I shan't sleep now, shall I?

Hence I am sitting up banging out another review. The detox is going so well -I'm fitting loads of films in around talking about diets and planning exercise sessions , which I then miss due to an important episode of America's Next Top Model. I see Claudia Winkleman is back on too, on Film 2011, but she's idiotic. The guy on the show really knows his stuff, but his mother's not Eve Pollard and he doesn't have the glamour of a fringe stretching from ear to ear in a pompadour. Claudia loved Black Swan and yer man did not- I think I can see it from both angles.

Ballet films are tricky- they must have either proper dancers unknown to all but the initiated in the audience or stars like Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point, or Natalie Portman in this case. No-one was wanting a repeat of the frenzy of The Red Shoes, now were they? Thus you must expect a lot of lame shots of the necks and shoulders of a bankable star, or watch them nancying about in pale pink wrap cardigans, with their feet sticking out at right angles. Natalie Portman told Grazia magazine she was, at times, 'delirious' due to the training she had undergone but you still have to make an effort to overlook the knowledge that she couldn't possibly be really doing all that leppin' about en pointe. Still she had a lovely bun and had lost loads of weight; every little girl knows Ballet is as much about the look of the thing as the dancing. She was positively emaciated in this and really rather bendy. Therefore I would suggest you go to see on a full stomach, were it not for its content. It was gruesome.
So I'm afraid it has joined the ranks of those films forever remembered in my family for an unfortunate audience reaction-I leapt from my seat, recoiled in horror and exclaimed loudly, albeit involuntarily. Very feeble, compared to Uncle Gordon's prolonged and extremely audible gagging when a scarf was stuffed into Paul Newman's mouth in The Prize. My mother's best friend The Brick had a belter when Henry Fonda had his heart attack in On Golden Pond and Katherine Hepburn struggled with his pills. The Brick was so involved she leaned forward and yelled 'Under his tongue, put them under his tongue!'
Black Swan is not only horrific but is what my mother and The Brick call 'near the knuckle'. This means rude. I confess I had me scarf up to me face when the swan got herself involved with a very sexy lezzer rival. And that wasn't the worst of it , believe me. I checked this film's rating: 15, so be warned. You must also be advised regarding French actor, Vincent Cassel, he with an eye on either side of his face. How he attracted Monica Bellucci is beyond me. Anyway, he has a very showy role in this , as the Dance Director or something, so he gets quite a few snogs , silly accent notwithstanding. Barbara Hershey plays the possessive mother and somehow was the main catalyst for the horror of it all crossing over to high camp humour, which I feel, was not intentional. Honestly, I didn't know whether to heave or hoot.
It was at this point I realised that there is a tradition of actors winning great plaudits (Natalie Portman already has the Golden Globe) for good acting in bad films. You may remember Jessica Lange in Blue Sky or Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry. You don't? That's because the only twit who saw it after the Oscars was a girl like I, who feels that Black Swan will only be remembered for its central performance. Natalie was very, very good here-it was positively harrowing watching her tiny bosom heaving in torment over xylophone ribs. The film itself, however, was simply bally bonkers.