hard to find oneself wondering how he managed to get from one scene to the next. Characters are often introduced with an abundance (J. Edgar Hoover) or dearth (Baby Face Nelson) of fanfare that's inconsistent with their importance to the script. Entire scenes exist simply so we get to hear a single "classic" Dillinger quote.

All of this creates a notion that John Dillinger was a complex and interesting – even likeable – man, that Melvin Purvis (Bale) was trying to compensate for having a ridiculous name, and that the '30s were a hell of a time for anybody fortuneate enough to have a little of what money there was to go around. But Public Enemies fails, as so many biopics do, to hold together as a great film in and of itself, absent of its subject's (in)famous greatness. That said, it's hard to imagine any film living up to the grandeur of this particular character, and many of the moments recreateed here are truly spectacular. How perfect, for example, is the parallel tthe film offers us between the film Dillinger sees in the Biograph before he's shot (Manhattan Melodrama) and Dillinger's real life as a criminal? Leave it to Hollywood, I guess, to create that kind of magic. Hollywood…or Chicago.

Moon ★★★★

Hey, It's on Netflix Instant Watch.

When I entered the theater last weekend, I knew nothing about Moon except that it starred Sam Rockwell and pretty much no one else. Having seen it, I'm reluctant now to provide any more information than that about the film, so as not to spoil the experience. Instead, I suppose I'll rely on cryptic, tantalizing hints that  might entice you to find out what this film's all about. Yeah, that'll work.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell the only engineer/operator in a futuristic power plant on the moon that harvests energy and sends it back to Earth on a regular basis for power business Lunar. He's aided and kept company by GERTY, a super-smart talking main frame computer, eerily and masterfully voiced by Kevin Spacey. It's been 3 years alone on the moon for Sam, and it's about time for him to go home... that is, if his brain and body can make it a few weeks longer. This gets to be a trickier and trickier undertaking as the film progresses.

The most exciting thing about Moon is the way it sets up genre-familiar expectations and then thwarts them over and over again. This little trick manages to keep the film scary and suspenseful while the plot moves ever forward. Not bad for a freshman director! Duncan Jones, whom you may recognize as David Bowie's son, has created a unique and interesting movie that sticks with you for days as more of it's secrets unravel themselves in retrospect. It's enough to make me want to start counting the days, Sam Bell-style, until his next film debuts.

No Country For Old Men ★★★★1/2