HaNaYaMaTa
Showing posts with label dance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dance. Show all posts
Monday, November 10, 2014
Anime Review: HaNaYaMaTa
During my Summer 2014 Anime Round-UP I mentioned that this was a show I hadn't tried out yet but was on my short-list to try if I found myself with some free time and that's exactly what ended up happening. I don't remember why but I found myself with a lack of colorful, cute shows in my viewing schedule and this seemed like a natural addition and a good way to fill those lunches at work where nothing else was airing that day.
Monday, October 14, 2013
TV Series Review: Dance Academy (season two)
Today I'm continuing with my adventures in Australian tv with the second season of Dance Academy. I suppose the real reason I watched this show is a lot like why I kept watching Heros of Cosplay, I love watching dance and wanted to be lazy and not have to search all over youtube or the rest of Netflix for it. Thankfully (practically) no matter what this show does it will always be better than HoC, although that doesn't mean that I liked what it did all the time....
Dance Academy (season two)
Summary: Tara and her friends return to the National Dance Academy for a second year of ballet! Or so they'd like to say, Kat failed last year, Sammy's dad is refusing to pay his tuition so he's working at a part time job to make ends meet, and second year also has some interesting additions that are sure to shake up the group's dynamics even more.
The Good: I really liked the character arc Abigail went through, it started in the previous season and here we can see her continuing to both pull herself out and be pushed out of the destructive tendencies (both to herself and those around her) that she had grown into to be a more stable and better person and I really liked that progression. I only really noticed it at the end of the season, when the show slightly contrasts her and new character Grace, but I think the show has done a good job at showing how she's grown a lot yet still isn't finished growing by a long shot. The other characters have grown some, new character Ben goes through a lot of character development in just the first few episodes (I think to make sure the audience didn't just start hating him) but other than that the other characters feel like they've grown far less. There is one more season to the show (I asked around and some viewers confirmed that yes that was the end, no going on forever shows here!) so I'm hoping that the writers do have good ideas for how to end the show and have the characters grow even more by the end but I won't be holding my breath for it. I will say however that I like how the overall story is structured here, the season isn't tied around one large thematic idea or even one large plot point (although the dance competition does play a huge role) yet everything manages to feel cohesive. Each episode manages to feel like just an extension of the previous and it's a nice example of how to tie together a show by being mostly character driven yet when Plot pops up it doesn't change the tone of the story at all.
The Bad: My biggest problem with the show happened very close to the end and I'm going to talk about just in a footnote which will have some spoilers because it's One Of Those Moments and I need to articulate just why I thought it was a terrible choice*. That was my biggest problem with the season, although I was less than fond of all of the romantic subplots in the show. Everyone was so confused on what they actually wanted in a relationship, with whom they wanted in a relationship, and all of those different things that they stopped feeling like "teenagers who are confused by life and trying to work it all out" and more like "characters who keep changing their lives just to keep everything dramatic." I'm also on the fence about new character Grace, on the one hand I can see what the writers were going for with her character (horribly self-destructive and emotionally manipulative towards everyone she meets, both because of her life and likely would have been that way even if she had been happier) but I think it was how the characters continuously trust her (including Tara, guys speaking as someone who was one of the more "innocent" high schoolers out there it's hard to take parts of Tara's character seriously) that broke my suspension of disbelief. I also had some trouble with another new character, pro dancer/teacher Saskia, but both of those characters apparently will be returning in the third season so I'll reserve my final judgement of them until I can see where the show decides to end.
The Production Values: Once again everything continues to look fine with no weird audio or video snafus. There was one point where Abagail was singing and I wondered if she was lip-syncing with another actress doing the singing (or just lip-syncing to a recording of herself, I would understand why the production team might choose to do either of those two things but there was something that was just a hair off in that scene which made me wonder) and it was a bit off-putting once or twice later in the season when the show used some music, which previously had only been used by a particular dancer for their piece and never anywhere else, in a different kind of scene and it gave me an odd feeling of dissonance. It was as if I was watching a movie and they played the theme for character A when character B was having an important moment, except this was the music character A had a dance choreographed to so you wondered why everyone else even had a copy of it. All in all those are nitpicks however, just about everything was perfectly fine.
So, for that ending I'm only giving this 2.5 out of 5 stars for being overly dramatic in way too many cases for me yet when the drama wasn't as large scale I did really enjoy the show and found myself watching episode after episode the way someone grabs a bag of skittles and then discovers they already ate the entire thing. I know that the third season just finished up in Australia and when it pops up on American netflix I will make sure to watch and get my review up as quickly as I can!
*right, prepared for major, end of series spoilers? Good, the short version is that a character is killed off less than five episodes before the end of the show. This character hadn't been sick previously or raised any of what some fandoms call "death flags", they were simply run over by a car off-screen and if it wasn't for the fact that they had the character film some more scenes with them (when the others were remembering them while mourning) I would wonder if the actor had actually died in real life. My problem with this is two-fold, one, this isn't the kind of show where people suddenly die. Yes people are killed in car accidents in real life, and in other ways, but we never see shots that focus on a how busy the streets are or how dangerous the characters lives are and this is fiction, not real life, you must foreshadow these things to make it seem as if the writer has control of their own story. Yes there were one or two references to death earlier in the season but only one of those involved the character who died, I wouldn't call it foreshadowing, so instead of feeling a great loss I just felt like the writers had lost it. Secondly, the show already had a huge number of dramatic plots running at that point. The competition, the Grace vs Tara rivalry that was bringing back stuff from the Tara vs Saskia conflict from earlier in the season. The tension with the school play which was also tied into the tangled romantic plots and, I thought, was supposed to be an interesting contrast with the musical that Abigail had become involved with. There was so much to work with that they could have easily filled up the rest of the season with it. I can understand them not wanting to have the season end exactly the way the previous season had (the dreaded trilogy syndrome) but I still don't think this was the right way to do it. Finally, and this is truly spoilerly territory, it does fall into this particular death trope which I really wish would, pun not intended, die already.
Dance Academy (season two)
Summary: Tara and her friends return to the National Dance Academy for a second year of ballet! Or so they'd like to say, Kat failed last year, Sammy's dad is refusing to pay his tuition so he's working at a part time job to make ends meet, and second year also has some interesting additions that are sure to shake up the group's dynamics even more.
The Good: I really liked the character arc Abigail went through, it started in the previous season and here we can see her continuing to both pull herself out and be pushed out of the destructive tendencies (both to herself and those around her) that she had grown into to be a more stable and better person and I really liked that progression. I only really noticed it at the end of the season, when the show slightly contrasts her and new character Grace, but I think the show has done a good job at showing how she's grown a lot yet still isn't finished growing by a long shot. The other characters have grown some, new character Ben goes through a lot of character development in just the first few episodes (I think to make sure the audience didn't just start hating him) but other than that the other characters feel like they've grown far less. There is one more season to the show (I asked around and some viewers confirmed that yes that was the end, no going on forever shows here!) so I'm hoping that the writers do have good ideas for how to end the show and have the characters grow even more by the end but I won't be holding my breath for it. I will say however that I like how the overall story is structured here, the season isn't tied around one large thematic idea or even one large plot point (although the dance competition does play a huge role) yet everything manages to feel cohesive. Each episode manages to feel like just an extension of the previous and it's a nice example of how to tie together a show by being mostly character driven yet when Plot pops up it doesn't change the tone of the story at all.
The Bad: My biggest problem with the show happened very close to the end and I'm going to talk about just in a footnote which will have some spoilers because it's One Of Those Moments and I need to articulate just why I thought it was a terrible choice*. That was my biggest problem with the season, although I was less than fond of all of the romantic subplots in the show. Everyone was so confused on what they actually wanted in a relationship, with whom they wanted in a relationship, and all of those different things that they stopped feeling like "teenagers who are confused by life and trying to work it all out" and more like "characters who keep changing their lives just to keep everything dramatic." I'm also on the fence about new character Grace, on the one hand I can see what the writers were going for with her character (horribly self-destructive and emotionally manipulative towards everyone she meets, both because of her life and likely would have been that way even if she had been happier) but I think it was how the characters continuously trust her (including Tara, guys speaking as someone who was one of the more "innocent" high schoolers out there it's hard to take parts of Tara's character seriously) that broke my suspension of disbelief. I also had some trouble with another new character, pro dancer/teacher Saskia, but both of those characters apparently will be returning in the third season so I'll reserve my final judgement of them until I can see where the show decides to end.
The Production Values: Once again everything continues to look fine with no weird audio or video snafus. There was one point where Abagail was singing and I wondered if she was lip-syncing with another actress doing the singing (or just lip-syncing to a recording of herself, I would understand why the production team might choose to do either of those two things but there was something that was just a hair off in that scene which made me wonder) and it was a bit off-putting once or twice later in the season when the show used some music, which previously had only been used by a particular dancer for their piece and never anywhere else, in a different kind of scene and it gave me an odd feeling of dissonance. It was as if I was watching a movie and they played the theme for character A when character B was having an important moment, except this was the music character A had a dance choreographed to so you wondered why everyone else even had a copy of it. All in all those are nitpicks however, just about everything was perfectly fine.
So, for that ending I'm only giving this 2.5 out of 5 stars for being overly dramatic in way too many cases for me yet when the drama wasn't as large scale I did really enjoy the show and found myself watching episode after episode the way someone grabs a bag of skittles and then discovers they already ate the entire thing. I know that the third season just finished up in Australia and when it pops up on American netflix I will make sure to watch and get my review up as quickly as I can!
*right, prepared for major, end of series spoilers? Good, the short version is that a character is killed off less than five episodes before the end of the show. This character hadn't been sick previously or raised any of what some fandoms call "death flags", they were simply run over by a car off-screen and if it wasn't for the fact that they had the character film some more scenes with them (when the others were remembering them while mourning) I would wonder if the actor had actually died in real life. My problem with this is two-fold, one, this isn't the kind of show where people suddenly die. Yes people are killed in car accidents in real life, and in other ways, but we never see shots that focus on a how busy the streets are or how dangerous the characters lives are and this is fiction, not real life, you must foreshadow these things to make it seem as if the writer has control of their own story. Yes there were one or two references to death earlier in the season but only one of those involved the character who died, I wouldn't call it foreshadowing, so instead of feeling a great loss I just felt like the writers had lost it. Secondly, the show already had a huge number of dramatic plots running at that point. The competition, the Grace vs Tara rivalry that was bringing back stuff from the Tara vs Saskia conflict from earlier in the season. The tension with the school play which was also tied into the tangled romantic plots and, I thought, was supposed to be an interesting contrast with the musical that Abigail had become involved with. There was so much to work with that they could have easily filled up the rest of the season with it. I can understand them not wanting to have the season end exactly the way the previous season had (the dreaded trilogy syndrome) but I still don't think this was the right way to do it. Finally, and this is truly spoilerly territory, it does fall into this particular death trope which I really wish would, pun not intended, die already.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
TV Series Review: Dance Academy (season one)
As odd as it sounds, not all recommendations I see in the YA community are for books, plenty of authors and fans/reviewers love to talk about what else they love and that includes movies, tv shows, and even music at times. A lot of times my tastes don't quite match up as far as tv series go, a bit too much romance for me and there is that terrible problem that half the time by the time I get around to trying a tv series is has gone from good to ugh which always brings up the point if it's still worth watching. As far as I know this series is still worth watching, the show started it's third season in Australia earlier in the year (and I'm fairly sure it will be the last, otherwise the characters won't be in school anymore and they'll have to change the title) and since I can't seem to read anymore of Swan legally I thought that maybe this would give me the ballet fix I wanted.
Dance Academy (season one)
Summary: Tara Webster is from the Australian countryside and remarks that in her tiny town everyone is known for something and for her it's for doing ballet. She applies and successfully gets into the National Academy of Dance in Sydney and begins her first of hopefully three years preparing to enter the world as a professional ballet dancer.
The Good: I went in hoping that the show would have regular ballet scenes and there is in fact at least a short dance scene in every episode! Sometimes it's hip-hop not ballet but it turns out that hip-hop dancing is rather cool so I was completely fine with that. I'm obviously no expert in either styles of dancing but I thought a lot of that looked rather well done , I could believe (outside of the fact that Tara is somehow both the best and worst student in her class it seems) that these were actual dancers in training and it was a nice change from all the series I've seen which are set in a school yet ignore the school aspect as much as they can.
The Bad: On the one hand I can't knock all of DA's more melodramatic moments, after all Swan shared some of the same ones (a main character who has great talent but terrible fundamentals yet still attracts the attention of the teachers in a good way) but there was way more romantic drama than I bargined on. There are six main characters, three girls and three guys, and in 26 episodes there are about eight and a half hook-ups between them and other side characters (also, they apparently have no idea that bisexuality exists which really threw me, I'll note that all of the hook-ups were straight for the moment). That's just a lot of romance and since a lot of it is short lived, everyone in the relationship is dumb because they're a teenager, romance I didn't find a lot of it very compelling either and hope (probably in vain considering where this recommendation comes from) that it gets toned down a bit next season.
The Production Values: As mentioned earlier, I thought all the dance scenes looked really great with good actors and good choreography which was the biggest draw for me. Not much else stood out to me however, nothing about the setting or the music (actually I believe the show uses the same music for both the opening and closing credits) really grabbed me but in a modern day, realistic fiction setting that's to be expected, there is a limit to how creative you can get with those things.
So in the end I give this season 3 out of 5 stars for nice dancing but entirely too much romance. I'll be checking out the second season soon, they're both streaming on Netflix and we'll see what I think of that I guess!
Dance Academy (season one)
Summary: Tara Webster is from the Australian countryside and remarks that in her tiny town everyone is known for something and for her it's for doing ballet. She applies and successfully gets into the National Academy of Dance in Sydney and begins her first of hopefully three years preparing to enter the world as a professional ballet dancer.
The Good: I went in hoping that the show would have regular ballet scenes and there is in fact at least a short dance scene in every episode! Sometimes it's hip-hop not ballet but it turns out that hip-hop dancing is rather cool so I was completely fine with that. I'm obviously no expert in either styles of dancing but I thought a lot of that looked rather well done , I could believe (outside of the fact that Tara is somehow both the best and worst student in her class it seems) that these were actual dancers in training and it was a nice change from all the series I've seen which are set in a school yet ignore the school aspect as much as they can.
The Bad: On the one hand I can't knock all of DA's more melodramatic moments, after all Swan shared some of the same ones (a main character who has great talent but terrible fundamentals yet still attracts the attention of the teachers in a good way) but there was way more romantic drama than I bargined on. There are six main characters, three girls and three guys, and in 26 episodes there are about eight and a half hook-ups between them and other side characters (also, they apparently have no idea that bisexuality exists which really threw me, I'll note that all of the hook-ups were straight for the moment). That's just a lot of romance and since a lot of it is short lived, everyone in the relationship is dumb because they're a teenager, romance I didn't find a lot of it very compelling either and hope (probably in vain considering where this recommendation comes from) that it gets toned down a bit next season.
The Production Values: As mentioned earlier, I thought all the dance scenes looked really great with good actors and good choreography which was the biggest draw for me. Not much else stood out to me however, nothing about the setting or the music (actually I believe the show uses the same music for both the opening and closing credits) really grabbed me but in a modern day, realistic fiction setting that's to be expected, there is a limit to how creative you can get with those things.
So in the end I give this season 3 out of 5 stars for nice dancing but entirely too much romance. I'll be checking out the second season soon, they're both streaming on Netflix and we'll see what I think of that I guess!
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Movie Review: First Position
Technically this is a documentary and, even though I'm not sure if documentaries are actually movies I'm still going to count this for my movie/tv series review of the week anyway. I heard about this a few weeks back somewhere on the internet where someone made a passing comment about how this was a surprisingly good documentary and I of course had to go see if it was on Netflix and since it was only 90 minutes I decided to give it a shot. I've had fairly good luck with documentaries people recommend to me and I like ballet alright so why not?
First Position
Summary: Every year the Youth American Grand Prix is held in New York City, the world's largest international dance competition where kids from 9-19 compete for medals, scholarships, and contracts with dance companies. This film follows six kids from different backgrounds who have all dedicated their lives to ballet and how they advance and perform.
The Good: I was impressed, I'm so used to documentaries hamming up the drama that comes with human life that it was a nice change of pace to see a film not do that. There is some tension of course, all of these kids are competing very seriously and devoting this much of your energy towards one goal is going to cause stress regardless of what your goal is, but it was all presented in a very natural, matter of fact way. The film also didn't make you feel like "oh this person deserves this more than this other person because of their life" and impressively it made me connect with all of the kids in just 90 minutes and really care about how they did in the competition. I don't watch many documentaries but I'm really glad I saw this one and I'm not surprised to see that it was pretty well received as a whole.
The Bad: I do feel like the film could have gone a bit deeper if it had wanted to, also considering it's only 90 minutes it could have gone longer and gone farther into the kids' lives but it didn't and I don't think it suffers for it (and the pacing was great so I'd hate to mess with that). It did feel a little impersonal at times, unusually I actually have no idea who the director was since I didn't feel them insert themselves into the story at all, but again that's more a stylistic choice than a flaw. I didn't really think this film had many, if any, big or little problems and overall I'm quite impressed with it.
The Audio: I've done some video work and audio editing was always something I had trouble with so I'm impressed at how well they handled it for the kids' performances. Obviously they aren't going to show their whole five minutes of dancing but you can't just cut in and out of shots with the music changing as well, that would be far too disjointed, so I thought the way they edited together the music and the dancing was done very seamlessly and I wish I could learn some tricks from whomever did it.
The Visuals: I did have a few issues with some of the film, why the heck were the performance parts so noisy?!? For each performance the video quality suddenly went down, as if they had to use camcorders on auto to shoot the kids actually competing, and it was rather distracting since the rest of the documentary looked fine. There were some points, again during the competitions, where I wondered if we were dropping frames, the movements looked just a bit off (I especially noticed it for Miko when she was spinning with a long dress, a shot I've seen in other movies and it just looked a bit off here and not because of her). I know there's a big difference between shooting a movie and shooting a real performance, I know from experience just how limited the range of a camera really is and how much light you need to make it look natural but I was still disappointed by these points since the rest of the film looked just fine.
So, as odd as it sounds to rate a documentary, 4 or 4.5 out of 5 stars and a hearty recommendation to anyone who likes ballet/dance in general to check this out. It's streaming on Netflix USA and apparently on Amazon Instant as well. Now, I really want to pick up Swan again after seeing all these dancers work so hard....
First Position
Summary: Every year the Youth American Grand Prix is held in New York City, the world's largest international dance competition where kids from 9-19 compete for medals, scholarships, and contracts with dance companies. This film follows six kids from different backgrounds who have all dedicated their lives to ballet and how they advance and perform.
The Good: I was impressed, I'm so used to documentaries hamming up the drama that comes with human life that it was a nice change of pace to see a film not do that. There is some tension of course, all of these kids are competing very seriously and devoting this much of your energy towards one goal is going to cause stress regardless of what your goal is, but it was all presented in a very natural, matter of fact way. The film also didn't make you feel like "oh this person deserves this more than this other person because of their life" and impressively it made me connect with all of the kids in just 90 minutes and really care about how they did in the competition. I don't watch many documentaries but I'm really glad I saw this one and I'm not surprised to see that it was pretty well received as a whole.
The Bad: I do feel like the film could have gone a bit deeper if it had wanted to, also considering it's only 90 minutes it could have gone longer and gone farther into the kids' lives but it didn't and I don't think it suffers for it (and the pacing was great so I'd hate to mess with that). It did feel a little impersonal at times, unusually I actually have no idea who the director was since I didn't feel them insert themselves into the story at all, but again that's more a stylistic choice than a flaw. I didn't really think this film had many, if any, big or little problems and overall I'm quite impressed with it.
The Audio: I've done some video work and audio editing was always something I had trouble with so I'm impressed at how well they handled it for the kids' performances. Obviously they aren't going to show their whole five minutes of dancing but you can't just cut in and out of shots with the music changing as well, that would be far too disjointed, so I thought the way they edited together the music and the dancing was done very seamlessly and I wish I could learn some tricks from whomever did it.
The Visuals: I did have a few issues with some of the film, why the heck were the performance parts so noisy?!? For each performance the video quality suddenly went down, as if they had to use camcorders on auto to shoot the kids actually competing, and it was rather distracting since the rest of the documentary looked fine. There were some points, again during the competitions, where I wondered if we were dropping frames, the movements looked just a bit off (I especially noticed it for Miko when she was spinning with a long dress, a shot I've seen in other movies and it just looked a bit off here and not because of her). I know there's a big difference between shooting a movie and shooting a real performance, I know from experience just how limited the range of a camera really is and how much light you need to make it look natural but I was still disappointed by these points since the rest of the film looked just fine.
So, as odd as it sounds to rate a documentary, 4 or 4.5 out of 5 stars and a hearty recommendation to anyone who likes ballet/dance in general to check this out. It's streaming on Netflix USA and apparently on Amazon Instant as well. Now, I really want to pick up Swan again after seeing all these dancers work so hard....
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Movie Review: Black Swan
One of the movies I got around to seeing over the break and it made me doubly sad that I wasn't able to see The Nutcracker this year. The last time I saw it (live) I must have been six or so and I was exicted to hear that one of my aunts had discounted tickets for it since my cousin was in it but with how crazy my Thanksgiving break was I didn't have a chance. Someday I guess, someday I'll be able to see a real ballet again in person instead of just having to watch stories about them.
Black Swan
Summary: Nina is a rising ballerina who really wants to have a bigger part in the shows her company puts on. Initially it doesn't look like she'll get the role of Odette/Odile* since she's too sweet and too much of a perfectionist and it's only after she does that she discovers just how much her perfectionism is going to hurt her.
The Good: Wow, most movies when a character goes insane the movie starts with them behaving normally and then shows their descent into madness. Black Swan wastes no time there and starts with Nina already unstable and takes it the whole way. I can't remember the last story I saw that took this approach (the closet I've heard about is Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue) and this was a very creepy and intense movie in parts. At points it was tricky to figure out what was real and what wasn't so the movie succeeds in being a physcological thriller very well.
The Bad: Once the fridge logic set in the ending felt a bit cheap. Yes I know the character is going mad/mad for the film and that this film is being “told” through an unreliable narrator but the film still has to make logical sense in the end (even if the character isn’t sure what is going on/presents a distorted version of the events there still needs to be a way for the audience to work out what actually happened). Also, I know so many people will disagree with me on this, but I must’ve been one of the few people going in who didn’t know about the lesbian sex scene and ack, most awkward thing to watch with your mother ever (and I’ve said it before, I just don’t like reading about/watching sex yet I’m only really annoyed by it when I don’t know it’s coming
The Music: I can't remember much about the music (I was too busy staring at the ballet) but I seem to recall hearing a few well-known pieces of classical music (I thought I heard "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies" in there but, even though Tchaikovsky composed music for both of those ballets, I think I'm off). The music worked, I would have remembered if it didn't, but like I said above, I was much more interested in the visuals.
The Visuals: Interesting camera work in this one, the camera was almost constantly moving (and a little jerky as well, as if it was being held by a person and moving around instead of moving on a track) which also added to the tense and off balance atmosphere. I’ve heard that the long shots of Nina dancing where not done by Portman and, since I was looking for this and didn’t notice during the movie, that was very well put together. Portman’s dancing looked alright to me (it has been years since I’ve seen a ballet together) and, like the filming style, there were many little details in the background that added to the uneasy air in the film. Visually the film felt very put together and the movie would not have worked as well if it had been a novel instead.
I'm still not sure if I liked this movie or not. My feelings on it, well, it made me want to hide under a blanket with chocolate, something to hug, and something fluffy to read and NOT think about ballet for a while. The funny thing is that all the stories I know that involve ballet are more serious than lighthearted. Swan was melodramatic, Princess Tutu (which I am currently re-watching actually) had more dark moments than you'd except something with that title and, having done some dance during my life** it is a serious sport that lends itself well to these kinds of stories. So, while I'm unsurprised that Black Swan turned out to be as dark as I expected, and I know I'll rewatch it at least once sometime, I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it enough to buy or not.
*Who are traditionally played by the same person, this isn't the movie trying to create tension, this is actually how the play is done!
** More Irish dancing than anything else however, much more lighthearted, just listen to the music!
Black Swan
Summary: Nina is a rising ballerina who really wants to have a bigger part in the shows her company puts on. Initially it doesn't look like she'll get the role of Odette/Odile* since she's too sweet and too much of a perfectionist and it's only after she does that she discovers just how much her perfectionism is going to hurt her.
The Good: Wow, most movies when a character goes insane the movie starts with them behaving normally and then shows their descent into madness. Black Swan wastes no time there and starts with Nina already unstable and takes it the whole way. I can't remember the last story I saw that took this approach (the closet I've heard about is Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue) and this was a very creepy and intense movie in parts. At points it was tricky to figure out what was real and what wasn't so the movie succeeds in being a physcological thriller very well.
The Bad: Once the fridge logic set in the ending felt a bit cheap. Yes I know the character is going mad/mad for the film and that this film is being “told” through an unreliable narrator but the film still has to make logical sense in the end (even if the character isn’t sure what is going on/presents a distorted version of the events there still needs to be a way for the audience to work out what actually happened). Also, I know so many people will disagree with me on this, but I must’ve been one of the few people going in who didn’t know about the lesbian sex scene and ack, most awkward thing to watch with your mother ever (and I’ve said it before, I just don’t like reading about/watching sex yet I’m only really annoyed by it when I don’t know it’s coming
The Music: I can't remember much about the music (I was too busy staring at the ballet) but I seem to recall hearing a few well-known pieces of classical music (I thought I heard "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies" in there but, even though Tchaikovsky composed music for both of those ballets, I think I'm off). The music worked, I would have remembered if it didn't, but like I said above, I was much more interested in the visuals.
The Visuals: Interesting camera work in this one, the camera was almost constantly moving (and a little jerky as well, as if it was being held by a person and moving around instead of moving on a track) which also added to the tense and off balance atmosphere. I’ve heard that the long shots of Nina dancing where not done by Portman and, since I was looking for this and didn’t notice during the movie, that was very well put together. Portman’s dancing looked alright to me (it has been years since I’ve seen a ballet together) and, like the filming style, there were many little details in the background that added to the uneasy air in the film. Visually the film felt very put together and the movie would not have worked as well if it had been a novel instead.
I'm still not sure if I liked this movie or not. My feelings on it, well, it made me want to hide under a blanket with chocolate, something to hug, and something fluffy to read and NOT think about ballet for a while. The funny thing is that all the stories I know that involve ballet are more serious than lighthearted. Swan was melodramatic, Princess Tutu (which I am currently re-watching actually) had more dark moments than you'd except something with that title and, having done some dance during my life** it is a serious sport that lends itself well to these kinds of stories. So, while I'm unsurprised that Black Swan turned out to be as dark as I expected, and I know I'll rewatch it at least once sometime, I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it enough to buy or not.
*Who are traditionally played by the same person, this isn't the movie trying to create tension, this is actually how the play is done!
** More Irish dancing than anything else however, much more lighthearted, just listen to the music!
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