I don't understand why people don't like this movie. I am not a huge fan of ballet but I found the movie mesmerizing and beautiful. Arronofsky did a wonderful job with this. One of my favorite movies ever (hence the username). But what do people not like about this movie?
shareMy guess would be that many people would not like the film because none of the characters in the film are "likable"...so there really is no "hero/heroine" in the film. This leaves a lot of people, in my opinion, with no entry point into the story. Many people like to enjoy a film through the vicarious thrill of putting themselves in the shoes of one of the characters in the film...one of the main characters in most cases...and that is a key to how they experience the film.
Black Swan really does not provide a character that most people can identify with in this way and so probably for a lot of people the story becomes a jumble of pointless episodes that focus on a person they neither care about or like.
It is pretty much standard in this directors work that his characters tend not to be people you would want to be...they are generally all very troubled people that can be difficult to identify with or make you uncomfortable if you identify with aspects of them because they are so deeply troubled.
So, I think a common complaint with films like this is "I really would not want to spend any time around people like this and so did not like spending time watching them in a movie theater."
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Yes, I liked Black Swan and Carnage. I did not "like" Nina but I found it interesting and involving to watch her story unfold. Characters tend to be a lot more interesting if a story displays their flaws as well as their more positive attributes.
I think she was conflicted emotionally and sort of stunted in terms of her intellectual level...caught in this never never land of preteen/teenage girl and the incredibly competitive world of the ballerina that limited her focus on other things in life. All the pressure and her inability to deal with things on an adult level causes her to crack up.
I think it is pretty easy to make fun of a story like this because it is so overheated and relies so much on melodrama taken to a ridiculous level. It is hard to make that work, I think, onscreen because you are walking this tightrope between the ridiculous and the absurd and it is so easy for it to fall into those areas...and maybe for some of the audience it does but I don't think they could get where they wanted to go without taking that risk.
This film also...like another film we've talked so much about...takes the liberty of not making it clear to the audience when the main character is actually physically seeing or experiencing something or we are seeing some internal conflict visualized/presented to assist in telling the story.
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Do we know how old the character was supposed to be?
I don't recall if anything about her age is stated in the film but I took her to be in her 20s. It seemed as if the Beth Macintyre/Winona Ryder character was supposed to be washed up/over the hill for a ballerina in her 30s perhaps...so I thought Nina would have been the new "flavor" taking her spot to keep it warm for the next upcoming sweet young thing.
I read in another thread someone suggesting that the mother didn't really exist.What do you think?
Interesting theory but I would have to watch the film again. I've also only seen it once way back when it first opened. My instinct on it when I saw it was that the mother did exist but perhaps some of her interaction with the mother was just part of her inner turmoil and did not actually happen.
I think a lot of what we see in the film is only happening internally for Nina and so is not actually a physical reality for her.
i personally didn't hate it, thanks to the great cinematography that kept me watching. but i was never driven into the story, i was even quickly bored, hated all the close shots of nails, and just waited for a twist that never happened. in the end i thought it was a really simple story and i didn't felt like there were many (interesting) interpretations to it. the directing was very good though.
shareWhat I find so weird is the backlash this film keeps getting lately on IMDB. Within its release in 2010 it was widely regarded as a masterpiece by critics and audiences alike, now it's dropped from about 8.3 to 8.0 within only 2 years. It's not normal. Usually it takes about 4 years for a film to have its star rating changed, and it takes a lot of votes too. Does this film have some kind of huge cult of haters that keep voting it down so it drops off the top 250 and slowly fades into B-movie obscurity? Because it's worth so much more.
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I didn't like the movie so much. I didn't find Nina a likable character. I didn't really care what would happen to Nina....
Surely, the scenes looked beautiful, and Natalie Portman was great and beautiful . But I missed some characteristics that make Nina a likable person. I thought that Nina didn't do or say anything nice to anyone else (or even think something nice) throughout the whole movie? Perhaps I overlooked something?
I did think that Natalie Portman played Nina very well. I mean, I love Natalie Portman (not only here, but also in other movies like "V for Vendetta"). The movie just didn't make me care about Nina.
For me this was an enormous difference with The Wrestler, where I thought that Randy 'The Ram' Robinson was very likable. The Ram at least tries to be a good guy (to his daugther and to other people like Cassidy). This is probably the main reason why I liked The Wrestler very much, whereas I didn't like Black Swan so much.
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This movie is depressing, it's really a girl life spiraling into a nightmare, and thta's where you're left at the end. So I understand people walk away not so happy.
shareI don't get it too. This movie is a masterpiece
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You answered your question with your statement,"I am not a huge fan of ballet but I found the movie mesmerizing and beautiful."
Perhaps if you WERE a true lover of the great art form that is Ballet, you would realize that this film is a travesty.
Aronofsky must really hate the Arts and its practitioners! Otherwise WHY make them look like nothing but loony sickies!!!
Sad, sad, sad.
Well--- "Noah" is making a few bucks. But I predict a future for director Aronofsky on the lines of one Michael Cimino. (Look him up, kiddies! He made a self-indulgent bomb called "Heaven's Gate."
I disliked that this movie seems to glorify child-abuse: a woman wants to be a dancer but this seems to be more to please her manipulative controlling mother (who gave up dancing because of her pregnancy) than because she honestly likes dancing.
An abuse that leads her to mangle her body in a desperate attempt to get her mother's love.
An abuse that makes her an easy prey for sexual predators.
And i don't like that her dead-scene is presented as something artistic ('dying for her art', nevermind that she fell in the first act so the performance was ruined already anyhow)