Maybe sprout wings
Among Marisa, Amanda, Nathaniel, I, Katie, Sara, Kate, Rebecca, and Becca, not everyone specifically said that Black Swan gave or would give them nightmares, but at Maggie and Kyle's holiday party the next day, many of us were definitely speaking of weird dreams and phantom itches and suspicious cuts (I have two on my hand right now; it's weird). Darren Aronofsky's twitchy, hypnotic, kind of fantastic movie about a ballerina losing her shit will do that to you. In style and theme, it really is something of a lady-centric flipside to The Wrestler: Aronofsky keeps the grainy film stock, the handheld following shots, and the obsession with pushing the human body, and adds in the jittery paranoia of Pi and Requieum for a Dream, with a more overtly horrific (yet in some ways less hysterical, much as I like Requiem for what it is) tone. I was surprised to find that Aronofsky didn't write Black Swan, or at least he's not one of the three credited writers, because it does bear his trademark perfunctory, on-the-nose quality -- scripts tending more towards skeleton than muscle. But he's making a movie less about dialogue or plot or even character so much as a state of mind, and his direction to evoke it is often stunning, as technically precise, thrilling, and single-minded as some of the dancing. It helps that Natalie Portman plays the crazy ballerina, and Mila Kunis adds tiny bit of humor (which apart from The Wrestler is usually all Aronofsky can deal with) as her friendly, provocative maybe-rival. I can see this movie being dismissed by some as ridiculous camp melodrama whatever, but Aronofsky is an expert at getting me to go along with whatever craziness he finds interesting. Black Swan is one of his most audacious in its embrace of a degree of that campiness, but it also manages to feel more satisfying than just inevitable.
It turned out that this weekend was all about degrees of camp and ridiculousness. On Saturday, Marisa and Katie and I went to another sort of dancer movie entirely: Burlesque. It's a silly, ham-handed and often lamely paced movie, but it's more purely enjoyable than any number of big-ticket Broadway adaptations of recent years. Xtina plays a waitress from Iowa who takes the bus to Los Angeles, looks for a singing job, walks into a burlesque club, and decides it's the most amazing thing she's ever seen and it's her dream to work there. So it's a good thing she didn't walk into a bordello, or an opium den, or a Target (or a mega-cliched backstage musical... oh wait!). From there, the movie ticks off an astonishing variety of well-worn elements: the stern but loving mother figure (Cher); the ingenue with the untapped potential; the bitter, reckless rival (Kristen Bell!); the sensitive songwriter who lacks the courage to play his music for anyone else; the rich guy with ulterior motives who isn't right for our heroine.
All of this stuff happens more or less simultaneously, with little sense of time or timing, or maybe it just seems that way because when Eric Dane, who plays the rich guy, manages to more or less stop time whenever he appears on any sort of screen. I thought that I'd onlyy seen Eric Dane in two movies, this and Valentine's Day, but it turns out that he eluded my attention in the third X-Men movie as well as the crappy horror movie Feast, but more importantly, apparently this guy is on Grey's Anatomy, which blows my mind. Grey's Anatomy is on like every week and watched by a lot of people. How are these people still alive after repeated exposure to Eric Dane? I've been consciously aware of him in exactly two movies and I'm pretty sure I've already lost five percent of my brain because of it. Does he audition to get work, or does he just talk at the casting director until he or she passes out and then he writes his own name on the sheet? He makes the cast of The Walking Dead look like the cast of Lost and he makes the cast of Lost look like the cast of Justified. I hate it when people misuse the word "literally" but I literally cannot think of a less interesting actor or possibly human being. It's possible that I could've done it last week, but then I saw a movie with Eric Dane in it and my brain works less good.
And yet. AND YET. I wouldn't say that I didn't enjoy Burlesque. The musical numbers are pretty enjoyable. A few of them are kind of sexy, which is probably a pretty lousy average for a movie about burlesque, but whatever, maybe, as I've long suspected, burlesque just isn't actually that sexy, or, you know, it's sexy for something you can see in a cheesy club full of theater majors, but for something you can see in a movie, not so much. Kind of like a singer trying to be sexy and interesting. Xtina conveys some acting by gazing with her lips parted and sometimes, when we're really lucky, with her finger on her face in a "hmmm" sort of pose, and in an ultimate cosmic f-you, she's still more convincing and likable than Britney Spears managed as the valedictorian virgin of Crossroads. Burlesque isn't made with that kind of spectacular clunkiness that distinguishes a movie like Crossroads; it's actually sort of an attractive, glossy, likable, amusing movie, when it's not being totally ridiculous. It actually could've been more ridiculous, which will make it the disappointment of the season for the camp crowd, but for me, it sort of did the trick on a very lazy Saturday afternoon.
There's also a trace of camp in I Love You Phillip Morris, which I saw a few weeks ago at a Lincoln Center thing and reviewed very positively -- along with Black Swan, it's gunning for a spot on my ten-best list for this year. Jim Carrey plays a gay con man, and as transgressive as the movie's dark sense of humor (courtesy of the guys who wrote Bad Santa) gets, it also sort of plays like a Jim Carrey Movie from the nineties gone strangely right. Please go see it. It needs your money.
And if you can think of a less interesting actor in Eric Dane who actually has a bunch of lines in anything, please, by all means, let my poor brain know about it.
It turned out that this weekend was all about degrees of camp and ridiculousness. On Saturday, Marisa and Katie and I went to another sort of dancer movie entirely: Burlesque. It's a silly, ham-handed and often lamely paced movie, but it's more purely enjoyable than any number of big-ticket Broadway adaptations of recent years. Xtina plays a waitress from Iowa who takes the bus to Los Angeles, looks for a singing job, walks into a burlesque club, and decides it's the most amazing thing she's ever seen and it's her dream to work there. So it's a good thing she didn't walk into a bordello, or an opium den, or a Target (or a mega-cliched backstage musical... oh wait!). From there, the movie ticks off an astonishing variety of well-worn elements: the stern but loving mother figure (Cher); the ingenue with the untapped potential; the bitter, reckless rival (Kristen Bell!); the sensitive songwriter who lacks the courage to play his music for anyone else; the rich guy with ulterior motives who isn't right for our heroine.
All of this stuff happens more or less simultaneously, with little sense of time or timing, or maybe it just seems that way because when Eric Dane, who plays the rich guy, manages to more or less stop time whenever he appears on any sort of screen. I thought that I'd onlyy seen Eric Dane in two movies, this and Valentine's Day, but it turns out that he eluded my attention in the third X-Men movie as well as the crappy horror movie Feast, but more importantly, apparently this guy is on Grey's Anatomy, which blows my mind. Grey's Anatomy is on like every week and watched by a lot of people. How are these people still alive after repeated exposure to Eric Dane? I've been consciously aware of him in exactly two movies and I'm pretty sure I've already lost five percent of my brain because of it. Does he audition to get work, or does he just talk at the casting director until he or she passes out and then he writes his own name on the sheet? He makes the cast of The Walking Dead look like the cast of Lost and he makes the cast of Lost look like the cast of Justified. I hate it when people misuse the word "literally" but I literally cannot think of a less interesting actor or possibly human being. It's possible that I could've done it last week, but then I saw a movie with Eric Dane in it and my brain works less good.
And yet. AND YET. I wouldn't say that I didn't enjoy Burlesque. The musical numbers are pretty enjoyable. A few of them are kind of sexy, which is probably a pretty lousy average for a movie about burlesque, but whatever, maybe, as I've long suspected, burlesque just isn't actually that sexy, or, you know, it's sexy for something you can see in a cheesy club full of theater majors, but for something you can see in a movie, not so much. Kind of like a singer trying to be sexy and interesting. Xtina conveys some acting by gazing with her lips parted and sometimes, when we're really lucky, with her finger on her face in a "hmmm" sort of pose, and in an ultimate cosmic f-you, she's still more convincing and likable than Britney Spears managed as the valedictorian virgin of Crossroads. Burlesque isn't made with that kind of spectacular clunkiness that distinguishes a movie like Crossroads; it's actually sort of an attractive, glossy, likable, amusing movie, when it's not being totally ridiculous. It actually could've been more ridiculous, which will make it the disappointment of the season for the camp crowd, but for me, it sort of did the trick on a very lazy Saturday afternoon.
There's also a trace of camp in I Love You Phillip Morris, which I saw a few weeks ago at a Lincoln Center thing and reviewed very positively -- along with Black Swan, it's gunning for a spot on my ten-best list for this year. Jim Carrey plays a gay con man, and as transgressive as the movie's dark sense of humor (courtesy of the guys who wrote Bad Santa) gets, it also sort of plays like a Jim Carrey Movie from the nineties gone strangely right. Please go see it. It needs your money.
And if you can think of a less interesting actor in Eric Dane who actually has a bunch of lines in anything, please, by all means, let my poor brain know about it.