*The Black Swan*

OK, a couple of people made the mistake of asking what I thought about the Black Swan, nominated for something like 5 academy awards. This expresses very well what I thought about it, though I would be less kind and say further the writing is thudly, lazy, dumb and unimaginative. In other words, the movie I saw was exactly what I expected to see and that is why I hadn't seen it before now, when three cabin-fevered friends employed it as a pretext to get the hell outta dodge on the first nice day in weeks and weeks of dreadful winter weather.

We shared our contempt of this movie. We agreed that the only bit that rose above the general mess was the staged solo of the Black Queen. That had the advantage of no dialogue, and of being danced by an authentic ballerina prima (Sarah Lane of American Ballet Theatre) to the authentic Tschaikovsky music, rather than the tarting up of Tschaikovsky by the movie's composer.

Nor are we the only ones to feel this way.  C said plaintively, "I suppose if you don't know anything about dance or artists you will think this is good. But I think even if I didn't know anything about dance or artists I still would have seen this as a bad movie."

We could not suspend disbelief. You just bet someone can dance with a blade of glass in her abdomen.  You just betcha a dancer whose entire back is covered in a tattoo will be accepted into a world class ballet company.

"But the ballerina must die.  They must die for the art.  Ballerinas' only role are to be instruments of the will of the male director. It's only a movie!  This is merely a paradigm of the ballerina's art. It's a horror film, for pete's sake, not to be taken seriously.  Lighten up you silly women."

Give us silly women a foxtrot break here. Now, if you wanted to do something new and exciting with Swan Lake, that remains a paradigm of the artist's and / or ballerina's experience, we effortlessly came up with several directions while we drove off to dinner in the dark.

At dinner we were bombarded relentlessly with the Super Bowl so-called entertainment up on the television screens which were on every wall and at every angle so thoughtfully provided by the only restaurants open on Sunday night down here.  This so-called entertainment was even dumber and more pointless than The Black Swan.

E said, "That movie wasn't worthy of my tutu.  I'm glad I decided after all not to wear it." C exclaimed, "E! You wouldn't have worn a tutu!" E looked at us. "Well, people dress up to see the Harry Potter movies." She reflected, spoon hovering, "I think they have more fun with Harry Potter than we did watching Natalie Portman starve, then kill herself and bore us all to death." Thoughtfully, she sipped another spoonful of her crab bisque.