As I watched watched this silly little movie, one thought kept running through my head: Haven’t these people ever heard of nail clippers?!

I’m not going to explain that, so as to not give anything away, but honestly I would not be spoiling much. Despite all the critical furor over this film, Black Swan is very much akin to mediocre B-grade horror, especially that of the “teen” variety. The campy storyline, the boogieman popping out of nowhere, people turning around blind to the camera and getting “surprised”, the hallucinations, the gross-out physical crap – it’s all there. The problem is, there is very little else going on. It’s fine for what it is – I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. But really, it’s just B-grade horror, folks.

Darren Aronofsky uses some really irritating camera techniques in this film. One is endlessly shooting the back of Portman’s head as she walks around New York. The other is shooting Portman’s face right close up as she walks around and does various things. I’ll bet Aronofsky thinks this adds “tension”, but really it just makes the action look silly and fake, and calls attention to the fact that we are watching a movie – it makes it hard to lose yourself during the film, as you’re always getting unpleasantly jerked back to reality by the fakeness of his techniques. As I remember, his first film Pi was exactly the same way.

As for Natalie Portman, she is very obviously going to win the Academy Award. The other nominees either already have one or are obvious non-starters, and besides, Portman has been parading her bare ass across the screen recently (not in this film, however) and we all know how the Academy voters like their female nominees to “show skin.” Plus, it actually is a decent performance, and I say this as someone who does not care for Ms. Portman’s acting. But if we are honest, this performance is really not any better than any good solid performance in … a B-grade teen horror flick. Is it any better than, say, Amanda Seyfried in Jennifer’s Body? I don’t think so. Portman is pretty good in certain aspects of the role (she does some good crying) but I never really bought her as a ballerina, and that’s a big problem! Much of the blame falls on Aronofsky for this, obviously.

Let’s talk for a moment about the sexuality in Black Swan. It’s an important issue, after all, because sexuality and sexual emergence is critical to the dominant metaphor of the film. But what do we get? Tepid, gutless crap! You get to watch Portman belly-down on her bed, cranking herself off for a bit, but it’s hardly stirring or even real-looking. The lesbian scene is totally lame – I have to laugh at American movies and all these people that have sex with their clothes on! The back stage sex scene (can you call something that short a scene?)  that Portman hallucinates manages to be totally unerotic. Even the crucially important final kiss of the film falls completely and utterly flat! This lame treatment of sex is kind of similar to the lead character’s inability to unleash her black swan on stage – Aronofsky needed to connect with his own “black swan,” that’s all I can say.

As for the dancing, Aronofsky picked an interesting way to hide the fact that Portman is not a dancer – he continued his “shoot everything six inches away” approach, and it is somewhat effective. But here’s the big problem: he never gets across anything real through the dancing. Take the grand finale, when Portman finally becomes the black swan on stage. The dancing does not move you at all. It’s boring! It looks just like all the other dancing! You don’t see any transformation at all. All you get is her partner saying “wow” on stage, like he’s surprised – fucking lame, man! That’s just tricked up narration, telling people what to think, rather than figuring out how to move people for real.

I’m telling you, Aronofsky shows himself to be a really limited filmmaker in Black Swan. He is adequate to deliver the B-grade horror aspects of the film, but everything else fails to impress. I don’t know what to say as far as a recommendation. See it to experience what all the fuss is about, I suppose, but honestly this film does not leave you with very much except the memory of a few gross scenes where you went “eeeeeewwwwww!”