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Entries in Black Swan (46)

Tuesday
Oct182011

Curio: Costume Dramas

Alexa here.  Every year my desire to arrive at the perfect Halloween costume sees me trolling the internet for ideas.  Unlike my husband, who can throw together the perfect Carl Spackler costume in 10 minutes, I need to plan ahead, and I can't sew well enough to get really creative.  Someday I'll create the perfect Maude Lebowski Valkyrie look, but this year, on my daughter's orders, I'm going as a chicken.  Here are some looks I'd rather be wearing for Halloween.

 

A Black Swan Rodarte replica, $700, from this shop.

Take a flowered house dress, some duct tape, and this book, and you'd have the perfect Geena Davis Beetlejuice look.

Click for more including Marilyn, Catwoman, and Mattie Ross...

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Monday
Jul252011

Nina who?

Wednesday
Jul132011

Sound Off: Mila Kunis

Because I spend so much time tied to my desktop, I start talking to myself when you don't comment. You don't want me going all Nina Sayers Black Swan batty, do you?!? I don't live with a portrait-painting mother who force feeds me cake but my cat stares at me so evilly that I wonder what he'd try if he had opposable thumbs. My point is this: if Mila Kunis rang my bell to take me dancing, I'd fly out the door.

By now you've heard that Mila recently accepted an invitation to attend a Marine Ball (military prom!) with a fan which some think makes her the coolest celebrity on the planet. Are you one of those people?

I was recently interviewed on the All Things Kunis topic by MSNBC Movies to coincide with the release of her romcom Friend With Benefits and you can read my quotes over there if you so desire. My basic feeling is that she should ditch the comedies briefly for something E-V-I-L. That vaguely sinister erotic charge that she gifted to Black Swan and the way you could read it as playful one minute and agenda-filled the next, suggests that she has an untapped capacity for darker roles, don't you think?

 

Tuesday
May242011

20:10 The Patriarch's Wishes. 

The 11th annual Film Bitch Awards have wrapped... finally. Just for fun and a bit of retro nodding, here's the image from the 20th minute and 10th second of 2010's Gold Medalist,  I AM LOVE.


It's that fateful dinner time scene when the Rechhi patriarch makes a shocking announcement that will begin to tear at the fabric of the wealthy clan, eventually weakening their solidarity and collective grip on their prized exotic possession, Emma (Tilda Swinton). Ugh, I love that movie so much!

He picked me, mommy. Did you hear me?

Black Swan was the leader with 16 nominations and 13 medals all told spread out on every awards page: major nods, acting, visuals, sound, line readings, character & extras, and scene work but it was The Social Network which took home the most gold (8). The South Korean marvel Mother managed the best nomination tally without any accompanying medals (4) and Rabbit Hole, which just missed the year's top ten list, had a strangely not-so strong showing with only 2 nominations and one gold (Nicole Kidman, Best Actress) ...

But awards are never a 100% accurate reflection of one's love.

Monday
May162011

Take Three: Barbara Hershey

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with this week's Take Three. Today: Barbara Hershey

Take One: Beaches (1988)
Whilst Bette Midler played the brash let-it-all-hang-out role in Beaches, Hershey was required to provide the flipside, a more fragile, buttoned-up role. Of course, in Garry Marshall’s timeless, weepy but somehow sickeningly enjoyable sorrowthon emotional barriers are royally broken down. As a solidly played, and, at times (all times, in fact), downright sentimentally treacly showcase of female solidarity, it works, and works very well indeed. (The late ‘80s was a fruitful time for the re-animation of such “woman’s” pictures; see also Steel Magnolias, Working Girl et al.) Beaches was a classic two-hander: one performance perfectly complemented the other. As the luxuriously-named San Franciscan heiress Hillary Whitney Essex, Hershey exuded just the right kind of well-turned-out class.

Her performance really was consistently good, despite the stock genre mannerisms very likely insisted upon by the filmmakers. She amiably chipped away at the inherent brittleness of the role, made her character appropriately timid, unexpectedly fragile and actually a believable mess with many of the concerns that spoke to half the women watching. (The other half would’ve surely identified with Midler’s character – this is a large part of Beaches’ amiability.) As the requirements of the genre dictate, there are melodramatic turns aplenty – love rivalry, career diversions, terminal disease – and Hershey and co. revel in its cornball pleasures. In the process it gave Hershey her biggest exposure. It was a certified commercial platform on which she could do great work. She broke through the privileged whininess of the character and made such a prim, off-putting madam feel thoroughly deserving of our investment and sympathy. But didn’t Hershey look as if she wasn’t always best pleased to be the wind beneath Bette Midler’s wings?

Take Two: The Entity (1982)
Just recently Hershey’s made a bit of a re-emergence on the big screen in a couple of notable roles. Earlier this year we saw her add some major dramatic supporting greatness as the nervous-wreck mother in Black Swan (see below), for which she unfortunately missed out on a second Oscar nomination (her first and only so far was for Supporting Actress in 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady). She followed that as a nervous-wreck grandmother in haunted house person flick Insidious, too. But it’s not the first time Babs has battled apparitions from the afterlife. Her career has seen its fair share of paranormal activity: back in 1982 she caused a spooky stir as beleaguered Carla Moran in Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity; a role for which she should have earned her her first Oscar nomination.

Two years before the Ghostbusters zapped spooks left, right and centre, Hershey and her parapsychologists had to lure her spectres in with a fake house set-up and little more than a majorly unnerving atmosphere in order to trap the unnatural forces that have been pervading her home and her very being in frozen liquid helium. As you do.

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