GeekReads

Let's not beat around the bush. The crack in her otherwise flawless face is analogous to the fragility of her mental state, OK?

What follows is a rant. If you’re not in the mood, then my summary of Black Swan is “Fight Club for chicks” (no not this). Otherwise, read on…

I fear that my regular anti-Hollywood diatribes here might paint an impression of me as an extreme right-wing puritan. I’m no bible-thumper (any more), but I do have a strong conservative bent that regularly puts me at odds with the values of Tinseltown.

There are several self-serving ideas that the industry patriarchs (that is, studio execs) would like you to believe:

1. illicit drugs are the cure to an uptight, boring existence;
2. sex is merely a recreational activity, and emotions are a bothersome inconvenience;
3. being attractive and sleeping around is the only way to get to the top.

Darren Aronofsky’s most recent release fits squarely into these three values*. If Inception is an allegory for movie-making then Black Swan is surely the tale of a studio executive.

In the movie, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is the director of a ballet company. He brutally dismisses his former leading lady, Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) and elevates the hapless but dedicated ingenue Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman). Cracking under the extreme pressure to prove herself to Leroy, her mental state degenerates, as a rivalry forms between her and the flawed but effortlessly talented Lily (Mila Kunis) – closely mirroring the plot of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, Swan Lake.

Now imagine Leroy as the studio executive, Beth as the previously successful but fading director (say Bryan Singer, director of X-Men, X2 and then… Superman Returns), Nina as the newcomer with impeccable technical skills but lacking in endurance (Shane Carruth, Primer), and Lily as the industry stalwart that often gets called upon to deliver crowd pleasers (Michael Bay, the Transformers franchise).

The analogy isn’t perfect: I’m not suggesting that the named directors had to sleep their way to the top – that idea you can lift literally from the movie – but they certainly are otherwise at the mercy of the nameless and faceless men (and by all accounts they are all inevitably men) that dictate who gets to be successful and who disappears into obscurity.

So as the Oscars are dispensed this weekend, get out the tinfoil hat, pick your favourite conspiracy theory, and marvel at the power of these invisible hands that manipulate the players of the industry like so many chess pieces.

—-

* I’m not the only one to have noticed that this movie sits at the intersection of a few base themes.

Hey just so you know, GeekReads is still alive (barely). Been so busy lately with my September ad-French-ure series that I haven’t had much time for anything else. Never fear, there’s a decent backlog of stuff that I’ll gradually work my way through once that’s over and done with. For now, here’s a two-for-one.

—-

So many meanings, so few letters

Easy A is a breakout role for Emma Stone – she’s what you would get if you take Lindsay Lohan’s innocence from her “Mean Girls” days, add a bit of Jodie Foster’s look, and inject a good-size dollop of Shirley Manson’s hair and spunk. She plays Olive Penderghast, the invisible, nerdy girl at school that nobody notices. Yeah, right. A very token gesture is made at the beginning of the movie to make her out to be dorky-looking, but that’s dispensed with almost immediately as she takes a giant step towards infamy in helping a gay classmate to stop being tormented by pretending to sleep with him – making way for the flashy, trashy costumes and the ‘tude as she revels in her new-found popularity/notoriety as the school slut. This inevitably spirals out of control, and she finds herself unable to deal with the attention that she suddenly starts receiving from every direction.

The movie is Hollywood in a nutshell – in a good sense of the word. It’s got: characters that straddle the border between real and stereotype; a smart, sassy script with wit and timing; a glossy and attractive cast that’s easy on the eyes; and a moral clarity, despite the fact that the pious are portrayed as the “enemy”. All of these are combined together in a package with proportions as perfect as Olive’s.  Another stand-out is Thomas Haden-Church as Olive’s English teacher Mr. Griffith – I don’t know why I find him funny, but I crack up every time I see him (and I wasn’t even a big Ned and Stacey fan).

—-

I prefer this poster. The other one makes the movie look like "Sister Act meets Scream"

Ben Affleck’s an odd one. He’s got this aura of crapness about him, and yet he still persists in being a relatively well-known celebrity. I don’t know whether it’s residual good will from Good Will Hunting, or even hand-me-down cred from his friendship with Matt Damon, but he simply refuses to disappear no matter how many disasters he appears in (and there have been many).

Affleck tries his hand at directing in The Town, and despite my inglorious introduction above, it’s not crap. He also plays the lead role of Irish bank robber Doug MacRay, who falls in love with a victim from one of his heists. This provides the tension throughout the movie as the various forces (police, FBI, gang bosses) conspire to bring his secret into the light.

One thing that I found interesting is the lengths to which the scriptwriters went to try and make the heists believable. Audiences today must be very sceptical from being brought up on a diet of CSI and its ilk, because great lengths were taken to show how careful the robbers were in covering their tracks: throwing bleach around to remove DNA evidence, ensuring that all mobile phones are not simply confiscated but destroyed, planting random hair to throw the police off the trail, etc. Robbing banks isn’t just about wearing gloves and not leaving fingerprints any more.

I’m usually pretty good with accents, but I admit that I struggled with the Boston/Irish one in this movie, and missed a bit of the dialogue.

Ewan Macgregor looks a wee bit like Ben Stiller here, don't you think?

It might be considered a bad thing that I mistook the start of the movie for BMW ad, but a lack of the usual plethora of studio logos and the egregious product placement aside, The Ghost Writer turned out to be reasonably compelling viewing.

Ewan McGregor plays the eponymous ghost writer (who’s never named throughout the movie) who is hired by a publishing firm to tackle the unfinished manuscript of the memoir of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), former British Prime Minister. The previous ghost writer died on the job, and “The Ghost” – as he’s often referred to throughout the movie – finds himself caught up in circumstances that puts his safety at risk.

This isn’t usually one of my genres so I had to do a bit of reading to convince myself that it was worth watching (it was Jenny’s idea to go see it, based on David and Margaret both giving it 4.5 stars). It’s old school, which is actually refreshing in a retro-cool kind of way. The linear plot starts at a pedestrian pace, and continues ratcheting up the intrigue and suspense right until the climax delivers the “ah hah!” moment. The script does tend to plod along a bit, and I wouldn’t go so far as to label it a thriller ‘coz it wasn’t ever particularly thrilling. I’d liken it more to a slow-burning whodunnit (and being of that frame of mind quite early, I ended up accidentally guessing the ending – yay me).

Being completely ignorant of the controversy surrounding the director, Roman Polanski, I came out of The Ghost Writer thinking that it was yet another Hollywood movie that suffered from that great bugbear of mine: the American superiority complex. But for those of you who like me didn’t know (or didn’t care to know), Polanski is currently a wanted man in the USA on charges relating to sexual abuse of a minor back in 1977. He has been “on the run” so to speak (avoiding countries that are friendly with the Americans) since 1978. Given that context, maybe it’s not so much of a superiority complex as Polanski’s criticism of the insidious power of the United States in regard to global political affairs. Heavy stuff.

Onto rather more superficial matters, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall play the Prime Minister’s wife and mistress respectively, and while in the movie you get a full side-on of a gloriously naked McGregor, there is only the merest hint of flesh from one of the leading ladies – you can guess what demographic this movie is aiming for. Not that I was expecting anything… ahem.

But yeah, keep your wits about you, and remember: when you see the BMW ad, the movie has started.