Another Year (2011) | Review by Hannah Brooks-Motl
I had menstrual cramps during Another Year. And popcorn-for-dinner made them worse. I was really stressed out on account of having all these student essays to grade, and feeling like I couldn’t write a poem if my life depended on it right now, and too why should I worry about writing poems anyway, is there a more useless and banal activity out there for a woman of my age and class and ethnicity to be doing; I ended up buying Mark both a drink before and a ticket to the movie because I suddenly felt awkward while he was in the restroom and solved that awkwardness, as I am wont to do, by purchasing something; I also drove him home despite my cramps, and the popcorn, and the stress about all the stuff I have to do and am not doing; and then I thought about writing this review and how I would have to adopt the goddamned “we” again and turn whatever dumb argument I had been losing with him in the car about character and realism, and how the movie failed to convince me of the “realness” of its characters because it hewed too closely to the codes by which we all understand ourselves to be “real,” following, in fact, the conventions of “realism” into the deep morass of its inevitable anti-category, “dullness,” into something profound and how I am stupidly sensible, and conventional in my aesthetics, and have become the “straight man” by tacit consensus; and then I went home and took a shower and washed my hair which I have started to hate doing because it is long and becoming pelt-like and like a pelt sheds everywhere—just today I lent someone my pen, only to notice with horror a clump of strands wrapped around its cap—
and then I got up early and wrote some biographies and graded some essays and gave a presentation on “clear classroom instruction” to my fellow TAs that probably made me look super-lame and prepared; then I came home and started trying to think about what I will say in seminar tomorrow, but then remembered I had this review to write and wrote my two paragraphs in which I said things like, “There can be no such thing as a “real character”—really. There can be degrees of realness, approximations in fiction to life, but no exact equivalence. We like ‘characters’ because, unlike ourselves or our friends, they are discrete” and “It asks us to see its characters as just as infinite and complex and ‘real’ as we ourselves actually are, and in doing so it cedes its claim to our attention and becomes a product of its excellent craft—‘art,’” before I grew so disgusted with it, and bored with it, and almost angry with myself, and the ways in which I feint and hide and puff myself and my opinions up with plural singulars, and large words, and knowing attitudes when really I know nothing at all, that I started writing this, looking out the window and thinking I am just so tired of winter and now terribly frightened at what I am writing, and what Mark might post, and if you have ever felt the terror of starting something and not knowing will you be able to stop it, you know what I am feeling, and you are alive and exist, and should probably go see Another Year because I’ve written myself into a change of opinion and now I kind of like it (though I still think the main character’s “unlikeability” could have been more attractively fulfilled).
Black Swan (2010) | Review by Mark Leidner
Character is a collision of philosophies. That is why realistic dramatization of human conflict is so difficult. You have to manage this collision and the schizophrenia of results it produces, instead of simply chart the course of a single idea safely through a series of sensual scenes. The latter course is of course exactly what Aronofsky charts through the claustrophobic corridors and… ballerina places of Black Swan. Ballerina places are anywhere where ballerinas are, and I encourage everyone to adopt this neologism immediately so I can get some… word fame. The first two thirds of this movie were tedious because they don’t star people, they star idea. No matter how much technical mastery you muster, you gotta get down on your knees and expose some not just vulnerable, but slutty piece of your self in order to awe your viewers. And I would agree that most unconvincing art is a product of privileging purity of intention over effect. Fine enough of a strategy if you’re a genius. You are your own audience of multitudes and woo the writhing crowd within. But most of us are like the white swan. The amoral animal we carry with us rarely seems to even peep a paint-chipped toenail into the front door of our oeuvres, oeuvres that, thirty years later, are as forgettable as they are capacious. We want to be the fancy and delicate arrangers of our own legacies, not the ragged-out whores of it… after the audience has arranged it for us, with a bulldozer of applause grinding through our minds. But that’s what it takes.
When stiff but visionless Natalie Portman (perfect casting) actually has to transform into the film’s eponymous bird in the third act, that part was the shit. I love ballet! I love… dance! I love movies! It was like scratching a lottery ticket-thin story for an hour and a half before finally uncovering a $5 win. Expression burned through the fog of theme, shining brightly on my white male face, and for a brief moment I found myself somewhere in that performative metamorphosis, and all the secrets of the universe unlocked. Then the last line reversed all this, renewing Aronofsky’s commitment to exposition of theme like one of those weird curved penises that is so curved, it pisses on itself. Part of me can see a defense of this movie taking shape in my mind as I criticize it. Let us call it “the fairy tale” defense. Why burn a filmmaker on a stake of character in the flames of realism when his intention is to dramatize a moral, or panegyrize a genre, satirize a style? To which I would respond BS‘s expression isn’t virtuosic enough to do justice to the lessons about art it deigns to teach, nor sharp enough to bite very deeply into whatever it’s supposedly satirzing. The script is slow, what isn’t handled in expository dialogue the score telegraphs, and no potential ambiguity goes unsledgehammered. If Tarantino taught a Kaplan course on how to send up a form by embodying it down to the eyelash, I would pay the thousand dollar fee myself so Aronofsky could attend.
Poets on Film 