Black Swan

But that will not be me. I’m here to tell you that I found “Black Swan’s” tale of madness, music and sexual repression utterly overpowering from the first few frames of the film. I forgot about the notebook in my lap and totally abandoned that sense I sometimes get that I’m trying to write the review in my head before the movie’s over. I was completely swept up and just wanted to ride along on Aronofsky’s hallucinatory journey with Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a rising young ballerina who emerges as the star of a leading New York ballet company just as she may also be undergoing a mental breakdown.

I will happily acknowledge my bias, in that I’m a pretty big ballet fan (although no aficionado) and an even bigger fan of “The Red Shoes,” the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger masterpiece from 1948 that Aronofsky and his screenwriters (Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin) are echoing or channeling or otherwise not-exactly-remaking here. I’ll leave it to genuine balletomanes to judge the quality of Portman’s dancing, but I can tell you that she’s had solid training and that Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique make her look sensational. Or maybe “sensational” isn’t the right word; “Black Swan” features some of the most magnificent ballet sequences ever created for cinema, but Nina is supposed to be a dancer whose prodigious technique is a little cold, mechanical and even fearful.

Nina is one of those girls who have been trained for ballet stardom since early childhood, and she has embraced that as her sole purpose in life (since that’s the only way you’re plausibly going to achieve it). She lives with her archetypal adoring-yet-smothering stage mom (Barbara Hershey) in a small Upper West Side apartment, and she’s painfully shy around the other girls in the corps, who have boyfriends and go out to nightclubs and do the other things young women in Manhattan are likely to do. If Nina isn’t a virgin, she’s doing an awfully good impression of one, and when the wandering eye of company impresario Thomas Leroy (French actor Vincent Cassel, who is superb as usual) alights on her, everyone knows what to expect.

Ambiguous, sexualized master-student relationships abound in the world of dance (not to mention the world, period) but Cassel’s character is clearly meant to evoke legendary choreographer George Balanchine, who tended to view the young female dancers at New York City Ballet as his own private hunting preserve. For Cassel’s Leroy (as, I believe, it was for Balanchine) it’s all part of the artistic process; if Nina is going to dance both the pure and virginal White Swan and the dark, seductive Black Swan in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” she’s going to have to learn some things about herself she doesn’t know yet. He’s just the guy to teach her, of course.

But some strange things happen on the way to what ought to be a simple conquest. For one thing, elevating Nina to prima ballerina means casting aside Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder, in a brief but memorable role), who is both the company’s reigning star and Leroy’s longtime lover. Perhaps deliberately, Leroy also propels Nina into a tense, rivalrous friendship with the company’s newest arrival, Lily (Mila Kunis), a tattooed free spirit from the West Coast who lacks Nina’s drive and precision but has charisma and sexual energy to burn. And by the time Lily lures Nina away from mom’s apartment for a long night of booze, Ecstasy, non-ballet-oriented dancing and some steamy bisexual exploration, we’ve already cottoned on to the dangerous truth that Nina can’t tell the difference between the real world and what’s in her head.

Nina has troubling dreams and a history of hurting herself (we gather) and a tendency not to recognize the girl she sees in the mirror. She’s haunted by every other woman in the movie — by her mother, by Beth, by Lily, and especially by the one she sees occasionally on the street or the subway train, the one who looks almost exactly like her. “Black Swan” sometimes has the buzz and chill of a classic horror film, and definitely contains elements of a clinical, Hitchcockian yarn about a nutso girl who damages other people and herself. But there’s a lot more heart and beauty to it, a lot more Balanchine and “Swan Lake” and “The Red Shoes,” than that description implies.

Aronofsky’s fable about Nina’s quest to transform herself from the White Swan into the Black Swan captures so much about the physical reality of ballet — the blood and bruises, the tortured toes and twisted ligaments — that it feels intimate, sympathetic and even loving. It’s a terrible cliché to say that a movie about artistic creation is itself an autobiography of its creator, but this is one of those rare movies in which director, actor, character and story all fuse into a big and powerful allegorical somethingness. “Black Swan” certainly has its flaws — it’s overcooked, and implausible in places — but I don’t care. It’s a magnificent blend of pop and art cinema, the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for from both Portman and Aronofsky, and an instant classic that people will be arguing about all winter.

“Black Swan” will open in theaters in December.

It’s easy to say that McBride and James Franco and Natalie Portman and director David Gordon Green — whose WTF career devolution, from “George Washington” and “All the Real Girls” to “Pineapple Express” to this atrocity seems destined to lead, sooner or later, to Budweiser commercials featuring women in white baby-doll lingerie — had more fun making “Your Highness” than we have watching it. But let’s face it, that describes 65 percent of all films made in Hollywood. Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-’80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott. A bus trip from Duluth to Sioux City would be more fun, and don’t think I didn’t do my research: That takes 13 hours and costs 96 bucks.

For a few hours after having seen “Your Highness,” I considered the possibility that it was the worst movie ever made. The image of McBride as the dim, smug and beefy Prince Thadeous, who begins the story as an irritating lardass loser and ends it as an even more irritating hero, was burned into my brain, complete with the enormous severed minotaur dong he wears on a necklace. (Monster cock! ICWYDT!) And while I shouldn’t feel bad for James Franco about much of anything (let alone the Newtonian backlash from all the media-fellatio he has enjoyed), his directionless, Keanu-lite performance as Thadeous’ cooler and studlier brother, Fabious, only deepens the sense that his career has abruptly hurtled off a cliff into a bottomless abyss.

These two idiots wander about the countryside — “Your Highness” was shot in Northern Ireland, so at least there’s pretty scenery — speaking in intentionally fakey Angoloid accents (sprinkled with wacky, occasional contemporary utterances, like “butthole” and “sweet!”), smoking some pipeweed they stole from Bag End, giving hand jobs to a Yoda-like alien pederast called the Wise Wizard (you can only wish I were kidding), lopping off the penises of would-be ass-rapist minotaurs and sporadically attempting to rescue Fabious’ fiancée (Zooey Deschanel) from an evil wizard called Leezar (Justin Theroux), who plans to impregnate her with his foul seed. Oh, and Toby Jones plays a little, Iago-like elfin character called Julie. Who turns out to have no dick. Did I mention that there are a lot of dicks in this movie? Or that the people who made it are dicks? Or that I must be a dick, too, since I lacked the dignity and self-respect to walk out on this bloated, atrocious spectacle?

Now, in case you think I’m just being a humorless prig — and I may be! I wouldn’t be the person to ask! — I do indeed get the point, to the extent there is one. McBride and co-writer Ben Best (they created the TV series “Eastbound & Down”) don’t take their movie seriously on any level. They inoculate themselves against all criticism, or try to, with an early-National Lampoon-meets-”Kentucky Fried Movie” level of intentional badness. If you’re as old as I am, or somewhere close, you might remember the Tolkien parody “Bored of the Rings,” and that’s the general idea here (with all the smart and funny parts taken out). The minotaur’s hacked-off love-hammer is supposed to gross us out; the accents are supposed to sound phony; Fabious and Thadeous are supposed to be buffoons. But that doesn’t make “Your Highness” any better, and might make it worse. There’s a special place in cinema hell for bad movies that were made semi-accidentally on purpose by talented people who ought to know better. If you’re going to pre-Mystery Science Theater your own movie, and deprive the audience of the pleasure of mockery through your own insincerity, then don’t come off like a bunch of self-indulgent dumbasses who squandered millions of dollars on something that is almost never funny. At least, that’s my advice.

Almost a full day of near-sobriety later, “Your Highness” no longer looks like the worst movie in history (although it might make the top 1 percent). Given an awkward role as a chaste but ass-kicking female warrior (not to mention a painful-looking metal thong), Natalie Portman brings a distinctive touch of class to the proceedings. The mysteriously underutilized Justin Theroux is terrific in every scene as the evil wizard, and gets to say: “You are too late! The Fuckening has begun!” He has another funny line, which got the biggest laugh in this nearly laugh-less film, but out of some misguided sense of charity or ethics I won’t give it away. As for Danny McBride … uh, he seems like a cheerful fellow! It’s not a criminal act, exactly, that he has dragged a once-promising director and several talented co-stars down the cannabis-scented rathole that is this epic, unwatchable disaster. I can only assume that his parents and friends and various other people genuinely enjoy his work as a writer and performer, and do not wish as fervently as I do that he would find some other occupation. 

One way of explaining what happened last night is that the Oscar producers tried to tack young and hip, just as academy voters tried to tack mass and mainstream, correcting for several years of more audacious indie-style winners like “The Hurt Locker,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “No Country for Old Men.” The result was a great big middle-of-the-road splat, presided over by a monumentally uncomfortable pair of stars, the miffed-looking James Franco and the perky-like-a-little-coffeepot Anne Hathaway.

While the show galumphingly tried to incorporate bits of the Twitterverse snark that surrounds it (and has all but superseded it), the biggest prize of the evening went to a dignified, achingly sincere Masterpiece Theatre-style film about the suffering of the Queen of England’s late papa. I have no particular problem with “The King’s Speech”; in fact, I enjoyed it. But my colleague Matt Zoller Seitz was correct to note, last week, that it might be the fifth- or sixth-best of this year’s nominated films (after “Black Swan,” “True Grit,” “The Social Network,” “The Fighter” and “Winter’s Bone,” at the very least). Awarding “King’s Speech” the best-picture prize was at least predictable; giving Tom Hooper the directing award, in a category that included Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers, David Fincher and David O. Russell, feels more like criminal pandering. (If I had a video clip of Sen. Paul Tsongas and his “Pander Bear” from the 1992 presidential campaign I would stick it in right now. Anybody? No? Well, let’s just move on then.)

It wasn’t simply that Franco was baked or bored, or that his idiosyncratic blend of sincerity and authenticity are precisely out of sync with the combo demanded by the Bob Hope-Billy Crystal-Whoopi Goldberg Chair of American Toastmastership, although those are all plausible hypotheses. Franco was pissed. On a night when he could have been building a multimedia installation or running lines for “General Hospital” or getting busy with an NYU sophomore or working on a paper about Sir John Suckling, Franco had to hang out on a cold night in L.A. with all these dorks, presiding over a pseudo-event so miscellaneous it couldn’t be rescued through meta-ness or reframing or any other kind of mental gamesmanship.Was this “performance art” like your GH gig, Jimmy? No, it wasn’t, was it? It was just lame.

Oscar’s leaden attempt to rebrand its trademark telecast as young and hip and social media-savvy (just consider all those terms surrounded with scare quotes, in celebration of your/my/our/James Franco’s sense of detachment and superiority) was as awkward as such things generally are. Justin Timberlake pretending to use an iPhone app to change the bewildering background projections — ho ho ho! Nobody in the entire world thought that was funny. Not you, not me, not the people watching in India or equatorial Africa. Not Kirk Douglas and Melissa Leo. (Why the negativity, people? At least they seemed like human beings.) Not my mother-in-law who doesn’t know what an app is or my 6-year-old son (who does). Not the person who wrote it, and definitely not James Franco. That was more and different pandering, of the sort that makes everybody unhappy, like the time your grandfather gave you a quarter but all you can remember about it is the terrifying tuft of hair sticking out of his nose. (More Paul Tsongas video, please. I just want to keep typing that name: Paul Tsongas!)

Speaking of the 1990s, let’s talk about that set, shall we? A few puff pieces last week dutifully described the use of digital projections as a “radical departure” from Oscar tradition and even invoked the term “virtual reality,” a sure sign that whatever you’re talking about will resemble a sales conference hosted by a mid-level Fortune 500 corporation. I spent much of the evening trying to figure out what those illuminated hoops looked and felt like. A briefly hot Las Vegas resort hotel, now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy? The inside of a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox? A rejected design template for “TRON: Legacy”? Then, when we saw a black-and-white clip of Bob Hope cracking wise on the first Oscar telecast — and when Bob Hope is much, much funnier than your current hosts, your show is in trouble — I grasped that the set was sort of, halfway supposed to evoke the classic interior of the Pantages Theater, not far away on Hollywood Boulevard, where the ceremony was held in the ’50s. But evoke it for whom, and why? To make Kirk Douglas feel less confused? (I’m kidding; he did fine.) To give younger viewers and participants some vague, disembodied sense of being connected to history? Wait, yes, that’s it exactly.

Awards? Yes, they gave awards and I haven’t mentioned them, because except for Melissa Leo’s unhinged F-bomb outburst and the outrageous, even shameful selection of Hooper as best director, it all went according to plan. Natalie Portman and Colin Firth had been practicing their lines, and delivered them nicely. (Yes, Annette Bening deserved to win, but Portman became the ass-backward representative of “Black Swan,” which deserved to win all kinds of other awards but didn’t.) Christian Bale looked more like The Dude than Jeff Bridges did, and gave every impression of being intensely weird. Lots of people we’d never heard of before mentioned their parents and grandparents and children, which is always irresistible. That Carrot Top-Yahoo Serious looking guy who won the live-action short prize was hilarious (although his movie isn’t that great). Accepting an inevitable and thoroughly deserved screenwriting prize for “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin went on and on and on — shocker! — and ended with the words “guinea pig.”

We were all the guinea pigs last night, Aaron, and the experiment didn’t go well. After that prepackaged opening riff when Franco and Hathaway inserted themselves into the nominated films — which was silly but fun and actually involved their talents as, y’know, actors, instead of their limited ability for shtick — the whole evening felt more and more like a bad idea gone wrong. (Sen. Tsongas, please!) I’d compare it to, like, taking your aunt to the prom, except that James Franco would handle that situation with awesome suavity. Anyway, if he’s got an aunt I bet she’s hot. And I bet she’d rather see “Black Swan” than “The King’s Speech.”

The “updated” set design: Virtual reality or lame-ass PowerPoint?

In what the Hollywood Reporter has described as a “radical departure” from past Oscar telecasts, the show’s producers are reportedly abandoning traditional set design for a series of projections meant “to take viewers on a trip through Hollywood history.” Now, first of all, we hear almost exactly the same Orwell-lite rhetoric every year, reminiscent of the way fashion magazines write about the fall collections: Past double-plus-ungood! Present and future awesome! I suppose it’s possible that this year’s electronic dog-and-pony show will seem like a technological Great Leap Forward into the age of virtual reality (which was more like 1996, but never mind). It’s also possible it will resemble a trip to the Universal Studios theme park, or a pharmaceutical industry trade show. Why aren’t Hall & Oates performing?

Best Picture: “The Social Network” vs. “The King’s Speech” (with “True Grit” sneaking up on the outside)

The main event in the best-picture race — a much-discussed showdown between a movie about a Harvard dropout turned Internet zillionaire and a movie about a stutterer who becomes king of England — now seems almost like an afterthought, as I recently discussed with my Salon colleague Matt Zoller Seitz. But not entirely! While “The King’s Speech” is widely expected to be Sunday’s big winner, and could easily pile up seven or eight awards, some Oscar-watchers still wonder whether the two big titles will cancel each other out, while a dark horse — maybe “The Fighter” or “True Grit” — sneaks in, à la “Crash” in 2005, and steal the prize.

Best Director: David Fincher vs. Darren Aronofsky

There’s a widespread view that the directing prize is where “The Social Network” will receive its consolation prize, with David Fincher receiving a kind of mid-career achievement award, in place of the Oscars he didn’t win for “Zodiac” and “Fight Club.” But don’t be shocked if Fincher gets nudged off the dais by Darren Aronofsky, whose dark and dazzling “Black Swan” bespeaks a powerful individual vision that has wowed Hollywood, but is simply too idiosyncratic to be a serious best-picture contender.

Best Actress: Natalie Portman vs. Annette Bening

How quickly the wind can change! Even a few days ago, when Matt Zoller Seitz and I discussed the best-actress nominees in a chat session, we both assumed that Annette Bening’s performance as an alcoholic lesbian mom in the soapy but highly affecting “The Kids Are All Right” was a near shoo-in. We were behind the curve, baby, and now the smart money expects Natalie Portman to be crowned as Hollywood royalty while Bening looks on graciously. (I’m still rooting for the latter, but thinking more realistically.) Portman, one expects, will go for bland, safe and humble; she must understand that she’s a controversial figure among movie buffs and that this moment will define the rest of her career.

Best Actor: Colin Firth vs. the letter J

There’s no significant suspense in the best-actor race, and you can probably get excellent odds in Vegas by betting the “J” field (that would be Javier Bardem, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco) against Colin Firth’s performance as stuttering King George VI in “The King’s Speech.” Firth is widely respected and genuinely liked; he is a classically trained British actor with impeccable Hollywood credentials, and his moment onstage will be a love-in. (By the way: No, this isn’t an award for “A Single Man” a year later, smartypants. “King’s Speech” may not be earth-shattering cinema, but he’s terrific in it.)

Leading indicators: How to read the Supporting Actor and Actress races

These categories tend to produce oddball winners, so don’t be shocked to see, say, Jeremy Renner, who was the best thing in Ben Affleck’s ludicrous Boston fantasia “The Town,” or Jacki Weaver of the Aussie crime thriller “Animal Kingdom,” up there. (Those would, in fact, be admirable choices.) My hunch, however, is that these categories may provide exit-polling results that point toward a “King’s Speech” landslide, with Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter winning instead of the favorites (probably still Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, both from David O. Russell’s underappreciated “The Fighter”).

Best Documentary: Will Banksy wear Vera Wang?

While most observers expect Charles Ferguson’s excellent financial-collapse doc “Inside Job” to win the Oscar, much of the attention inside the Kodak Theatre will be devoted to figuring out whether phantom-like English street artist Banksy, the director or entrepreneur or grifter or whatever of the hilarious “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” is there at all. Academy higher-ups have decreed that Banksy may not attend in disguise, so maybe he’ll wear a garbage bag, as fellow Brit Lucy Walker did for the New York premiere of her nominated doc, “Waste Land.”

As recently reported in Salon, “Waste Land” has been surrounded by murky whispers that Walker didn’t personally make much of it (which she and her producers strenuously deny). That could create an interesting onstage moment if this inspiring saga of an improbable art project in the Rio landfill captures the prize, as seems distinctly possible.

Foreign-language film: “Biutiful” vs. “Dogtooth”

No, I’m totally kidding. Or rather, I’m just throwing a bone to the tiny and desperate cinephile core here, because there is no way in frickin’ heck that the cryptic Greek allegory “Dogtooth,” one of the more surprising nominees in Oscar history, wins anything ever. That said, the foreign-language Oscar race, with its arcane rules and history of total lottery-ticket randomness, has virtually no commercial or artistic ramifications and could go to any movie on the list. “Biutiful” (officially the Mexican entry, although made entirely in Spain) offers a name-brand star and filmmaker in Javier Bardem and “Babel” director Alejandro González Iñárritu, but that counts for much less in this category than in any other. I won’t be surprised if Danish director Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” or French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s “Incendies” (neither yet released in the United States) snatches the prize, leaving a worldwide audience mildly puzzled.