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BLACK SWAN IS APPARENTLY AMAZING, SOMEONE C/D

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KharBevNor:
So the knee is basically internal in birds?

Edit: I guess I hadn't really considered the idea that a knee is a consistently named biological feature. I just thought that all animals were kinda like horses, i.e. different names for everything. (actually I think horses have knees, I can't remember).

Edit edit: Yes they do. One of the things I always fuck up when trying to draw horses is that I think their legs are articulated the same way as a humans four limbs, when actually it's the other way round: the knees are on the front legs and the hocks (elbows) are on the hind legs.

TheFuriousWombat:
Aranofsky is most unsubtle mother fucker on the planet when it comes to directing. Well, not the most but he is one unsubtle dude. The absolute insistence on manifesting every ounce of psychological trauma physically in Nina crossed the line into being absurd. Those stupid dancing/yelling portraits and the literal transformation into a fucking swan are just two things that really stood out to me as painfully idiotic and overwrought. For me, the inability of the director to merely suggest something killed a lot of the atmosphere and made the whole thing some weird hybrid of goofy and disturbing rather than moody and intense. We would have gotten what was happening to Nina without the visual hyperbole and silly CG noodling. The movie had tons of potential but I think it fell flat on its face for being too over the top and overwrought. I honestly felt like it was talking down to me a lot of the time: "there's a lot of sexual repression and infantilization (both of herself and by her mother) going on. In case you didn't get it through a whole lot of clues, I'm going to be really, really obvious: here's her room with tons of pink stuffed animals. Also she's going to have a lesbian sex fantasy!" for example. We would have gotten that she became the "Black Swan" metaphorically speaking without some stupid special effects being thrown in our face. And I'm more convinced than ever that Aranofsky's a pretty serious sado-masochist when it comes to his characters. It's all around unpleasant to watch.

TheFuriousWombat:
Yeah, that last remark is really my point I guess except I would cast that net over the movie as a whole not just the end. I felt like Aronofsky was clobbering me over the head the whole time when some gentle nudging would have been more effective. The unsubtle approach to exploring psychological trauma turned it into a gimmick, at times even a parody. Most everything was simply over the top and it dragged down the movie in big ways for me. I certainly didn't hate the movie. It was actually quite scary and had a great sense of unease. The atmosphere, that is, was well crafted and a rare example of horror done well. I just couldn't get over some of that one flaw which to me was ever present for the whole movie. I mentioned this already but when all those paintings started yelling at her I laughed. It was stupid. And when we saw her literally turn into a swan, it seemed downright silly and completely unnecessary. Other examples abound. Maybe it's just me but I don't need my movies to be 100% explicit almost to the point of insulting my intelligence and ability to decipher things on my own.

Elysiana:
I don't see how that's clobbering people over the head though. That's like saying it was unnecessary to show the hallucinations in A Scanner Darkly because we see the guy scratching his skin, so we can assume he thinks there are bugs on him. The point is not to say "Hey audience, check it out, she's changing! Look, she's changing! Hey, did you notice?" but more to show what's going on in her mind. I don't think the movie would have been half as creepy had they not shown her pulling out feathers and her legs breaking and such. She wants to transform, she wants to be the black swan, but it's terrifying for her.

I actually don't even remember a scene with paintings yelling at her. I should go watch it again.

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