Valentine's Day and Black Swan **Spoilers**

My husband rocks.

He emailed my boss two weeks ago and had her schedule an all day meeting with the Product Mgmt team so that nobody would schedule meetings for me on Valentine's. I got a surprise day off! You can't beat that. Waking up, ready to slog through Monday only to find out you don't have to go to work! We went and did a bunch of stuff together for the entire day - nothing fancy or extravagant - just fun time together.

Part two of our itinerary was seeing Black Swan. I had wanted to see this movie since it came out. I mean, tens of people on Facebook said it was great. Dean repeatedly said "no" everytime I asked. Well...He might have been right, maybe. I'm still undecided. The movie was dark, disturbing, and completely fucked up. I think the most traumatizing moment is when Winona Ryder's character, Beth, stabs herself in the face repeatedly with a nail file (at least as Nina imagines). And when Nina (Natalie Portman) tears her cuticle back to her first knuckle - yuck - I still get that weird feeling in my chest (like nails on chalkboard feeling) just thinking about it. Those are like 2 of 10 fucked up moments...

I completely see why this is Natalie Portman's once-in-a-lifetime role and how it was overall, extremely well done (except one nitpick in that much of the dancing was shot waist up to presumably hide amateur technique, but whatever). But even given all the industry (and FB) praise, blah, blah, blah, I'm not completely sure that I'm happy I saw it. This movie is basically sitting in a weird, uncomfortable purgatory between drama and horror. Horrific scenes of mental illness played out as a drama. Something like that. We should have went to the stupid, predictable Sandler / Aniston flick and saved this downer of a movie for a rental.