The Black Turkey

Rating: 1/10 (13 February 2011)

Ah!
Another artsy-farty film about an artsy-fartsy subject made for the artsy-fartsy crowd....
TBS is a tedious, stagnant and derivative film that goes absolutely nowhere.
Well, one wonders, what can be as exciting as the backstage story of a young lady competing to be the prima ballerina in a new production of The Black Swan? Not much really, because under normal circumstances there is nothing going on in this type of environment, unless one is interested in underweight, monomaniac girls with inflated egos whose main objective in life consists of perfecting the vacuosity of dancing...
On top of that, TBS is a film whose characters (without exception) are despicable. The main character, Nina, for instance, could easily be described as a pathetic, anorexic, obsessive and psychologically weak young lady. Her mother is an abusive, bitter, has-been type of person. Nina's friend (if we may call her that...)is a dancer who smokes(a clear sign of the presence of the tobacco lobby in action) and do drugs, the choreographer, of course, is a sex addict that preys on the vulnerability of his young dancers, and the rest of the them, which are the other dancers, seem to be poised to stab each and everyone in the back so that they can get the most coveted part in the production. They are all very inspiring, I guess.
The end of TBS, of course, is very cliché (as is the whole film...) because, as expected, what matters in the end is the performance, the perfection of execution and all that stupid bla-bla-bla about winning and succeeding at any cost.
To spike the interest in and keep the attention of the male audience watching this "masterpiece" , the producers resorted to an old trick and introduced two gratuitous sex scenes (one of them depicting lesbian sex) in the film.
So, in the end we have a film with unpleasant characters, a weak script, and a story which could have been told in 15 minutes.
Well, it seems "Black Swan" is the perfect Oscar contender...