FILM REVIEW: Mammut (Mammoth)

Written/Directed By: Lukas Moodysson

Starring: Gael García Bernal as Leo, Michelle Williams as Ellen, Marife Necesito as Gloria

Lukas Moodysson is one of the few Swedish directors, alongside Tomas Alfredson and some other people I can’t quite remember (lolz), that has a substantial presence in contemporary ‘world cinema’ (a term that I hate for its reductionistic tendencies and American bias but that is, unfortunately, inescapable); and I make the most of every opportunity to extol the beauty of Swedish cinema. He is also the main creative force behind the best lesbian romance film in history, the gorgeously understated Fucking Amal, and has on multiple occasions been dubbed “the new Bergman” — because American film critics’ only knowledge of great Swedish films is from their essential viewing of Bergman’s overrated classic The Seventh Seal and they have no idea who Victor Sjöström or Bo Widerberg is, and because Moodysson really is one of most interesting filmmakers Sweden has ever had to offer. Naturally, the thought of praising his work while decrying the vapidity and sheer triteness of American/mainstream cinema is incredibly tempting. However, Moodysson’s Mammoth is too much of a blithering disappointment to allow that.

For one, the soundtrack is a giant fucking annoyance. Some of the tracks here are appealingly hipster-chic, but like most other directors who aren’t Sofia Coppola and have cool music taste but a poor understanding of mood, they often feel tragically inapposite and/or painfully uncomfortable. For example, when Leo finally succumbs to fucking around with a prostitute, the post-coital scene is accompanied by a bizarrely moving electronic instrumental piece, which seems to indicate that we should appreciate the romance in it, but then the sequence continues with Leo secretly, inconsiderately leaving her while she’s asleep. I understand what Moodysson is trying to do — he wants to emphasize that the romance was just an escapist fantasy, an illusion of intimacy, but he doesn’t succeed because he doesn’t understand how soundtracks work. Non-diegetic music either tells the audience how to react, or hints at a hidden emotional state. The problem is, Leo doesn’t secretly feel that his encounter is romantic — he loves his family too much to make it out to be anything more than a temporary, regrettable but necessary behavioral anomaly in an alien world, and while Leo understandably wants it to be romantic, the film and the audience are supposed to remain ambivalent, because they, as presumably intelligent entities, must acknowledge both the essentialness and wrongness of his dalliance; they can’t and don’t have Leo’s privilege of living inside the fantasy. If the music were diegetic, it would’ve both emphasized the illusory nature of Leo’s affair while effectively disengaging the audience from the romance; if there were no music, the film would allow us the space necessary to ponder the morality and reasons for Leo’s actions. Instead, Moodysson smothers us with an inappropriately romantic song choice, emptying the scene of its depth and unconvincingly invites us to revel in its aimlessness. When Leo finally returns to his family, Cat Power’s poignant “The Greatest” plays in the background (great music taste btw lolz), and there is absolutely no attempt at addressing Leo’s lack of guilt over fucking a prostitute while being away from his wife. These haphazard, bewildering uses of music (there are so many other instances, but I don’t have the effort to list them all) also parallel the tragic self-unawareness of the screenplay, which is a point I’ll revisit later on.

In the second half of the movie, home to much of the film’s overwrought drama, there are also just too many scenes where dramatic instrumental pieces manipulatively bend us over backwards to fuck the sympathy out of us. For example, when the (sadistic) grandmother brings Salvador to a junkyard where poor children are collecting trash, sad piano music plays in the background because Moodysson too wants us to feel guilty over the fact that some children have shit lives. I mean, it’s really sad that people have to live that way, but what’s even sadder is that Moodysson thinks that this is some kind of powerful revelation deserving of a lot of screentime. Part of what makes Slumdog Millionaire so wonderful is its no-nonsense depiction of Indian slums; it shows us how disgusting the living conditions are, how unsafe and horrible that world is, but the insight is always just a sidenote. The movie, above all, is a story of triumph, of destiny and love, not of how sad the world is and how bad we should feel for owning iPhones while others don’t. The world is fucking unfair, and obviously sometimes it’s really sad. But get the fuck over it. How naive can you be? This naivete brings me to my next point: White guilt.

I think this film, above all, is an unwitting (but illuminating) insight into the dynamics of white guilt. Leo travels to Bangkok, and feels overly guilty about a pretty Thai girl being a prostitute, so he hands her a shitton of money and asks her to go home to ‘sleep’, possibly because he is stupid enough to think that his money will last her a lifetime and will effectively turn her away from lucrative nights of prostitution, but probably because he is actually condescending and self-important enough to think that he alone can change the way things are in the third world. This self-importance is suggested throughout the movie when he tells the Thai whore that she SHOULDN’T EVER THINK THAT BOYS ARE GOOD WHILE GIRLS ARE NOT and when he arbitrarily declares, in laughable sincerity, that he should think about DOING CHARITY in less fortunate places, especially since he has SO much time to spare for some occasional self-serving pseudo-goodwill. Even Ellen, his wife, immediately feels bad for unintentionally discrediting the merits of Tagalog (Philippines’ national language) and spends much of the second half of the movie attempting to make herself feel better by showing her maid, Gloria, some cheap parlour tricks involving an apple pretending to be an orange. When I first saw these scenes, I immediately thought that Moodysson was cleverly, self-knowingly pointing out the laughability of white guilt. But then I realized that he was juxtaposing them with some disgusting, cringe-inducing scenes involving Gloria’s children and their oh-so-sad lives; turns out, Moodysson, in true white ignorance, doesn’t even recognize how self-important and disgusting these sympathy ploys are. Yes, people in the USA are generally quite privileged, and yes, the people in third world nations (specifically Thailand and the Philippines here) aren’t as entitled, but so fucking what? Is Moodysson so ignorant that he doesn’t realize that there are too ghettos in the US? Does he not realize that there are too privileged people in third world nations? The Bangkok that Leo first sees looks exactly like a high-budget Hollywood set, yet Moodysson seems perfectly and tragically unaware of the implications here — because he too is an unwitting advocate of self-important white guilt and first-world condescension. Think about that. Moodysson’s underlying sentiments are truly disgusting.

The worst part of the film is the Gloria character. She is such a flat, nonsensical caricature of working mothers and maids across the globe it is almost painful and infinitely insulting. We are led to believe that Leo and Ellen’s daughter, Jackie, is a stand-in for Gloria’s sons, but Gloria seems genuinely delighted by Jackie. Gloria cries dramatically (and haphazardly) practically every night when she talks to her children, and constantly talks about her inability to be away from her children (something that has understandably been interpreted as an anti-feminist statement against working mothers), but this pain is never transferred into her job, where she magically puts her pain away and savors her time with Jackie, even praising her intelligence in front of her Filipino friends and teaching her Tagalog words. This incongruity is endlessly baffling and unconvincing. Necesito doesn’t seem to understand her character’s pain, but then again perhaps it’s Moodysson’s fault for not telling her? Her character immediately reminds me of Walter Salles’ segment in the anthology film Paris, Je Taime, in which a maid too is made to take care of her employer’s child while abandoning her own — except that film effortlessly conveyed her plight, while Mammoth remains as inarticulate as Gloria is ridiculous. Also, just to add on to Moodysson’s inherent racism, the Filipino character in his film is a maid, and the Thai character in his film is a prostitute. Right on, white people. Asians so enjoy being reduced to cultural stereotypes by the ever-wonderful white gaze. BRB, STABBING MYSELF.

This film bravely attempts to style itself as a piece of world film, but fails quite miserably. While most films tend to be in one language or at most two, Mammoth ambitiously sends its characters to 3 different parts of the globe and incorporates all 3 languages into its framework. I mean, it unwisely perpetuates the myth of difference between the three peoples, but at least there is some vague attempt to highlight the universality of disconnectedness, especially in the first half of the movie. Ellen and Leo, Gloria and her sons are both separated by distance, Ellen and Jackie by Gloria and by Ellen’s job, Leo and the Thai whore by language, Leo and Bob by lifestyle. However, instead of intelligently tackling this idea of disconnectedness and disillusionment and linking it to modernity, Moodysson bizarrely uses it to make a vapid statement about privilege, which in turn completely undermines his attempts at universality. The titular mammoth ivory pen at first too seems to be a metaphor of disconnection, in that the ivory is at once tangible and intangible, physical but of unimaginable, non-existent provenance, but it turns out to be a lame statement about Leo’s privileged life, a trite declaration of first-world/third-world imbalance.

But good filmmakers have a tendency of fitting in at least a few redeeming qualities in even their worst movies. I really enjoyed the disconnectedness in the first half of the film, and had the film been about disconnectedness in a modern world, regardless of race or country, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. Of course, Moodysson’s racism would’ve remained as pervasive, but still. Also, in Moodysson’s defence, the film does have a marvelous premise — it is just executed in such a ghastly, unintelligent fashion that it is indefensibly offensive. Anyway. The two leads’ performances are absolutely spectacular. I’m a huge fan of Gael García Bernal, an ex-teen idol from Mexico turned critical darling with Alfonso Cuáron’s fantastic Y Tu Mamá También turned perennial supporting actor in an assemblage of Oscar-nominated films, and here he is absolutely spot-on in playing the awkward, guilt-ridden Leo, who is dreamily attractive but subtly awkward, child-like but tentatively assertive. It’s a gloriously strange, believable character that for once humanizes the Hot Male Lead, and it’s really, really sad that Bernal’s magnificent creation will be ignored because of Moodysson’s sub-par efforts. Michelle Williams, probably the most exciting actress today, is as always, unstoppably eclipsing and achingly humane. There is nothing she can’t do, except save this film (lolz).

KevinScale Rating: 1.5/5

FILM REVIEW: Broken Flowers

Written/Directed By: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Bill Murray as Don Johnston, Jeffrey Wright as Winston. Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy and Sharon Stone as Don’s ex-lovers.

Broken Flowers was released in 2005, only a little more than a year after Bill Murray’s critically-lauded role as Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola’s transcendent Lost in Translation, yet it shamelessly and artlessly steals much of what made that film work and awkwardly claims them as its own. If Jim Jarmusch had waited, say, another 60 years, or if he had any of Sofia Coppola’s instinctive storytelling smarts, I probably wouldn’t be getting all worked up. But this film, in concept and in presentation, is frequently a lackluster, tiresome attempt at recreating the magic of Lost in Translation, and its unoriginality is so blatant, so stark, that it is irrevocably insulting. Both Bob and Don are extremely wealthy men with no semblance of direction in life, both films are portraits of their loneliness and aimlessness, both films incorporate extended sequences of inaction and silence, both films bestow a certain tenderness and poignancy to Bill Murray’s improvised cynicism. But while Lost in Translation is a revelation disguised as meandering inaction, Broken Flowers is meandering inaction disguised as a revelation. Nothing much happens in Lost in Translation, that’s true, but the expansive script still manages to be a thoughtful meditation on celebrity culture, marital dysfunction, existential disillusionment, cultural displacement and alienation. Broken Flowers, on the other hand, explores aimlessness, only aimlessness, and does so with a resolute, obstinate aimlessness. It has absolutely nothing to say, and attempts to disguise this fact with Don’s quasi-cryptic, pseudo-intellectual revelation at the end of the film (“The past is gone, I know that. And the future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So all there is, is this. The present.”), which incidentally is a vacuous declaration devoid of meaning or significance.

Like Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, which Broken Flowers steals liberally from, this film is about a man taking a road trip to visit his past lovers, and both incorporate torturously long sequences of the protagonist driving down ill-maintained roads and through expansive, rural landscapes. The former is too a film that solely explores aimlessness, and that has little to say about it, but at least the final payoff (Chloe Sevigny’s blowjob, the realization that Gallo’s character witnessed her being raped and did nothing) is arguably devastating enough to make the film’s inertia into a powerful emotional statement. This film, however, wanders aimlessly and concludes after nearly fucking 2 hours with deadpan indifference and frustrating opacity. Granted, films like Groundhog Day (Murray’s 2nd finest work) wander aimlessly too, but at least the journey is gorgeously decorated with jokes and fantastic bursts of pure hedonism. Broken Flowers, despite having Bill fucking Murray in the lead, is often quite humorless, and as a result is an extremely torturous and aimless watch.

Bill Murray mostly plays the same type of character: cynical, world-weary, self-aware, caustic. In Lost in Translation, Coppola even goes a step further to explore the bitterness and loneliness that presumably crafted this on-screen persona, and does so by juxtaposing Murray’s sardonic improv work with extended sequences of him staring blankly into space and raising his eyebrows defeatedly at the world around him. In Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch steals the latter idea, but Murray is given extraordinarily few moments to be sardonic or even opinionated about anything. Mostly, he repeats what other people say with a deadpan weariness, recites reluctantly from a standard script or stares blankly into space. In fact, so restricted is Murray by the god-awful script that he is almost painful to watch. He is too wooden, too weary, too nothing. By any stretch of the imagination, he remains fiercely, stubbornly impenetrable, and because Jim Jarmusch doesn’t even do what Nicholas Refn did for Ryan Gosling’s reticent character in Drive, there is no semblance of hidden depth, no air of mystery; only a bored old man waiting for meaning (and personality) to find him. To be fair, there are occasionally moments where Murray’s understated charisma suddenly eclipses the screen like a brilliant wave of light, but these moments are too few and too far between. Immediately, Don reminds me very much of Johnny Marco from Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere in his woodenness and his lack of personality. However, Somewhere is intelligent and self-aware enough to be littered with smug observations of Hollywood culture, to be grounded in the sweet, tender relationship between Marco and his angelic daughter Cleo, and to acknowledge Marco’s nothingness in its powerful, poignant ending. Broken Flowers finds no such redemption.

The film boasts an all-star cast. Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, four of the most revered actresses in Hollywood, play Don’s ex-lovers — but only because their presence affords Broken Flowers the sort of artistic validity that would otherwise prove elusive. None of them are given substantial roles, and despite being outrageously talented, none of them are given the opportunity to bring anything particularly special or intriguing to their parts, because the script is much too wooden to afford them complex personalities, much too restrictive to allow them room for improv. None of them even appear for more than ten minutes. They wander aimlessly into the film, and without making any kind of impact and without doing anything, really, they leave. Tilda Swinton’s job consists of opening her door, saying “FUCK YOU DON” and storming back into her house. For artistic cred, even perennial indie queen Chloe Sevigny makes a presence here as a bespectacled secretary who is (apparently) fucking Jessica Lange. Thankfully, in a sea of missteps, Jarmusch almost redeems himself by having the smarts to cast chameleonic stage actor Jeffrey Wright of Angels in America fame to play Don’s annoying Ethiopian neighbour, who also incidentally is the most well-written character here. Winston’s insufferable enthusiasm serves as a convincing counterpoint to Don’s woodenness, even if he doesn’t have enough screentime, he serves to obviously as a plot device and his chemistry with Don isn’t particularly palpable. In any other movie, Bill Murray would invariably be stealing the show, but the huge disparity in writing quality turns the tides, and Wright effortlessly steals every scene he’s in. To be fair though, Wright is a magnificent actor; it’s just that Murray is, given a good script, even more so.

And like all inept arthouse filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch too litters Broken Flowerswith bizarre, hyperstylized sequences that don’t actually add anything at all to the film. Towards the end of the film, he takes various scenes from the film and re-edits them to make them all psychedelic and tinted, and while they are effectively dream-like and hipster-chic, they serve no purpose other than to create some awkward illusion of purpose.

This is a film so awful that it actually makes Bill Murray look bad. Given a better director, this could’ve been a much better film, but under Jim Jarmusch’s direction it comes across as a radically uninspired rehash of Antonioniesque conventions.

KevinScale Rating: 1/5

FILM REVIEW: Midnight In Paris

Directed/Written By: Woody Allen

Starring: Owen Wilson as Gil, Rachel McAdams as Inez, Marion Cotillard as Adriana

Latter-day Woody Allen — and this distinction from early-day Annie Hall Woody Allen is important, I think — is a writer-director whose films are often compulsively indulgent portraits of upper-class Europe. In Vicki Cristina Barcelona, his protagonists attend art galleries, spend long vacations in exotic locales and embark on oh-so-treacherous journeys of self-discovery — seemingly because they have little to occupy their time. In Match Point, his characters spend their free time attending more art galleries, ruminating over Dostoyevskian existentialist philosophy, attend operas in the best theaters and in the best seats, and casually collecting vintage cars. In his latest film Midnight In Paris, his characters too attend exclusive art galleries, flaunt their knowledge of philosophical pseudo-intellectualisms, live in premier lodgings, and sulk over not being adequately knowledgeable in art history. Now, I’m not particularly opposed to films revolving around ‘upper-class’ interest (Kiarostami’s Certified Copy has a script simply overflowing with bourgeois philosophical banter, and I love it 4realz), neither am I films that are brimming with artsy esoterica (in Match Point, the purposeful detailing of bourgeois life is actually fundamental in the film’s goal to expose the underlying primitivity of the cultured individual). But Midnight In Paris is both aimlessly pretentious and gratuitously esoteric — a film that sucks up to pseudo-intellectuals and performs the hitherto impossible task of baffling both idiots and intellectuals alike.

The film’s very premise is esoteric in nature: Gil travels back to 1920s Paris and meets up with iconic artists such as Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Luis Bunuel et al. For anyone who doesn’t know them, Allen’s not-so-carefully embedded network of references would prove meaningless. Dali’s vision of a subject with “only one tear down the cheek”, for instance, is a reference to the surrealistic tradition of embracing asymmetry. Naturally, people who take pride in flaunting their knowledge would laugh at this point — even though getting the reference does not actually translate to some underlying joke. Those who don’t get the reference would not laugh because they don’t get the ‘joke’, and those who have an equal wealth of knowledge and intelligence would not laugh either — because there is no joke to begin with. I think this basically exemplifies what I don’t like about much of the humor in the film: it brings out the self-important know-it-all in semi-knowledgeable people, and gives them an opportunity to laugh and feel special. Even his dialogue feels awkwardly pretentious:

Inez: Come on, we should quit the ‘idle chatter’ because we’re gonna be late.

Inez’s Mom: ‘Nevertheless’, I don’t think your idea of having him followed is very practical.

Of course, if the film had then gone on to knowingly mock this brand of pretentious bullshit — in true George Carlin fashion –I would be totes in love with it. After all, Allen’s films work best when they are self-aware; Allen’s magnum opus Annie Hall succeeds mostly because of his self-deprecating dissection of Alvy Singer’s neuroticism. But Midnight In Paris has a script that seems genuinely unaware of its cringe factor.

But even if I were okay with Allen’s pretentious execution, why on earth would witnessing the rivalry between Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway, or listening to Cole Porter singing a song be particularly interesting? As an audience, we understand Gil’s fascination of watching his idols come to life. But we also know that we’re watching a film, and therefore hardly share his excitement. The history trips would’ve been so much more interesting if the film had debunked some myths surrounding the icons portrayed, or if some revisionist element were introduced. I mean, Allen’s caricatures of Hemingway (‘the tortured artist’) and Dali (‘the eccentric genius’) were occasionally entertaining, but they aren’t enough to make Gil’s ‘magical’ trips…well, magical.

And even though the film is already by nature extremely esoteric, Allen makes a lot of bewildering concessions that come across as half-hearted and overly simplistic. The inclusion of Dali and Bunuel to make a fantastically general point about surrealism and how it expands the imagination is, for one, incredibly insulting. I assume Allen deliberately chose to bring them both into the movie at the same time because of their collaboration on the arthouse tour de force Un Chien Andalou, but there is no explicit exploration of that suggestion here. Allen simply raises a possibility, then shits all over it. Bravo, Woody Allen. Bravo.

The plot of the film is also offensively predictable for any filmmaker, let alone Woody Allen. It begins with Inez dismissing Gil’s romantic fantasies of Paris-in-the-rain, proceeds with making Inez look like a total bitch, introduces Gabrielle (as sweet and beautiful as Parisians get), introduces Adriana (the quintessentially enigmatic beauty that never ends up with the likeable protagonist), breaks up Gil and Inez (as though we never saw it coming), and ends with Gil and Gabrielle walking (IN THE RAIN) towards a happy, happy future of perpetual nostalgia. Sometimes, predictability of plot is comforting – as it is in Lars and the Real Girl, or City Lights – but at other times (like in Midnight In Paris), it is off-putting, anti-climactic and just plain boring.

The philosophical ramblings in the film are hardly worthy of an intellectual of Allen’s stature either. The intellectual premise of the film is firmly grounded in the problem of existential disillusionment, which is something that has been consistently explored in his works. However, Allen fails to explore this thematic framework as powerfully as he does in Match Point, or as ambivalently as he does in Vicki Cristina Barcelona. Instead, he skirts around the topic like he has nothing much to say, aimlessly invokes various discursive concepts like ‘Golden Age Thinking’, then descends into brainless camp and saccharine sentimentality. Admittedly, nostalgia as a manifestation of a perpetual dissatisfaction with the present is an intriguing premise, but without development and/or exploration, it is neither interesting nor powerful enough to sustain an entire movie. Often, the ‘intellectual’ banter here comes across as a very watered-down, dumbed-down Bergman ripoff. Unless you’re inventive, articulate and skilful enough to make intellectualism something accessible (as Bergman does effortlessly), um…don’t do it kthx xoxo

I’m not finished complaining though; the character development here is awful too. Inez, for one, is shockingly superficial. In Match Point, where Scarlett Johannsen basically plays a variation of Inez, her death necessitates our sympathy. Therefore, she is allowed to be as whiny and needy as possible, because no matter what she does, we will still be on her side mourning for her. Here, however, there is no attempt to humanize Inez at all. She whines constantly. She belittles Gil everytime she has a line. She sucks up to ‘pseudo-intellectual’ Paul. She almost accuses the hotel maid of stealing. She doesn’t even feel sad when Gil breaks up with her. She just whines some more. Belittles some more. Bitches some more. But it’s not just her. Everyone apart from Gil is flat and unrealistic. Paul has the potential to become a wonderful character, but Allen cruelly obliterates him from the film after the first half, as though he himself wants the film to become a total dud. Thankfully, though, this film does have some redeeming factors.

Owen Wilson, best known for his invariable slapstick shtick in countless B-rated critical bombs, is quite wonderful here. He captures the Woody Allen persona with incredible accuracy and performs the remarkable task of imitation without ever once descending into unintentional parody. Wilson’s Gil is brimming with introverted tentativeness and ambivalent self-effacement, possesses a genuine fascination for the world, and awkwardly asserts his presence with an artist’s pride. His performance is endlessly marvelous and effortlessly funny, and I’m genuinely surprised he didn’t manage to garner an Oscar nomination for it. Adrien Brody’s campy cameo as Salvador Dali is pretty awesome too; it’s just a shame his role wasn’t particularly huge.

As always with latter-day Allen films, Allen’s use of music is exquisite and his cinematography is stunning. The ending, which is uncharacteristically sweet and pretty, is also a wonderful thing in itself — even if it is an inadequate apology for an awful film.

Ultimately, this movie is bearable, pseudo-intellectual fodder that reads and feels like a Woody Allen film; it’s just not a very good one. Not a very good one at all.

KevinScale Rating: 2.5/5

So Black Swan is an arthouse mindfuck for shitheads

That’s right. After more than a year since its glorious global release, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (BS) still annoys the shit out of me. And not just because Aronofsky eschews all semblances of subtlety and adopts instead offensive in-your-face visual conceits to convey ideas reeking of half-baked superficiality (I’m so over that), but because, time and time again, I have been forced to listen to people (Ed Wood sympathizers, no doubt) telling me how awesome it is:

“Oh, you know, the mirrors are used to like, symbolize right, this like…um… multiplicity of identity, you know?”

“It’s like…daring and bold and inventive, you know? The lesbian scene was very bold and daring, and like…it’s so cool, you know? Like when the black wings grew out of her, right, I couldn’t believe it.”

Omg stop kthx.

Admittedly, BS’ visual conceits are not just empty exercises in set design and special effects. The mirrors are obviously symbols that chronicle the fragmentation of Nina’s identity and serve to express the tensions between her “uptight virgin” and “lesbian slut” sides. The use of black wings is obviously a counterpoint to Nina’s endless supply of white dresses. But children…making sense is imperative; making sense does not make a film great, or even good. On the contrary, the abundance of clichés is both cringe-inducing and irritating – especially when constantly faced with hapless sycophants.

Let’s poke around Aronofsky’s oh-so-twisted mind:

“Natalie Portman is hot. Mila Kunis is hotter. They should make lesbian porn together. I should help them.”

“But how do I pretend I want to convey something complex about identity? Oh, I know. I’ll use mirrors. It looks pretty and it gives Natalie a chance to flaunt her Harvard Psych degree by making multiple references to the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to confuse otherwise-credible film critics into liking mah shit.”

“Maybe I’ll make the mother evil.”

But to clear the air, I’m not wholly against Black Swan. Fear and paranoia permeate the film’s atmosphere, and more often than not they come crashing down on the audience, at once suffocating and sublime. The actors are obviously very dedicated in their mission to salvage Aronofsky’s weak source material, because the acting is uniformly top-notch – even if Natalie Portman’s dancing was mostly done by an overlooked stunt double (OH SNAP). The strategic placing of mirrors occasionally makes for a stunning scene. The extensive use of close-ups and grainy cinematography effectively disposes of ballet’s veneer of grace and poshness. If this movie were less drenched in Aronofsky’s half-baked stylistic flourishes, and people didn’t keep droning on about how amazing it is, I would probably like it more. Also, to Aronofsky’s credit, he is not a bad director. Requiem for a Dream (I approve of this film btw) was one of the most inventive films of the last decade, and all of its stylistic flourishes – the score, the hip-hop montages, the clinical yet dim lighting, the juxtaposition of melodrama and subtle, complex subtexts – were extremely well-developed. For his sake, as well as for that of his diehard fans, I really hope that Black Swan was just a throwaway creative outlet to purge him of all his unoriginality.

Also I quasi-apologize for the unrestrained grumpiness. I just woke up from a nap and found out my Ruffles stash had been wiped out.

Aloha bitches. KevOUT. (Geddit? Kevin out? KevIN out? KevOUT? TROLOLOLOLOLOL)

(/badhumor)