2010 Rewind: "Black Swan"

Being an artist is tough. Aside from pursuing a career that has no security or long term prospects, the physical and mental strain it places on the individual is enough to drive most mad. Every morning artists wake up and strive for perfection and in many cases they go by unrewarded and worst of all, sometimes completely unrecognized. It's a wonder that artists don't all lose their minds at some point early in their career, which leads us to the topic of the movie "Black Swan".

Considered a spiritual successor to Darren Aronofsky's previous film, "The Wrestler", "Black Swan" observes the behave and destructive dedication that performers go through in order to reach that next level of their career.

The film follows Natalie Portman, a young girl gunning for the lead role in her troop's production of Swan Lake. In every way she's perfectly suited for the white swan position; she's humble, delicate, fragile, a perfect unblemished innocent. Unfortunately, in order to play the white swan, tradition dictates that she must also be the black swan, a symbol of unbridled sexuality and precocious adolescent lust and temptation. The audience is treated to the maddening lengths that one young girl will go to in order to achieve her goals as she slowly changes from the shy girl next door to a passionately unchecked ball of emotional confusion and sexual discovery.

Where the film truly excels is in the presentation. Mirroring her mental transformation, we are treated to a hauntingly bizarre physical metamorphosis that brings into the very question of the character's mental state and radically alters the viewer's perspective; thrashing and tearing at the walls of reality and exposing a twisted fantasy that blurs the lines of reality and psychosis.

For all the struggling artists out there and even for all of you workaholics, this film is something that needs to be seen. There's definitely a hidden message buried within the context here, about the dangers of perfection and the harsh reality of personal discovery and the nightmarish roads that we sometimes must take that will lead to our own happiness.