THE IMAGINATION OF MAN’S HEART IS EVIL FROM HIS YOUTH. A few more thoughts on Black Swan and its reviews.

First, here’s Kindertrauma, with prose as OTT as the movie itself! Much love, but as with the movie, you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the review. I wonder if our mutual appreciation for this flick and Frozen (otherwise vastly different horror-shows) is because we were willing to watch two desperately flawed movies for what they did right? It’s so hard to make recommendations, in general, because nothing is perfect, Nina, so it’s a question of whether the misses will overwhelm the hits for any specific viewer. For me Black Swan hit hard. (Like this guy!)

Commonweal‘s review did one thing right, in comparing Black Swan to Repulsion. I wish I’d thought of that! But what’s bizarre to me is that the review accused Black Swan of being cold, compassionless, unable to take the audience into empathy with a disturbed mind. And that’s a criticism I’d make of Repulsion–despite its astonishing imagery–whereas I thought, as I tried to indicate earlier, that Black Swan actually has a lot of sympathy for all of its characters.

Repulsion also has a much more simplistic underlying psychological theory than Black Swan, I think. (Black Swan‘s dialogue appears startlingly on-the-nose, which is why I called it “crude,” although I do appreciate that no one who speaks about Nina is actually right.)