Black Swan

The story of Swan Lake is a beautiful ballet.  It's about a virgin girl trapped in a swan's body.  To break the spell, she must gain the love of a prince.  Unfortunately the evil black swan tricks him into loving her.  Upset by the life she must live, the white swan kills herself, and in death she finds freedom.  The film Black Swan is a similar story of an innocent girl, Nina (Natalie Portman; Star Wars, The Other Boleyn Girl) who needs to learn to "let herself go" in order to dance the Black Swan, as well as the White Swan.  The latter she does perfectly, but the former is a struggle due to her innocence.  Her world is turned upside down when she meets a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis; That 70s Show, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), who's an exact opposite of Nina and helps her to let loose.  The Black Swan turns into a great conflict of man vs. himself, when Nina works so hard on the role it drives her into insanity, struggling internally between staying the white swan and becoming the black swan.
Nominated for five Oscars including, Best Picture, Actress in a Leading Role (Natalie Portman), Cinematography, Directing (Darren Aronofsky; Requiem for a Dream), and Film Editing, Black Swan is considered to be one of the best films of 2010.  I think Natalie did an outstanding job portraying both the innocent and the crazy.  We're use to seeing her play smaller, "good girl" roles, but we did get a sneak of her rebellious side in Closer.  She really broke out of her shell in V for Vendetta playing a rebellious freedom fighter.  Natalie really got into her role as Nina and was believable as both good and bad. 
Mila Kunis was surprisingly good.  I always liked her on That 70s Show as Jackie Burkhart, but she had that role for so long, and I think that sometimes actors carry a role into other roles.  Mila, however, didn't.  She played a completely different character, and it was believable.  I like Mila Kunis a lot, because even though she's done a lot of movie roles, she still continues to play the voice of Meg Griffin on Family Guy.  She hasn't left the show thinking she could do better without it.  She didn't have a big enough role to get nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but I think someday she'll make it to that point.
All together this film was pretty good.  It was hard to separate fantasy from reality, which is a good thing considering the film's storyline.  Not knowing whether the main character was hallucinating or not, almost made the audience go through it with her.  There were a few queasy parts that I had to look away from too, but not so bad.  One thing I noted was the emphasis on the feet.  Ballet is a really beautiful form of dance.  The prettiest in my opinion, and the cinematography during the dancing was excellent.  It's hard to film dancing and have each shot be consistent.  Also, in some films, the cinematographer will do a closeup of a body part instead of doing a full body shot, because they want to hide the fact that the actor isn't doing their own stunt.  I often feel, however, that its obvious the actor isn't doing it and that's why they cut to the close up.  However, in Black Swan, I believed it was Natalie Portman's foot and that the closeups were just to emphasize how good of a dancer Nina is and how hard she worked.  It definitely was done very well and flowed nicely.
One thing I didn't like was the costume choice.  Some dancers wore white, symbolizing good, and some wore black, symbolizing evil.  None wore pink or any other color making the film typically feel like black and white.  I thought that was a little obvious, especially when they did the wide shots of a whole room of black and white dancers.  It was a good symbolization but over done.  I liked at one point when she started the inner battle and was wearing gray to symbolize the mixture between good and evil.  Also, once she put on the black tank top Lily gave her, she kind of lost control.  Parts of it were good, but there were parts that was a little too much.
Some may argue with me, but I don't think the ending was very predictable.  In a way I guess I saw it coming, but it was still a little shocker.  Everybody will have their own opinion about this film, and that's what's so great about it.  Whether or not it wins Best Picture, Black Swan will be talked about amongst friends for months (maybe even years) to come.