My review of Black Swan

Black Swan...

the dancer movie...the psycho drama...

the best actress award for Natalie Portman

Well, I guess that I have a little bit of insight into this movie. For those of you that haven't figured it out from my "name" or read about it from a previous post yet, I was a ballet dancer. I danced professionally until I was 4 months pregnant with my son.

I enjoyed this movie. There were parts that were so over the top that I was really laughing out loud at them, but overall, I thought they made a different type of psychodrama.

They gave us the Hollywood extreme of how obsessed a dancer can become with her role.

Though I have never known anyone to drug a fellow dancer, nor pull feathers out of their skin,

I did relate to the intensity of a dancer when depicting her role...especially as the infamous

white swan/black swan duel role.

I personally did not dance this role, but I watched my friends dance it and have to become the opposite personalities that it requires.

I also watched as fellow dancers portrayed a particular role in a ballet that they would cry when their character died...or would really laugh out loud on stage...

(or maybe that was me, laughing at some silly joke someone told me when the peasant girls, aka-me, were in the corner supposedly giggling about the cute Romeo or whatever character! hahaha...this actually happened and my director once told me that she could hear me laughing from the audience...oops!)

I also watched fellow dancers be...well, let's just say, not so nice to another dancer that got the role they wanted. I hated when the casting went up on the board...I would always wander over after people left so that they wouldn't see the possible disappointment in my face because I hadn't gotten a role.

I have heard of dancers getting involved with their directors...though never experienced it with my company.

So, in a general sense, I thought they did a good job...taking it to the Hollywood extreme, but the underlying theme and the way they portrayed it was good. I never go to a movie and watch it because of the Oscars. You expect too much and are usually disappointed, which is how many of the women that I watched it with here felt. They thought it was terrible and horrible story line and blah, blah, blah...

they never asked me for some insight though! Oh well, their loss!

I did speak afterwards to two of my closer friends about it...and they liked the insight that I gave them about the

"life of a dancer"

and now you have my thoughts too...

let me know what you thought!