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"Black Swan" and the cast gets Teen Choice Nominations

Recently announced were the Teen Choice Awards nominations. Black Swan and several of the cast members received nominations.

Voting can be conducted here.

Lindsay Lohan wanted lead role in "Black Swan"

According to recent news items, controversial actress Lindsay Lohan, famous for her roles in movies such as The Parent Trap remake, Mean Girls, and I Know Who Killed Me and also for her well-publicized court/rehab life, feels as though she "deserves" the role Natalie Portman had in Black Swan - that of a schizophrenic ballerina suffering from an eating disorder and stress.

Lohan reportedly took ballet until she was 19.

Do you think Lohan would have been a good choice for Nina, or too close to real-life for comfort?

"Black Swan" wins big at the Independent Spirit Awards

Tonight Black Swan won Best Cinematgoraphy, Best Director, Best Female Lead, and best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. Natalie Portman and Darren Aronofsky were in attendance for the event.

Pictures of Portman's and Aronofsky's red carpet attire under the cut.

Rihanna channels Black Swan in new Reb'l Fleur perfume ad

Does anybody else reckon that Rihanna had Black Swan in mind when she was making the new advert to her perfume?
We couldn't stop thinking of the Oscar-nominated Natalie Portman movie Black Swan when we saw Rihanna's Reb'l Fleur perfume advert.

Red-haired RiRi emerges from a sea of peach-coloured feathers at the start of the clip looking simply divine in a flesh-coloured mini dress (this is the white swan moment).

The Barbadian songstress steps out of the feathers into a garden with a maze where she spots a hunky man in a suit *phwoar*.

But before long Ri has stepped through a mirror onto the 'bad' side where her dress changes colour to black (this is her black swan moment) and she seduces the stallion.

Unlike the movie, though, Rihanna crosses back to the good side and back into her flower. Beautiful.

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Russian Family Still Strong for Aronofsky

Film director Darren Aronofsky, whose latest movie “Black Swan” opened in Russia on Saturday, gained inspiration for the film from a visit to St. Petersburg, he said in a recent interview.

“Black Swan” is set in the New York ballet world and stars Natalie Portman as the perfectionist ballerina Nina. Cast in the lead role of a new production of “Swan Lake,” Nina is the ideal Odette, the innocent white swan princess, but is pushed by choreographer Thomas (played by Vincent Cassel) to develop her portrayal of Odette’s double Odile — the seductive black swan.

It is one thing to lose yourself in your art. Caught up in a web of intrigue involving a younger rival, Lily, who effortlessly embodies the black swan (Ukrainian-born actress Mila Kunis), Portman’s ballerina loses her mind.

“Mila’s Slavonic ancestry did influence us at the start,” Aronofsky said. “ We thought about her having an accent, since ballet is so international, but as we worked on the character we liked her coming from San Francisco better.”

The Brooklyn-born Aronofsky is keenly conscious of his Russian heritage.

“I feel a deep connection to Russia,” he said. “My grandparents came from Russia and so many of my family traditions are connected to the country.”

The director, whose previous films include “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), and “The Wrestler” (2008), said he had originally been attracted to ballet because of his connection to actors.

“When you are in front of the curtain, it’s all beauty and light. When you go backstage, you see the dancers are out of breath and sweaty — it’s anything but effortless. And you realize there is all this competition. As a director, that got me really excited.”

What were the major influences on the film? “More than any other film I’ve done, this one has been compared to other’s people work,” he said. “The biggest influence was Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘Swan Lake.’ We tried to build the entire film from the fairy tale.”

Aronofsky visited St. Petersburg several years ago when he brought his last film, “The Wrestler,” which was nominated for two Oscars, to the city.

“I loved St. Petersburg when I visited with ‘The Wrestler;’ I can’t wait to get back,” he said. “I hope to bring ‘Black Swan’ to the city. When I was in St. Petersburg, I took in a production of ‘Swan Lake.’ The ballet was amazing, the dancers were staggeringly beautiful, and the musicians were tremendous. But I was stunned that the production had a happy ending. I’d never seen it before! And in Russia? Needless to say, my film’s ending isn’t as bright.”

Aronofsky is now working on his next project, a new adventure thriller titled “The Tiger.” The movie, based on John Vaillant’s book “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival,” has been optioned by Focus Features, with Brad Pitt potentially taking a leading role.

The story tells the tale of poachers in the Primorye region in Russia’s Far East who are tracked and hunted by an “almost” supernaturally powerful Siberian tiger.

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The Many Faces of ‘Black Swan,’ Deconstructed

Few ballet films excite popular fascination and excitement, and almost none to the degree of “Black Swan,” which is up for five Oscars this month. So why has it so intrigued academy voters and the public alike? Surely because it exerts its lurid appeal on multiple levels.

In “Black Swan,” Natalie Portman plays a ballerina who finally wins a lead role only to feel the pressure that accompanies it.

It’s a backstager: Will poor hard-working Nina (Natalie Portman) get the white-black double lead role of “Swan Lake,” pull off its taxing demands, survive till the first night and vanquish her rival, not to mention her terrors? It’s horror: Nina’s life spirals out of control for alarming reasons apparently beyond her control and indeed her comprehension. It’s psychosexual drama: Those forces come from her confused perceptions of her mother, her sexual inhibitions, her ambitions and her increasingly schizoid fantasies. It’s a Tchaikovsky-soundtrack movie: Nothing about it is neater than the way Clint Mansell’s score is almost all taken from “Swan Lake” material, with a marvelous use of the slow chords prefacing the ballet’s most famous pas de deux for an offstage effect of psychological suspense.

Most powerfully it’s a modern example of that old genre, the woman’s movie. Nina’s loves are seen as repressed and illicit, her successes are shown as triumphs in an unnatural and injurious art form, and she is duly punished for these transgressions. Joan Crawford would have killed to play her.

Nina has a female nemesis, but that turns out to be less her sexy, confident frenemy Lily (Mila Kunis) than her own alter ego. Yes, “Black Swan” is the latest example of what the film critic Jeanine Basinger has called the “My god, there’s two of her!” device. Nina develops her own built-in anti-Nina.

And it’s a highly partial — airless — view of ballet’s interior workings. It goes out of its way to contradict the old escapist idea that “everything’s beautiful at the ballet.” Instead it takes energy from the aspects of ballet that are cruel and unfair. Let’s not pretend, however, that those aspects don’t exist.

Let’s also admit there have always been striking parallels between the ballet classics of the 19th century and the Hollywood women’s movies of the mid-20th century. In “A Stolen Life” (1946) passive, sensitive and artistically creative Bette Davis, thanks to her inhibitions, loses Glenn Ford to her active, sexy but heartless twin — played, of course, by Bette Davis. In “Random Harvest” (1942) amnesiac Ronald Colman realizes only at the end that his perfect but cool, unyielding wife, Greer Garson, is also the warm, outgoing and devoted woman whom he married in the love-filled other life long buried in his subconscious. Resemblances between these absurd but deeply enjoyable movies and the full-length “Swan Lake” are easy to spot.

Likewise “Black Swan’s” alter-ego rivalries and divided-ego visions connect intimately to the good-bad, white-black, active-passive Odette-Odile heroines of “Swan Lake.” First Nina is told she doesn’t have it in her to be both the white swan and the black. Eventually, however, it’s disconcerting how much of the contrasting heroines she does contain.

Nina sometimes sees her anti-Nina in the mirror. Ballet has been obsessed with mirrors for centuries, and not just in works like August Bournonville’s “Ventana” (1856) and Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” (1953). Dancers often spend more of their time in front of the mirror than before an audience, and it’s in the mirror that they see both the ideal versions of themselves they hope to show the public as well as their own failings.

In “Black Swan” Nina’s mirror-image starts to take on an independent life. Away from the classroom Nina continually sees this doppelgänger acting out her hopes and horrors. At the climax of a lesbian fantasy Nina’s lover Lily turns into Nina’s lover Nina: a radical rewrite of the old idea of the dancer as Narcissus.

If Nina is a narcissist, however, she is appalled by it. More obviously she is a self-tormentor. I wish this view of ballet were a lie, but it’s not. It is, though, far from being the whole truth. The “Black Swan” screenplay has surely been prompted by a number of dancers’ memoirs — Gelsey Kirkland’s 1986 best seller, “Dancing on My Grave,” is just the most famous — to convey its neurotic version of the internal life of ballet.

Nina could learn from a dancer she invokes in a dressing-room scene: Margot Fonteyn. In her 1975 “Autobiography” that most reasonable of superstar ballerinas emphasized the crucial distinction between taking work seriously (“imperative”) and taking oneself seriously (“disastrous”). “Black Swan” could have been inspired by elements of Fonteyn’s own story: She wrote emphatically of the “terror” with which she faced every performance of “Swan Lake” (whose central role she danced for some 35 years), and how, after Frederick Ashton told her everything that was missing at the dress rehearsal for his new ballet “Apparitions,” she found “by some alchemy of despair” the artistry to rise to the work’s demands .

One book about Fonteyn quotes her as saying, “I’m sure if everyone knew how physically cruel dancing really is, nobody would watch — only those people who enjoy bullfights!” For some dancers it is the hips that take most strain; some, the spine; for Fonteyn and others it was the feet. “Black Swan” offers just enough imagery to show us why pointwork in ballet can seem as extreme and punitive as the old Chinese custom of binding women’s feet.

“Black Swan” certainly feels hostile to ballet, but I don’t think it means to be. Its real objective — above and beyond that of so many women’s movies — is to imply that a woman’s truest fulfillment is as (heterosexual) lover, wife and mother, and therefore that Nina’s best artistic successes can never compensate for her personal sacrifices. The “Black Swan” view of ballet is that it’s an unnatural art in which women deny too many normal aspects of womanhood.

There is copious evidence to support that view. Witness such dancer autobiographies as Ms. Kirkland’s and Toni Bentley’s “Winter Season” (1982). Ms. Bentley describes how, when she has her third monthly period in a row, colleagues in her dressing room ask, “Are you sure you’re a dancer?” True dancers, according to that attitude, don’t have normal female functions.

To these negatives ballet brings many positives: energy, responsiveness to music, discipline, teamwork, idealism, interpretative fulfillment. Not so “Black Swan.” It’s both irresistible and odious. I was gripped by its melodrama, but its nightmarish view of both ballet and women is not one I’m keen to see again. As a horror movie, it’s not extreme. As a woman’s movie, however, it’s the end of the line.

Most depressingly, Nina is just not a great role. She’s too much a victim — the film makes her helpless, passive — to be seriously involving. Though she enjoys triumph, we never see the willpower that gets her there, just the psychosis and the martyrdom. It’s the latest hit movie for misogynists.

“The Red Shoes” (1948) — to which “Black Swan” owes so much — actually had more psychological depth. Its ballerina heroine found both fame and love, and her torment came from choosing between them. That’s a highly ambiguous attitude toward ballet — she cannot permanently reconcile dance and love — but you can see why it inspired thousands of girls to take up the art. The “Black Swan” idea of ballet is narrower: obsession, torment, inadequacy, paranoia, delusion.

Those things aren’t absent from ballet (or womanhood or life). And so Nina’s interior and exterior lives here spin together into a compelling vortex.

Will “Black Swan” follow “The Red Shoes” in inspiring a new generation of young dancers? Unlikely. It will, however, draw many to “Swan Lake,” to check out the ballet at the heart of the movie. What will they see?

Surely it’s time to go back to staging “Swan Lake” as it used to be before the 1940s, with no black swan at all, but with the antiheroine Odile dressed in strong colors, as a woman of the world. Her seductions lie in seeming not demonic but glamorously — if deceptively — available, unlike the withheld Odette. No ballet of the 19th century goes further into true tragedy: Odette the Swan Queen takes heroic responsibility for herself and also her flock of swan-maidens.

Alas, companies go on presenting “Swan Lake” as a crude choice between a good, loyally loving but passive victim and an evil, active and vampishly duplicitous sorceress. And ballet goes on abounding in sexist, melodramatic clichés. While this remains so, “Black Swan” is the ballet movie our era deserves.

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Former ballerina: I was a real Black Swan...and it nearly killed me

HOLLYWOOD star Natalie Portman is tipped to win an Oscar for playing a tortured ballerina in hit movie Black Swan.

But the film has caused outrage in the ballet world, as Portman's character, Nina, pushes herself to the limits - suffering eating disorders, self-harm and depression in a quest for dance perfection.

For former ballerina Ali Townsend, watching the movie was like seeing a younger version of herself.
The mum-of-one had a glittering 18-year career as one of the country's top ballerinas and danced for the London City Ballet and the English National Ballet.

'It brought back haunting memories' ... Ali Townsend

She even tackled the dual role of the white swan and black swan (Odette and Odile) in Swan Lake - the dance which forces Nina over the edge.

Today, Ali reveals herself as the real-life Black Swan.

"Black Swan" on Blu-Ray March 8?

Just a few weeks ago, some were surprises that Sony seemed to be accelerating the DVD/Blu-ray release of The Social Network. (103 days from theatrical premiere to retail release.) Today we hear the announcement that The King’s Speech will hit store shelves on April 19 (131 days after its Dec 1 premiere). Now I’m finding a site offering (unconfirmed) pre-orders for Black Swan, apparently shipping on March 8 (a mere 81 days after it opened in mid-December, and roughly a week after Oscar night.)

The rule of thumb for estimating home video release dates used to be 17 weeks (119 days). Disney shortened that window considerably for Alice in Wonderland with its theatrical release span of March 5 – June 1 (12.5 weeks, 89 days). This time-frame works to terrific advantage with the current awards season calendar. Films released in the Fall are ready for AMPAS voters in editions that serve as deluxe FYC presentations. Movies that wait for traditional holiday premieres are perfectly positioned for home delivery, striking when the iron is hottest and publicity machines are firing on all cylinders.

Expect me to question this Promote Me & Own Me marketing synergy? No way. I’m too eager to get my hands around Nina’s neck to be skeptical of the Incredible Shrinking Theatrical Window. (Just wondering what’s taking so long for Pulp Fiction, Vertigo, and Lawrence of Arabia to go Blu.)

[Check out the cases after the cut.]

Inside the Special Effects of "Black Swan"

How 'Black Swan' Will Reach the $100 Million Mark

A ballet psycho-thriller isn’t the typical boxoffice juggernaut, but as Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan hit the $75 million mark during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, Fox Searchlight received its most detailed breakdown of who is fueling the season’s surprise hit:

Women (big surprise!) About 55 percent of the audience is female (17-34 is the sweet spot), and many are bringing their boyfriends and husbands along. Women are giving the film a B+ on CinemaScore; men are a bit less enthusiastic with a B, but that is considered great for a horror/thriller.

People in small cities After opening in 18 theaters, Swan upped its theater count from about 1,550 to 2,328 and extended into smaller communities, turning in top performances in Butte, Mont., Guleph, Ont., Columbus, Ga., Houma, La., and Bangor, Maine. The $13 million-budgeted film is doing especially well in French Canada and heavily Hispanic San Antonio, even though Searchlight initially didn’t spend much there.

And big-city types, too The top-performing theater in the U.S. is the Regal Union Square in New York, where Swan will soon become its third-highest grosser of all time, behind only Avatar and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace ($1.7 million each). Other top cities include Boston, Seattle and Chicago.

But not really L.A.'s Arclight Hollywood is the No. 2 theater overall for Swan, but Searchlight says the film hasn’t overperformed in the broader Los Angeles market.

How high can Swan fly? After her best drama actress win at the Golden Globes, Natalie Portman is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, which should send the film past $100 million and possibly toward the ranks of Juno ($143.5 million) and Slumdog Millionaire ($141.3 million), Searchlight’s highest-grossing films. Says Searchlight’s Sheila DeLoach, “It has become the movie people have to see.”  

Article from the Hollywood Reporter: Source