After watching and penning this "review", I went and had a look at Rotten Tomatoes opinions. The balance is favourable. In my view there are things that are done well. The acting is OK and the bizarre sense of being in a nightmare is very good. Unfortunately that's it. This review sums it up for me. It even chooses "ham-fisted" as a suitable epithet.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
I may have to watch this at home just to savour the badness. I thought Aronofsky's Black Swan was pretty good, and Noah was insufferable trash, quite possibly Crowe's worst role among many bad ones.
“Having a super time riding my favourite pony Satan.”
I bought a copy of Black Swan on DVD, largely because I heard such good things about it. But when I watched it I was disappointed. It was technically well put together and the acting throughout is great, but I couldn't help feeling it would have been better without the weirdness. Seems to me there was a lot of weird shit bolted on to make everything seem more mysterious.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
I'm not against weirdness in movies. I like the wtf is going on feeling. But it has to be properly attached to the action. I'm beginning to come round to the feeling that Aronofsky reaches for the "oddness toolkit" as a substitute for having something to say, or to shore up where he hasn't said something very well.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
I thought Black Swan was alright, but I got into Aronofsky with π and really really liked that, saw it at the cinema and got the soundtrack and so on. Requiem For A Dream was incredible, but also incredibly bleak so I've only seen it the once and maybe I'd have a new opinion now if I tried again? Plus that amazing track in the soundtrack got borrowed for the LotR trailer and then overused by nearly everything else for several years. The Wrestler was good. I even love The Fountain which I'm sure most right-thinking people would find unbearably slow and pretentious. The screening I saw of that had the people behind the spaaaace FX doing a talk beforehand, it's all particles in droplets of water, as pioneered by the older one of them in the Superman intro. But since then I lost interest, I saw Noah by mistake I think and cannot recall any of it but for thinking maybe its got some stone angel monster things? And this Mother! has been sitting on my hard disk for about two years unwatched and I've not got around to it and don't know when I will.
now the paragraph got even longer, if the symbol eats this one I might as well write an article.
He clearly divides opinion, or some of his stuff is great and some isn't, or both.
I wanted to like Black Swan since friends I trust told me it was fab. But then I thought it was meh, and could have been a great, if old-fashioned, story about rivalry and ambition without the psycho stuff.
I was totally neutral about Mother! (keep missing the exclamation mark) before watching but then thought it was well crafted, well acted, shit.
The thing is, I really liked Pi too. But what I've seen and heard since is making me think again. Maybe he just went off the rails a bit.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
I loved Pi and Requiem for a Dream, and I thought the wrestler was great too. It had that lo-fi realism of just telling a regular guys' story. Not seen Black Swan yet and given what I've heard I went be rushing to see it.
Currently working my way through a Hitchcock box set and finding some gems in there.
I wouldn't be put off by what people have said here (especially me) about Black Swan. You may be in the camp that thinks it's excellent.
It is interesting though, the differing views and how strongly they are held. I suppose the Wachowskis are a case in point. They made a really cracking good SciFi movie in the Matrix and followed that with sequels which were described as anything from "great" to "abysmal". They made Cloud Atlas which definitely divided opinion, but also Jupiter Ascending which was universally panned. In their case, the occasional (hugely expensive) blotted copybook hasn't turned people against them in the way that I've seen people turn against Aronofsky.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
Some of the mattes, yes. They *look* like they were composited with green screen shots in some digital compositing sw, to the same end: gorgeous, turgid, galumphing, overwrought (etc), and ultimately meaningless eye candy. Many directors have fallen under its spell. The only one I've seen that made it work in the context of adding value to the film as something other than a tediously long fx reel, was Peter Greenaway's Prosperos Books which, TBF also has fuckloads of nudity going for it.
“Having a super time riding my favourite pony Satan.”
