Kindergarten filmmaking

Rating: 1/10 (31 January 2011)

Mix horror, thriller, childish "boo!" effect, lots of corny camera movements, simmer it with over-dramatic music and lighting, the result is an art fraud that'll fool audience and critics alike. That's Black Swan for you.
First of all, what acting? Portman has only one facial expression which was magnified by the endless, tiring, and meaningless close-ups. 10 minutes into the film one is already sick of her shifty eyes and short breaths.
Then there's the very shallow plot and lousy dialogue. There's no character development. The few talking parts are inconsistent and one-dimensional. Most people are mere blurry passing shadows. The crucial night out was totally incoherent. Things happen for no particular reason. The girl still shows no sign of desperation or desire. And it's supposed to lead to her "letting it out" and "living a little" by having red eyes and imagined feathers? wtf?
And the lack of continuity! You'd think someone flipped the negatives. So bad I was hoping it's deliberate; an effort to display the mirroring yet twisted hallucination. But it's too subtle - one thing this film is anything but!
The dichotomy of the white and black swans is symbolized literally (and solely!) by the white and black outfits. It's unforgivably lazy to convey a person's inner transformation by simply pulling a black singlet over a white one, and later covering all with a gray sweater - this is the filmmaking for the kindergarten!
Finally, this is perhaps the only film about an art form that doesn't portray any of the beauty and passion of that art. Ballet is brutally and shamefully dismissed. It's reduced down to no more than the wooden doll spinning on the toes. Such annihilation is a blasphemy. Why does the filmmaker pick a topic he has absolutely no interest in? Instead of the power of ballet itself the film opts for the CGI effect which adds neither visual pleasure nor emotional value. wtf?
Someone needs to wake up to the fact that female masturbation and lesbian sex don't make a film avant-garde. What happened to good scripts? Can nobody learn anything from the masterpiece "The Piano Teacher"? Yet "Black Swan" receives such undeserved rave reviews...... wtf?