In Which Nothing Can Ever Tell You How Bad Noah Is

God Wants You To Cease Filmmaking

by DICK CHENEY

Noah
dir. Darren Aronofsky
A billion minutes

It feels like an eternity waiting for the only sex scene in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. It takes about ninety minutes into this mess for that to happen. In an instinctual move brought on by the realization that Anthony Hopkins has restored her ovaries, Emma Watson instructs her bf (Douglas Booth) to throw her a high hard one in the area every thinking person calls a hermione. He complies, and we wait for this transcendent moment humanity was denied for too long. Instead Aronofsky cuts away. An entire family sitting next to me whispered, "Goddamnit."

Emma clearly fired her hairstylist for calling her Granger too often, because this is completely unacceptable.

Noah (Russell Crowe) has been instructed by some vague dreams that the world is about to end. He goes to see his "grandfather" who drugs his son and later hits on his wife. Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins) is the devil in disguise - for Christ's sake he is Lecter - and for good reason. He is the only performer in this utter disaster with the least bit of acting ability.

actually there was a kind of frosty sexual tension between RC and Ray Winstone, but it was never fully explored. Sequel? Jk.

Lynne wanted to see Noah because she loves when two animals, two animals of the same species, are brought together in close quarters. I asked, hadn't she had enough of that?

He can't stop thinking about how weird her ears are. He will never stop thinking about how weird her ears are.

Noah's wife Naameh (a completely insane Jennifer Connelly), reprising her entire performance from the weirdly cold blooded roles she is forced by her agent to play, has had enough of this proximity to another person. So far, all her marriage to Noah has brought her is two mediocre sons and a tent in the desert. He never fucks her, not even on her birthday.

Connelly's Naameh has one completely bizarre scene where tears run down her face and around her mouth, making her look like some depraved ex-wife shown up at Noah's doorstep. You start to wonder why Noah is even in a relash, given that he never looks directly at Naameh the entire movie. When they finally reconcile later he resorts to a bro hug because he doesn't want his mouth to touch her gross tears.

this is the mother of all retouched photos. Actually she looks like the wicked witch of the west tbh
It is hard to know who to blame for this disaster. I could joke and say it was on God for making Aronofsky in the first place, but that would probably be a premature assumption. All of the director's screenwriting efforts have been complete fuck-ups, and in Noah, he even loses the visual éclat that brought him to prominence in the first place.

the people who cut down trees in Avatar were evil, here they are heroes. Missin u always James Cameron

Instead of feeling like a surplus of excess, the visuals of Noah are highly dated. At times the CGI looks unprofessional, and the characteristic bestiary is never even viewed in its entirety. The animals have no personality, even as themselves. We never see them up close, just as a indeterminate mass. No one care for them. Lynne could only conclude that the makers of the production held some bias against any type of creature at all.

The ark itself is a massive disappointment, looking more like a sloppy 2x4 than a construct befitting the God who commissioned it. The only thing that would have made it worse is Frank Gehry.

at least have them kiss with tongue. It's not too much to ask.

No scene in Noah is more than ninety seconds, lest we realize the complete clichéd absurdity of what is being communicated or said, or see how little there is to this entire thing. Aronofsky has never been the slightest bit skilled at subtlety — the individuals in his films rarely turn out to be anything other than what they are. As Ila, Watson herself never provides any kind of Eve-ian sexuality; in fact there are few roles in cinema she would seem more ill-suited for, given her mincing, sexy mouse-like appeal and flaccid Englishness.

For some reason Aronofsky figured it would be better to have everyone doing poor English accents, while allowing Crowe to just talk as he normally does, and Connelly to keep her own American whine. Noah is a linguist's nightmare, and it's also a completely racist festival that includes only whites. No one is even tan, though many are dirty.

"Guys, there is this really mean blog post about our movie. Let's build another ark."

What is most missing from this piece of shit is wonder. The world ending and a boat floating across its flooded ruins is supposed to be at least partly enjoyable, the way that falling from a great height suggests a thrill we will remember for the rest of our life, no matter how much longer it may go on. There is no wonder to the animals or the places the ark goes, no delight even at finally reaching land — we suddenly cut to the entire group on a beach, without even seeing the discovery. At that moment, I felt like Tom Hanks when he found out Captain Phillips was utter bullshit — extremely upset and disappointed with myself for even witnessing this debacle.

I mean, I feel so fucking embarrassed for this shit (below). Emma has like five scenes in the movie, and 90 percent of her lines consist of telling someone her belly hurts:

God will have his revenge on those responsible for these lies.

I mean yes, The Fountain was completely embarrassing and stupid, but it was just some revolting made up story, it didn't have actual things like drama and exciting moments that you expect from the story of Noah. At the very least Noah could have made a compass or done something besides send a really tired seagull out to find land for him. Deprived of all the things humans do in order to survive difficult situations, Crowe's Noah just growls a lot and tries to kill his grandchildren. It would be laughable if it was not so completely dull and boring. Throw in a swordfight, or cast Antonio Banderas as Jennifer Connelly's latin lover. Anything but this.

0/10

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Don't look at the metacritic Jennifer. You won't like what you see."

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In Which Black Swan Trumpets Disaster

Tortured Dancer

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Black Swan

dir. Darren Aronofsky

107 minutes

Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller, Black Swan, is a cannonade of ballet’s absolutes turned burlesque. Like a self-doubting teenager who applies too much make-up or wears too much jewelry, the film piles on element after element and never once — despite its patent mirror motif — stops to consider its own reflection. In a world where precision wears the crown, Aronofsky’s cumulative fanaticism feels unwieldy.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a tortured young dancer whose reach for perfection as lead in Swan Lake results in her fatal undoing. Delusive eruptions of anger and suspicion, fright and mutilation, pilot her to the end without ever establishing reality or any basis for comparison. The entire film is a cold sweat panic attack that wobbles cartoonishly under a score of clichés — a devoted and despotic former ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey) who paints nightmarish portraits of her daughter, Nina’s infantilized Capezio pink and plush toy bedroom, a doppelganger dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), whose drugs, tattoos, drinking, and sex life tempt and thieve, and the company director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), whose “Attack it! Attack it!” method of teaching is sexed up with adages on “losing yourself” and “letting go” in order to become “transcendent.”

At first Portman’s performance as Nina is fascinating because her initial calm is almost macabre. As tokens of imminent craze begin to surface — jealousy from other dancers, stress rashes, a ripped toenail while practicing her thirty-two fouettés — the prospect of a diametric character becomes exciting. But Portman doesn’t break from the mould. She is the stereotype of a strained dancer, taut to the point of tears or possessed in a spate of delirium. No layer of warm-up shrugs or pastel legwarmers can hide overwrought, flinty intensity.

Like years of corset tightlacing, her entire face recedes into her fixed bun; even her eyebrows appear pinned. Her performance reaches its ceiling and remains there. And like so many thrillers that misfire, the camera ceaselessly orbits and stalks her every move; Portman’s Nina spends the majority of the movie trapped in what might as well be a hermetic maze of eternal mirrors.

While there are moments of stunning beauty, indelible is not a word that comes to mind. Ashen skin set against total darkness is contrast and nothing more. Music that bullies instead of chaperones is not moving, it’s simply too loud. A girl in a delicate white gown can so easily look like a girl in a nightgown. Rare are the moments where Black Swan takes off, and en masse, it’s the props that are deserving of praise. Like the celebratory cake, a gift from mother to daughter. Replete with bright pink edible flowers, lustre dust, and royal icing, it looks sickeningly sweet and under no circumstance would a dancer consider even one slice. The cake — so ridiculous and ornate like a Havisham relic — both mocks and infantilizes Nina. It’s the most heartbreaking and in some ways creepiest cake ever. A perfect prop!

Ballet in film indulges some of our guiltiest pleasures: drama is at its highest concentration, the pursuit of perfection is infinite, rivalry is both tacit and public, company hierarchy breeds paranoia, discipline breeds mania, and the dancer’s lissom body — a complex and almost cruel layering of muscles and bones, a miniature torso, a long neck — is impossible to ignore. With that in mind, some of the worst ballet films are in fact some of the best ballet films. We pander to their production because like CIA thrillers— cover-ups, classified files, lampooned conspiracies — ballet’s backstage can be similarly entertaining. Both genres are met with “It’s what you’d expect” approval and recommendation, and some even garner cult status.

So why isn’t Black Swan one of those terrible but wonderful ballet films? And what does it take to make a great ballet film a great ballet film? A central love story? A repellent but ultimately well-meaning impresario? Real soloists as lead characters? Or perhaps no lead characters at all? Is it a question of proportions? An even ratio of clichés to nuance? For every scene where she can’t eke out a perfect turnout, count one where she can let loose at a downtown walk-in class. For every question, another question?: “Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?”

That final example references the greatest ballet film: Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 The Red Shoes. In its climactic seventeen minute ballet of the same name, the most hallucinatory fantasia of optics and illusion dissolves the stage’s limitations into a celluloid nightmare. Likewise, the stage’s presence—its design, its costumes, the validity of live audience — imparts a physical power to the camera. Two art forms that are typically at odds converge. The ballet of The Red Shoes within the film displays the most harrowing commitment to art; a plenary account that Black Swan tries too hard to attain and ultimately misses entirely.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and twitters here.

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