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I love ballet. We have this home video and my mom snuck up behind me with the camera where I was dancing, unaware, to some classical number. I look hilarious. Like most children do when they dance. I've always loved dance. More than that, I've always loved ballet. As a child I thought The Nutcracker was the best of ballet. I got over that when Ia heard the score to Romeo and Juliet. It's so emotional. Add some iconic choreography and you have got yourself a tear jerker. But then I saw Swan Lake. The story, the music, the angst all come together to create a beautifully overwhelming and tragic story. At the end of last year, director Darren Aronofsky and writers Mark Heyman and Andres Heintz came together themselves to tell this story on screen.
Natalie Portman was chosen to play ballerina Nina Sayers, who wins the lead in Swan Lake. While perfect for the role of the White Swan, she slowly loses her mind trying to free herself of the inhibitions preventing her from owning the role of the Black Swan.
Portman carries a wonderful fragility. This enables her to embody her imperfections and inhibitions in a wonderful way. It also stands in stark contrast to the evil that later emerges as she suffers psychologically. The Academy Award given (as well as every other award) was well and wholly deserved. Up to that point Mila Kunis plays a polar opposite to Natalie's fragility. This pairing is golden. Kunis, largely known for her role as Jackie on That 70's Show, is welcomed in this more serious role.
While sexually explicit at points and horrific at others, this film will stay with you for days. And we should return to its inspiration; the ballet and its original score. For their story and themes are the reason such wonder has occurred.
Facebook. What a generational phenomenon. The ability to follow each other's every move. The ease of discovering personal information and never needing to 'catch-up' with people you haven't seen in the flesh for years. We rely on it. We live by it. It was only appropriate that it should be made into a screen play. Every movie-goer in the world can relate to this viral phenomenon. Even better than this, it stems from the fascinating tale of twenty year old Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore at Harvard with apparently nothing better to do.
The story begins with the making of an offensive hot-or-not type website created by a marginally intoxicated, recently dumped computer-science major. The website got so many hits on the night of its launch, it crashed the Harvard server. At this point, Mark is approached by Harvard upperclassmen looking to create an exclusive social networking site available only to Harvard students. From here Facebook is created, Sean Parker - founder of Napster - comes in as partner, Zuckerberg makes a lot of friends, loses more and gets sued twice.
The story of Facebook's rise is told in an interesting fashion. In creating this multi-billion dollar internet company, Zuckerberg was sued by two sets of people involved. It is through these lawsuits that the story is told. While this isn't an entirely new method of recap-story-telling, it fit the nature of this narrative well. The complication arises in balancing the story as told between the two lawsuits. Lucky for the viewer, this isn't anyone's first whack at it. Director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, do a seamless job of moving from the story to the lawsuits. Jesse Eisenberg carries a wonderful deadpan ambivalence as Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield, as Eduardo Saverin - co-founder and student at Harvard, provides a wonderful point of chemistry for the film. Most of North America is grateful for their pairing.
If there is a moral to the story and I'm reading it right, it's as old as time. Greed, jealousy, arrogance. As old as Cain and Able (that's for you Dad). And unless you have somehow escaped the life-sucking trap that is Facebook, you, as the viewer, can't find much distance from this greed, jealousy and arrogance. You're a part of that story. You've helped make it what it is. I'm not distancing myself from this as I accuse you of being a part of it. I'm there as much as you are. And here the producers are, forcing us to confront this as we watch the story unfold; and we're not even aware.
Filmmakers are amazing.
