Lurking at Lincoln Center

Finally got a chance to see Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan and loved it. Pretty exciting stuff. If I'd been in a coma and you woke me up and showed me this movie with me knowing nothing about it and asked me, "Who do you think directed this movie?" I''d probably answer, "David Cronenberg." There is a great deal of physical transformation going on in Black Swan as Natlie Portman's Nina Sayers descends more and more into role-obsessed madness in her quest to be the "perfect" Tchaikovsky Swan. She does a superb job and the role seems tailor made for her. But as well as she fits the part, this is a Natalie Portman we've never seen before.

Her home life with mother is right out of Carrie. Barbara Hershey is the bestower of the obsessive genes here and she's a pretty disturbing stage mother. Their apartment feels like it could be just down the hall from Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's Baby. As Nina struggles to be the Swan Queen her director wants her to be, she withdraws deeper into the darkness inside of her, veering away from mom and closer to the influence of a new member of the company played by Mila Kunis'  -- an influence that challenges and threatens Nina's ideas of who she is and who she is expected to be.

As the director of the ballet company, Vincent Cassel is fantastic. You just hate him, but you can't stop watching him, either. Somebody needs to make this guy the villain in a Bond movie, he'd be perfect.

There are some over the top sequences in Black Swan, and you can imagine how some people might not roll with these punches. But if you're in the mood for a phenomenally dark, luruid, at times Hitchcockian tale of paranoia and psychosis in New York, Black Swan is both a visionary and realistically pulp tour de force. Highly recommended.