The worst kind of trash

Rating: 1/10 (4 November 2012)

I can't resist writing the one-thousandth review! Just watched the movie on DVD. I thought this was supposed to be a great and compelling film about the pressures of ballet dancing. It's just a pile of tripe. No top-flight dancer, musician, athlete or anything else professional can be as self-absorbed as the heroine (?) of this film: they have to do a squillion technical things to get over their performance, otherwise they'd be replaced without hesitation. So let's assume it's all a fantasy in which the Natalie Portman character imagines all manner of hallucinations as she goes into the toughest role in the ballet repertoire (is it really?!). A good film fantasy makes the viewer interested, shocked, amazed, horrified. This one mostly makes the viewer bored, with an overwhelming sense of nausea at the stock characters (domineering mother, rivals out to trip up the star) and the stock situations (sexual interactions that may or may not be real, woundings and murders that may or may not have happened). For goodness' sake: this sort of thing has been churned out time after time in countless B movies and it's done here more expensively but not any better. The whole thing resembles a Ken Russell effort made on an extremely bad and mindless day.