Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Pompous Loser on the Train: An Afterword to Black Swan

So there I was on the Philadelphia Regional Rail, heading back to my friend's house in Glenside PA (with whom I was staying the weekend) after the Philadelphia Film Festival screening of Darren Aronofsky's brilliant batshitcrazy Black Swan, and sitting two seats in front of me was a man and a woman in discussion of said Black Swan.  Now my personal thoughts on the film (which are obvious from the aforementioned use of the word brilliant) aside, it is not what they thought of the film that I take a certain offense to, but how they thought of it that bothered me - or at least how the titular pompous loser thought of it.  The woman, if anything, just seemed to want to get up and escape her possible date (first date perhaps?).  These two seemed not to know each other all that well (just gathering from the lack of intimacy in their conversational style) and this I think bodes well for the poor woman in all of this - a woman that has hopefully since escaped this pompous loser and his reign of condescending verbal fire.

After telling this woman that she did not know what she was talking about, because she liked the film, this pompous loser went on a tirade of how Aronofsky's film (not the he ever mentioned the director by name - most likely unaware of who he even is!) made no sense at all and "why does this girl care so much abut doing the things she does?" he went on and on, "It's ballet, who cares?".  Really?  Really buddy?  Seriously, this jerk just kept going on about how the film was unworthy of our time because HE did not care about ballet.  Meanwhile, the woman just shuffled about in her seat, waiting (I hope) for her escape.  He didn't understand why Portman's character kept hurting herself over all of this, and why it was so important to her.  At one point this jackass said "No one cares about ballet, why even make this movie?".  Really?

Now my love of The Red Shoes aside (why make that movie even?) this wasn't even the worst part of his soapbox diatribe.  His ending note, just before they got off the train (one stop before me), was thus, "Why do people try to achieve perfection?  Instead everyone should just try to be average."  Wow!  I really hope he isn't a parent or a teacher or someone else that can warp children's minds.  Amazing stuff indeed.  Let's just all strain to be average.  Perhaps I should have stepped in and called him out on all this, but I was mesmerized by watching them - as if I were watching a movie right then and there (one filmed by Godard or Bresson considering my constant shot of the backs of these people's heads).  Oh to be average.  Perhaps this guy should stick to less daring fare such as the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg or Ron Howard - they make average look so easy.

Oh yeah, and Black Swan is batshitcrazy brilliant.  Be sure to see it when it opens on Dec. 3rd.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think somehow you're confusing a conversation from someone on the train about how brilliant batshitcrazy Black Swan is with a scene from the film where people spoke the dialogue you wrote here. Whether you did it knowingly or not, this must be the case, because such people do not exist in reality, or at least in the reality I choose to accept. Perhaps the pair were part of a theater troupe who go around on trains staging performances for onlookers to then blog about - but even then I refuse to believe that this happened in reality. This must be a part of the brilliant batshitcrazy film, and all a part of the brilliance of what is surely a batshitcrazy blog post, the only one befitting of a batshitcrazy film. Surely. Surely.

(This post was written on a train).