Black Swan

Tonight, a film about ballet, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is the artistic director of a New York ballet company. His latest project is a new production of Swan Lake for which he promptly forces his star ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder) into retirement.



Boo hiss, always been a Ryder fan. You’re too old love. Her replacement in the coveted role of the Swan Queen is to be Nina (Natalie Portman). Boos turn to cheers over here. Always been a Portman fan.



Ryder is so distraught, that after insinuating just how down ‘n’ dirty Miss Nat P had to get to land the role, chucks herself under a car. Of course our Nat, well I best call her Nina, wouldn’t do any such thing, she is the White Swan personified, a real goody two shoes.

Let me explain and give you the idiot’s guide to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake... Evil sorcerer turns pretty young girl into a white swan and she can only be turned back if her prince swears eternal love to her. Evil sorcerer though has dirty trick up his sleeve, he invents an identical black swan who he sends to seduce the prince and divert his affections. You know how easily men are swayed.

As Swan Queen, Nina has to play both swans. The good, sweet, innocent White Swan as well as the wanton black one. Nina has all the technical ability to dance the White Swan dance but the director seriously doubts her ability to capture the brazen sexuality of the Black Swan.

Enter the rather fetching Mila Kunis as Lily.



Mmmm. Move over Ms Portman, slowly. I’ve suddenly become a Kunis fan. Nina finds the self assured Lily totally incomprehensible. She’s the sort of a girl who dabbles in all sorts of naughty pastimes, such as fun, as well as drugs ‘n’ alcohol, and carries her knickers around in her handbag. Nina feels threatened by her, more so when she finds out she’s to be her understudy. Lily has the all the sensual blackness that Nina lacks, she is the Black Swan immortalised, at least in Nina's eyes. Oh and she even has black feathers tattooed on her back. Subtle? Not.

Somehow Nina must find a way to evoke her inner Black Swan. Thomas tries to provoke and manipulate her into the role, demanding that she live a little and be less 'white'. He kisses her, she bites him, he’s impressed, and she gets the role.



Nina tries hard to live the role but still struggles to discover her dark side. The stress begins to tell on her and she starts to have delusions. Thomas, getting sleazier by the frame, takes her back to his place, for what we assume is an education in sleaze. Though you suspect he’s going to seduce her more for his own ends rather than just for the sake of the production and that she'll go with it for the role, as Ryder implied and maybe did herself, but that's not what happens. He sends her away with 'homework'. Homework she throws herself into with abandon (nice technique Nat), until she realises her mother is in the room.

Ah yes, her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey). She too was once a ballerina but gave it up to raise Nina and now lives her life through her daughter. Always pushing her to be successful, whilst sheltering her from the world. She has raised an insecure young woman who looked fragile from the opening scene.

Nina’s hallucinations grow. The scratch marks she inflicts on her shoulder, yet we never see her do. She tears a piece of skin off her finger, ouch, but then realises it didn't happen. Her reflection in the mirror moves on its own... Nina becomes increasingly unhinged and before long she can barely distinguish between what is real and what isn’t and nor can we.

Enter again, the black haired temptress to lead her further away from reality. Lily takes Nina into what is probably uncharted territory, a bar and a night club, where Nina is so uptight that Lily offers her a drug to lighten her up.



Tugged along by Lily, Nina has a few drinks and the two of them indulge in an alcohol and drug fuelled night of clubbing and flirting with a couple of chaps called Tom and 'Jerry'. Then she takes Lily home and to bed, at least in her mind, via an argument with her mother. They lock lips, in several configurations, as Nina embraces a more lustful version of herself. Nina wakes up the next morning, alone and late for rehearsal where she finds Lily in her costume, dancing her routine, fresh from spending a night with Tom.

With so much pressure being exerted by her director, her mother, her rivals and herself, Nina continues to buckle under the strain. Becoming more and more obsessed with the role and the role takes her over. Aronofsky takes his audience inside her deteriorating sense of reality, making sure we see what she sees, we experience what she experiences. It is intense stuff.



It may have been her mother's paintings moving and talking to her that caused her to fall and hit her head. She comes round, in her own bed, on opening night to find out that her mother has called her in sick... mothers don't you just love ‘em.

When Nina finally gets to the theatre and performs, things don’t go that well. Lily is still up to her tricks, flirting with one of the male dancers. Nina loses her concentration and falls. The girls argue in the interval and fight or is Nina fighting with herself? Are these two girls actually two halves of the same person? Is Lily even real?

Whatever happens in that dressing room, Nina comes out and dances the Black Swan with the sensuality that Thomas has been asking for all along. She leaves the stage to rapturous applause and kisses him passionately, finally having seduced him with her dancing.

Then in the final scene of Swan Lake, as the White Swan commits suicide, perhaps we finally realise what is real and what isn’t... or perhaps not.

Either way, it’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking. An enthralling experience from start to finish, something you would not expect from a film about a ballet. So perhaps the Kings Speech isn't the best film of the year after all. As for Portman, does she deserve the plaudits she’s been getting? She’s always been easy to look at but as an actress, the jury was out. In this though, you have to admit she was terrific. Best film, best actress, best director... maybe, we have a few more to see yet.

The Kings Speech

‘The Kings Speech’ opens with King George V (Michael Gambon) asking his second son Prince Albert, the Duke of York, to deliver a speech at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition. The Duke (Colin Firth) is not the most confident of people, not helped by or possible the cause of a speech impediment and the prospect of public speaking simply terrifies him. He immediately becomes tongue tied in front of the crowd and stammers what words he can manage.



The Duchess (Helena Bonham Carter) takes her husband to see Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a speech therapist from Australia. A man with no academic credentials but one who comes highly recommended although with unorthodox methods. They have already tried many professional therapists without success.

Before he realises who his new customers are Logue suggests that if her husband cannot cope with public speaking then perhaps a career change might be in order... not really possible she admits.



Logue agrees to treat her husband but only under his own rules in his own office. He doesn’t do house calls he tells her, not even for royalty. He also insists on using Christian names, so a reluctant ‘Bertie’ is coaxed to his first appointment. It doesn’t go well and when Logue records him reading the famous opening lines from Hamlet, you know ‘to be or not to be’ and all that jazz, but whilst wearing headphones so that he can't hear his own voice, the Duke’s patience runs out and he storms off.

It is not until sometime later than the Duke plays the recording of this speech that Logue gave him and realises his reading was almost perfect. Oddly the headphones trick is one that Logue doesn’t reuse; although it probably leant itself perfectly to some of the radio work the Duke has to do later.

So the Duke goes back to Logue and his therapy continues, during which an unlikely friendship develops between the two.



If he thought being in the public eye as a Duke was bad, circumstances were about to make things a whole lot worse. His elder brother David (Guy Pearce), the heir to the throne and a much more confident person, is chasing the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Meanwhile, going on in the background is the build up to World War II. It’s all actually a nice history lesson and for once no one has seen the need to alter the past. So this film will educate many people who do not know the history of this period.

When his father dies, David becomes King Edward VIII but in less than a year he has been forced to abdicate making Bertie now reluctantly King of England and his first task is to face a very public coronation ceremony.



Then the weight of leading Great Britain into conflict is thrust upon him as Britain declares war on Hitler’s Germany and the King is required to broadcast live to the nation on radio.

Now if I was King and was handed a nine minute broadcast I’d have told them to reduce it in size or face a trip to the Tower. Nine minutes... no thanks, shall we do four? Or off with your head. I'm sure that's how Queen Elizabeth I would have done it.



It is a tension filled scene but Logue is there to coach him and thankfully it is a resounding success.

It is a true story that the screenwriter David Seidler had wanted to write for some time but when he first attempted it in 1981 he was thwarted. Lionel Logue's son would not let him use his father’s diaries without permission from Buckingham Palace. Permission was given in principle but King George VI’s widow, by then commonly known as the Queen Mother, insisted that it would not be done ‘in her lifetime’. Poor Seidler then had to wait another 30 years to write his script as she went on to live to be 101.

I was very impressed with some excellent casting; everybody looked like the real people they were portraying, right down to Prime Minister’s Baldwin and Chamberlain. Even Timothy Spall was near perfect as Winston Churchill and I can't help thinking comedy whenever I see Spall.

Colin Firth gives a performance for which he is certain to be nominated for an Oscar while Helena Bonham Carter was spot on as his wife but for me, it was Geoffrey Rush at his best as Logue who stole the show.

It’s a thoroughly entertaining piece of historical cinema that gives a fascinating insight into King George VI. Not only into the struggles he had with his speech but it also paints a picture of a man who never thought he would be King but, unlike his brother, he wanted to do his duty. He wasn't meant to be King, he wasn't groomed to be King nor was he particularly suited to be King but he did it and ultimately history shows that he did it well.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

This film version of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is of course based on Alexander Dumas’s classic tale. My partner says it’s one of the best books she’s ever read. So it’s sure to be a rubbish film then and consequently she hated it. So I thought I best do my research as I haven’t read the book, although I may now have to. To be fair, it’s a complex book that clocks in at 50 hours and 47 minutes on audiobook, which could probably never be perfectly transposed into a two hour film but... they probably didn’t try very hard. I guess the director and scriptwriter assumed most people have never actually read the book and they’d probably be right.

Edmond Dantes (James Caviezel) is a sailor for a shipping company and is engaged to a beautiful girl with the rather racy name of Mercédès (Dagmara Dominczyk), who rather appropriately everyone is quite keen to take out for a spin.



Dantes is set up by his friend Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce), who is narked at Dantes being named the captain of one of their company’s ships but also sees the opportunity to acquire the keys to his Mercédès. Dantes is unjustly accused of treason, imprisoned and confined to life in Château d'If, a prison on a remote island.



Once there his cell is tunnelled into by none other than Dumbledore (Richard Harris), well actually an old chap called Abbe Faria. Faria is trying to escape and they attempt to dig their way out together. They never manage it but Faria teaches Dantes many things and then on his deathbed fourteen years later tells him the whereabouts of a great treasure, which enables Dantes later to transform himself into the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo. Faria’s death also gives Dantes the means to escape.



Once free, he clashes with the crew of a pirate ship and acquires the help of one of the pirates whose life he spared. Together they make plans to take vengeance on the men who were responsible for destroying Dantes life.



Fernand and Mercédès are now husband and wife, part of Parisian highlife and have a son. Dantes rescues their son from a fake kidnapping that he himself set up, in order to endear himself to their household.

Dantes gets his revenge on everyone; Hollywood manages to fit in a few swashbuckling sword fights before our romantic adventure film ends with the traditional made up happy ending. Dantes gets his girl and even gains a son, which will be news to Dumas. Someone ought to dig him up and tell him.

This was the tenth adaptation of the book and perhaps there are better ones. Thing is, bad or not, this adaptation has made me want to read the book, so it can't all be bad.

The movie is entertaining, more so if you discard the title. I guess like most adaptations, avoid if you’ve read the book.

The Way Back

‘The Way Back’ is the story of a group of men who were imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags but escape and walk to safety. That’s just a mere four thousand miles over a couple of mountain ranges and across a desert.

It is based on the international bestseller, ‘The Long Walk’, which is in effect the memoirs of Slavomit Racuwicz, a Polish army officer, who himself was a prisoner in the gulag. Although since his death it has come to light that, and I’m trying not to say that he made it up but, it appears he didn’t make that journey himself and apparently based it on stories he had heard. However director Peter Weir claims to have done his research, so presumably he thinks such a journey would be possible. I’m not so sure but it makes for a captivating couple of hours cinema.

The film starts by introducing us to some of the characters inside the prison and the harsh reality of life there. The inmates are warned that the gulag itself is only part of their prison and should they feel the need to escape, nature will take its toll upon them. This prospect doesn't however put them off plotting an escape.

Key among the escapees is Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a pole who has been imprisoned for allegedly being a spy. The evidence paraded before him was his weeping wife, Janusz is convinced must have been tortured, who betrays him to his face.

The escape itself bursts out of almost nothing and the men break out into a blizzard. Among the motley band of escapees are the knife wielding psycho Valka (Colin Farrell) and a grizzled American who wishes to be referred to only as Mr Smith (Ed Harris).



The men head out across the hostile terrain, scavenging for food and water, towards Mongolia, only to discover when they get there that it too is under Soviet rule and they have to rethink their final destination.



Directorial licence also adds some female interest to an otherwise all male story. Not sure why Weir felt it needed it but I suppose Saoirse Ronan does break up the bickering between the escapees who have to make their uneasy alliance work just to survive.



A few do fall by the wayside and the ones that don’t endure a perilous journey to freedom, which continues out of Mongolia across the seemingly endless Gobi Desert where they struggle against the blazing heat and sand storms as well as a distinct lack of food and water.

They finally reach Tibet where they are faced with crossing the Himalayas in order to reach English run India. A final trek that is rushed compared with the rest of the film.



It’s a long film but thoroughly engrossing, one that has you captivated the entire time. A story of human endurance and the stark struggle for freedom. Though it’s a bit repetitive at times. You know: - mountain, desert, mountain, desert, etc but it’s all beautifully filmed and does drive home the vastness of their task but also the implausibility of it.

Then once he’s achieved his aim Janusz has to wait almost half a century for the fall of communism so that he can be reunited with his wife. Life’s a bitch.

The Kids Are All Right

'The Kids Are All Right' is written, directed and I think most other things by Lisa Cholodenko. Who apparently writes from personal experience, so it’s kind of semi-biographical.

Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are an 'old' married couple but, and the clue is in their abbreviated Christian names, a lesbian couple. They also each have a teenage child produced with the aid of the same anonymous sperm donor. The test tube version one assumes. In many ways it’s an ordinary family with the kids constantly embarrassed and annoyed by their parents.



The eldest, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), named after Joni Mitchell, is now eighteen and legally able to track down her biological father without her Mother’s permission. She isn’t that bothered but is convinced to do so by her younger brother (Josh Hutcherson). Though we don’t get given any background to why the kids feel differently about it and why her brother is so keen. The man they trace is an easygoing restaurateur and organic farmer called Paul (Mark Ruffalo).

The brother by the way is a fifteen year old called Laser... 'Cool name' says his new found Dad. Errr no. Well maybe for a dog. Then again, no not even for a dog.



Paul begins to regularly meet with the kids and is taken by surprise by the fact he starts to feel very paternal towards them. He seems to have a positive influence on them and it starts to change him a bit as a person.

As for the mums. Jules is intrigued by this man who is undeniably part of her kids make up, yet also a complete stranger and she agrees to design and construct a garden for him. While control freak Nic is suspicious and jealous of someone she sees as an interloper in their cosy family set up.

There is a side plot about Joni trying to discover herself sexually and about Laser, well there’s not much about Laser actually, other than him stopping a friend of his inexplicably peeing on a dog...

Nic and Jules’s relationship has obviously gone a bit stale and one night we get a comedic, well cringe inducing, scene where they attempt to spice things up by watching male gay porn complete with leather clad hunks. An odd choice, that they then have to attempt to explain, unconvincingly, to Joni when she overhears them.

The result is more old spice that hot ‘n’ spicy, so it's no wonder that Jules decides to get her next sperm donation the old fashioned way and throws herself into Paul's leather clad arms the next chance she gets. A turn of events that will no doubt annoy lesbians in their droves. Who knows if a girl can be turned that quickly and that easily but it’s a male fantasy that Paul can now cross off his things to do before I die list.



Consequently Jules spends more time getting athletic in Paul’s bedroom than digging his garden. Cue several gratuitous graphic love scenes, although we’d already had one earlier with Paul and his attractive female assistant. Jules will be pleased to know that he seemed to repeat the exact same repertoire in the exact same order with her.

One of the strongest moments of the film is when Nic has a scene with Paul at the dinner table, watched by the whole family, where she finally seems to come around to Paul's easy going charm, almost to the point of seduction. Jules looks mightily jealous and concerned. Then Nic discovers her partner’s hair in Paul’s bathroom and subsequently, when she snoops, in his bed... Hang on. A question if I may? Would you recognise your partner’s hair in the plug hole? I wouldn't. Long brown hair is long brown hair. You would have to be a mega suspicious person to jump to the same conclusion that Nic did and if your partner wasn’t even supposed to be into that gender, totally paranoid too.

This unsatisfactory discovery of their affair leads us to a very unsatisfactory ending. Well actually it’s a complete cop out. The film had created some interesting situations that were well worth exploring but then it all ended in such an illogical way.



Jules grovels to the rest of the family, apologizes for her actions and assures Nic that she’s still an All American lesbian despite showing more than a few traits of being a rampant bisexual. So Jules rejects Paul, despite the fact he confesses he’s fallen in love with her. As do the kids, the kids that Paul has now realised mean everything to him. Enabling Nic to triumphantly tell Paul to go and find his own family, when he comes to their house to make his own apology.

So in the end the film never goes anywhere and everyone appears to end up back where they started, resuming their previous lives as if nothing has happened. Which is something I really hate to see in films.

It also caught me off guard. I’d thought all the way through I was supposed to be rooting for Paul, who after all didn’t ask for any of this and it was the kids who initiated the contact with him, but all along it was a film about two lesbians staying together in the face of adversity.

It’s an entertaining film but one that fails, frustratingly, to fulfil its potential.

I imagine in the end both kids went on to maintain contact with Paul, Joni did takes his hat that he gave her to college with her, meanwhile Jules presumably left Nic, anything else just wouldn't be realistic.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

It’s a Wonderful Life was originally released in 1946 and now has one of those tags as an ‘enduring classic’. It was nominated for five Academy Awards but won none in a year the board was swept by `The Best Years of Our Lives'.

George Bailey (James Stewart) is a man with big ideas. He wants to leave his home town of Bedford Falls, go to college, travel the world and make something of his life but it never happens for him. Life throws up situation after situation for George but each time he puts others and the well being of his town before himself. Which means that he ends up never leaving the town.



The bonus here should be that he is stalked, albeit laid back 1940’s style stalking, by the lovely Mary (Donna Reed). Frolicking naked in a bush, we know your game Mary. That was no accident was it? George proves to be a hard man to snare but Mary is a patient girl who waits around for the penny to drop and for George to realize that he loves her.



The film tells us all this in flashback because George has had enough of being a failure and is ready to end his miserable life by throwing himself off a bridge and would have done so if it hadn’t been for Angel Second Class Clarence (Henry Travers), a man yet to win his angel wings, who is sent to save him.

First though Clarence is given the story of George Bailey's life which is how we find out that as a child George saved his brother’s life, a brother who went on to be a war hero and he also persuaded his chemist boss Mr Gower that he had unwittingly prescribed poison to a child. Then when he was older and his father died he took on his father’s loans business. It was his father’s dream to build affordable houses despite the greedy Mr Potter's (Lionel Barrymore) influence on the town and the loan company being probably the only business that Potter doesn’t own. There follows many situation where George puts the town folk or his family before himself.

Then on Christmas Eve, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) misplaces a large sum of the business’s money. Potter finds the money and keeps it. George realizes that he will be held responsible and probably jailed, finally allowing Potter to take control of his company.



After arguing with his wife and family, George gets drunk at a local bar and comes to the conclusion that he should never have been born. Broken and suicidal he heads for the bridge, where Clarence’s grants him his wish. Clarence shows George what life would have been like had he never existed and what would have became of the people he knew. It’s a nightmarish vision of Pottersville, a town mired in sleaze where all George’s friends and family are either dead, ruined, or miserable. Most horrific of all Mary has become a librarian and a spinster.

The film appears to say that we are all inextricably linked to each other’s lives and we each play an important part in one another's existence. True but not necessarily to the good. George was one in a million. No one else in the town had the back bone to stand up to Potter and as for Potter. What would have been Clarence’s spiel had it been Potter on that bridge? Or would he have even bothered getting out of bed for that one. Erasing his existence would have had a positive effect on everyone or at least you would think.



Perhaps the true message is one of sacrifice for the greater good. George sees the influence he’s had on friends and family and finally realises just what a wonderful life he's really had. He is restored to the present, gets down off the bridge and goes home. Where everyone is dredging up their life savings to raise the money to save George. It’s all heart warming stuff. Even I was a bit touched.

Of course theft is theft and George would be jailed anyway, as Potter never does seem to get his comeuppance, but that just wouldn't be Christmas.

Rare Exports

Tonight we take in a Christmas film, although admittedly a slightly offbeat one, which is quite different from the usual cheesy Christmas fodder. How refreshing. Kind of.

‘Rare Exports’ is actually a prequel to two short films that the same director made a few years ago and I mean short. ‘Rare Exports Inc.’ is eight minutes long and ‘Rare Exports Inc: Official Safety Instructions’ is ten minutes long. The premise of these is that Santa isn't the nice rotund gentleman dressed in red that we've come to know but is actually something far more sinister.

A few days before Christmas, somewhere in Finland, some faceless corporation are excavating something from one of the mountains. Meanwhile in the valley below, the local residents are getting ready for the annual reindeer round up, only to discover they’re all dead. They blame the excavation team but when they go to confront them no one is there and they appear to have left in a hurry.



A young boy called Pietari reckons he has, with the aid of a bit of dedicated research, discovered what they were digging up. Santa. Buried there centuries ago because he was an evil guy who punished naughty children in horrible ways. Now they’ve dug him up and suddenly being naughty or nice becomes a life or death decision. When Pietari sees footprints on the roof outside his window, he assumes Santa is coming to get him.



The next day, Pietari and his father discover an old man who has fallen into their wolf trap. Pietari is convinced it’s the main man himself and eventually persuades his father, who together with some friends attempt to sell Santa back to the corporation that organised the excavation but they tell him it’s not Santa Claus but just a mere elf.



Then suddenly dozens of naked old men with long white beards appear out of the shadows, elves galore. The man from the corporation gets an axe in the back of the head and his helicopter pilot is dragged away and killed. They all run for cover into a nearby aircraft hanger but inside there is another surprise. The elves have been busy collecting all the naughty children. They’ve bagged them all up in potato sacks and taken them to meet Santa or rather the large ice cube with horns that is still being defrosted by dozens of heating appliances that the elves have pinched. A total 'elf and safety nightmare.



The smart kid, Pietari, of course, saves the day. After only a few ‘the grown-ups won’t listen to me’ moments, he comes up with a cunning plan and the film descends momentarily into action movie mode with a quite improbable situation of dozens of kids in potato sacks being airlifted to safety by helicopter. Then again, what’s probable about burying Santa under a mountain? It's just a shame we didn't get to see the evil Santa before they blew him up.



It’s a very original storyline, creepy in places but all done with a very dark sense of humour and the lad who plays Pietari is simply superb. The elves also deserve an honourable mention. Just how did they get all those old men to stand naked in the snow for hours on end? Ok, so may have been fake snow.

The daring rescue of the kids and the destruction of Santa just leaves them with one small problem. Well quite a large problem actually, 198 naked elves, who now without their master seem to have become quite docile. Can they domesticate them, make them like all the kids and perhaps become nice friendly Santas. Of course they can.