Sucker Punch

Tries to merge Black Swan, Inception and Brazil with comics, anime and videogames and the results are....... unsurprisingly vapid and sterile. Total pile of crap. 2/10

Leon Morin, Priest

Trying to complete my Jean-Pierre Melville collection. This is mostly a story of repressed desire and love between Barny, a widow of a Jew and the titular priest, with curt lesbianism (Barny's love for her ebony boss) and curt paedophila (a Nazi soldier falls in love with her half-Jewish daughter of 6, albeit a brief innuendo). It is a bit boring and hardly as captivating as Melville's other adaptation of another book set in a similar era, The Silence of the Sea, which is more atmospheric and tense than this. Set during the Nazi occupation and directly after, the Catholic theology is a bit too much Christianity 101 but the interaction between Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Paul Belmondo is rivetting and compelling. And it ends with the typical Melville ending. Not really a good Melville effort, even if it did win the Venice Grand Prix (or whatever). 6/10

Swan Lake (1968)

Got it because of Black Swan fever. It's a Russian production. Pretty good although I disagree with the choice of the guy playing Siegfried, they shoulda used the Court Jester guy, instead, as he dances more supple and agile. Was the guy chosen as Siegfried because of his chiselled features? He still looks gay-ish to me, though and he doesn't really dance that well. The costumes are outrageously daring, the White Swan's pubes are visible, the Black Swan has half-exposed breasts. The performances are fab, the White Swan is tender, soft and supple, the Black Swan aggro, terse and passionate. My main gripe with this is trying to make it into a movie, with split screens, dissolves, special effects, superimposition. And the film production is horrible, some out of focus shots, inconsistent lighting, choppy editing and use of different film stock giving different hues and saturation within one movement. They should have shot it as it appeared on stage.

My ratings - as a movie - 5/10. as a performance - 10/10. highly emotional and sexually invigorating. as Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood once said - "ballet is a just a highly stylised form of sex".