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Reviews
Black Swan (2010)
Laughably bad - don't waste your money!
In contrast to other reviews here, I will give an unpretentious and honest assessment of Black Swan. It should have been more accurately entitled 'The Emperor's New Clothes', since it is devoid of any meaningful content and has been feted by reviewers who really ought to know better.
It looks stylish (though the insistence on using hand-held camera for long periods has a tendency to make the user feel seasick), but is essentially meaningless tosh. Worse than that, at key moments it is laughably awful. Portman emotes like her life depends on it, but she can't help the stilted script or the director's clumsy handling of his denouement, which in turn says nothing and was foreseeable through the entire film.
Ignore the accolades. This is truly a movie worthy of the Razzies. Please, please do not buy it on DVD and if you were thinking of venturing out to the cinema, stay home and watch Polanski's Repulsion. Now there was a director who knew how to hit nerve endings and portray a descent into madness credibly and scare the audience witless.
So in short, there are no redeeming features - this really is a film that could have been decent in the right hands but which has been sabotaged. Please save your hard-earned cash!
Amadeus (1984)
As dramatic as an grand opera
First the only thing that really grates with me: the heavy American accents are a distraction and clearly undesirable in a movie principally about Italian and German composers.
But to moan about that would be to overlook a simply magnificent film, one with the dramatic scope and scale of a grand opera, told through the unreliable recollections of Salieri at the end of his life. Great credit to the director (Forman), actors (especially Abraham, one of very few actors to deserve his Best Actor Oscar outright for the performance given), the city of Prague for recreating Vienna so beautifully, to Sir Neville Marriner for the best soundtrack of all time, and to Schaffer for a script that tells a powerful story in such a spellbinding fashion, artfully weaving fact and the fictions of Salieri.
Put simply, Amadeus will always be among my top 3 movies of all time, with good reason. If you haven't already seen it, don't delay by so much as a minute!!
The Principles of Lust (2003)
Brave and jaunty
Granted the Principles of Lust is patchy, but it's nothing like as bad as you would conclude from other user reviews. It pushes at the boundaries, challenges the viewer with explicit images you would never expect to see even in an 18-cert movie, but does also say a lot about relationships in the process. Paul and Juliette's instant attraction and failure to communicate effectively echoed much of the love-hate nature of real life relationships in my experience, right down to the closing shots where love and bitterness combine while Juliette's son looks on, uncertain. Secondly, Paul's uncertainty about himself and his status as a writer speaks volumes - and thereby he represents the vast majority of us. Ultimately, do we know what we really want? Maybe we are all drawn to the dark side but are afraid to admit it, even to ourselves?
So from my perspective, bravo to Penny Woolcock for making this film, which inevitably will polarise its audience - but remember its nod to Fight Club, and the fact that it is adapted from a novel by Tim Cooke. It's hard to imagine a feistier adaptation than this.