swan dive fantastique~

Aronofsky’s films are not easy to watch. Never have been, never (God willing) will be. The box office allure of Black Swan rides on the wings of the star power of Natalie Portman and if this is what it takes to get people to crawl out of their sheltered, watered down film going experiences, more power to Daron for choosing her for the role. In my opinion, Natalie was perfectly cast. Role of a lifetime? Umm, maybe not quite yet, but she beat the shit out of this character with such ferocity, I’m still struggling to catch my breath as images flash through my mind from last night’s viewing.

Strange episode this has been, waiting for this film to open. It is one of the first films in a long time that I was ready on opening day to be first in line to buy a ticket to see. Yet the distributors chose to only release it in major cities on December 3rd, and made the rest of the smaller venues in America wait a week. In that week of waiting, a lot of my anticipatory excitement diminished. So much to the point that when it came to Pleasant Hill’s Cinearts this past weekend, I balked on going to see it until last night (Monday). and not because I was afraid of the weekend crowds. i think it was simply that all the energy of the hype had drained out of my system. Maybe it had something to do with the current Mercury Retrograde situation too.

So last night at the 9:45 showing I was quite surprised to see that there were about 30 other attendees at the showing. Late show on a Monday night, wtf, right? I took my usual position, 4th row center – everyone else sits behind me, as usual. I don’t care. I’m not there for them. I took good care not to read ANYTHING about this movie. No reviews, no summaries of the story, I knew nothing other than what the trailers exposed and that Aronofsky directed it. That, and Natalie, were enough to guarantee me a good time. And I must say, I do not think there was a single thing wrong with this movie. Not a single wasted scene… in Lily’s own words, “It was perfect.”

I’m not telling you about this to get you to go see it. In fact, I don’t want you to go see it. Because I don’t personally know anyone else like myself that could watch this and enjoy the perfection of it like I did, and then you’d just become a detractor saying things like, “Oh, it was okay.” or, “It would have been better if….” or “I didn’t like this and that about it…”. So really, forget everything I just said, ok?

I will tell you one thing though, I have listened to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake on repeat (the full symphony) about 4 times since last night. Tomorrow morning at 7am I have my enrollment time for colleges at Diablo Valley College too, and the first classes I am going to try to get into are the Beginning Film Making and Beginning Script Writing classes. Seeing this film anchored my emotions about how much I love this art form and how long I have yearned to be involved in the process of creating film. 

Enrollment at the college has been open for a couple of weeks already though, and tomorrow, I may well find that these classes, and all of the other classes (my secondary choices – ranging from poetry/short story writing, literature, intro drawing classes) may well be full too. The reason my enrollment date is so late is because I am considered to be a “new student”, since I have not been enrolled in any classes for over 3 years now.

If I don’t get into any classes it’ll be just fine. I’ll just continue with my photography/book making projects, and of course the work on my new novel. My reasons for wanting to attend the college are two-fold. One reason is in fact to learn some new skills, but also to have some social interaction with other creative people. I may be walking down a path that could lead to destruction, based on experiences that happened last time I was at the school, but hey, life’s a crap shoot. And you aren’t going to grow unless you stretch out and try some new things, right? Hopefully the lessons I learned from my last mishaps there will help me act differently this time. If it sounds like I’m talking in riddles right now, that’s intentional…