This one didn’t come out quite right, I’m pretty sure the ears should be higher. The directions were for machine-sewing, and had all this stuff about basting and seam allowances, and I just went “fuck it” and tried to figure it out myself. But except for the ears — which can be fixed — I think it looks pretty good for something with so many pieces that was sewn entirely by hand.

This is the last design in this particular book that I’m going to make. There’s a few more that I don’t want or have a need for: A Happy Birthday banner, one that just looks way too impossible to do by hand, and an iPod case. I don’t have an iPod, my mp3 player is a lot smaller (and I already made a case for it). …However, there are some members of my family who do have iPods, so it might do to keep it in mind for a Christmas present.

But me and felt aren’t finished yet! Yesterday I bought this book at Borders, and every single design in it looks insanely cute. I also want to get this book eventually; Borders did have it, but it had been opened and looked pretty beat up and I didn’t trust that all the patterns were still there, so I think I’ll buy an untouched copy from Amazon. There’s one duplicate (the little happy tree guy on the cover) from the book I just finished, but the rest are new to me.

In other news, yesterday I got There Will Be Blood from Netflix, and ho. ly. SHIT. it was amazing. When my brother David saw it he said it was like Daniel Day-Lewis was like “Oh, you thought I was a talented actor before? *mimes rolling up sleeves* STAND BACK, BITCHES.”

I am so going to shout BASTARD IN A BASKET at the next person who annoys me.

The cast of "Nine"; image courtesy of newsinfilm.com

I saw Precious today and want to talk about it length, but need to process what I saw. I’d also like to get to Push, Sapphire’s book on which the movie was based at some point before the end of the year. For now, I’ll say this. I didn’t love it but I did like it, thought Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique were great, was heartened that my matinee screening had a good and diverse turnout, and think you should see it. But you may want to see it with someone and encourage your local theater to have a safe space where people can go if the movie becomes too intense or touches on frought emotions or horrible memories.

For the time being, I thought I’d mention the preview of a coming attraction. Nine, Rob Marshall’s screen adaptation of Arthur Kopit, Mario Fratti, and Maury Yeston’s musical (itself an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2), comes out next week. You can view the trailer here.

So, I know very little about this musical. I only recently discovered the origins of its source material, which I haven’t seen (though, based on my less-than-enthusiastic viewings of La Dolce Vita and I Vitelloni don’t hold high hopes for it, unless Fellini allowed for self-deprication in his autobiographical film the way that Bob Fosse did in All That Jazz, a movie of a similar mold that I love). Beyond that, I knew Raul Julia starred in its Broadway debut back in 1982, the original production won many Tonys, and once heard someone sing “Unusual Way” at a family friend’s wedding, which is a really cryptic song choice for such a ceremony.

As for the film adaptation, I know the players. Rob Marshall directed Chicago and is at the helm here. Daniel Day Lewis plays Guido Contini, a tortured director. The women who populate his life are considerable — Marion Cotillard plays his wife, Penélope Cruz his mistress, Nicole Kidman his muse, Stacey Ferguson (aka Duchess Fergie Ferg) a whore he once knew, and Kate Hudson a fashion writer whose character has a song that was written for the movie. Oh, and Judi Dench is Contini’s costume designer and confidant.

So, I totally suspect a two-hour version of Julio Iglesias’s “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before” with generous dashes of love for the authorial presence of male film directors. Also, I think this trailer gives you virtually no insight into what this story is about.

That said, I totally want to see this movie because:

1) I’m always interested in film musicals, whether they are good, bad, screen adaptations of stage musicals, or screen adaptations of stage musicals of feature films. Yes, this means I saw Hairspray and didn’t hate it as much as many of my movie geek friends did. But those matters should be saved for another post. 

2) Unlike many people who hated Chicago (several of whom I suspect feel Marty or Roman got robbed out of a Best Picture Oscar for Gangs of New York or The Pianist), I actually enjoyed it. I felt the adaptation stayed true to the source material, deftly staged sequences that are actually going on in the protagonist’s mind, and felt like Catherine Zeta Jones, Queen Latifah, and John C. Reilly were great. I even enjoyed Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere, actors whom I otherwise would rather not watch in a movie. My only real complaint (which Jon Stewart shares), was that Bebe Neuwirth, who won a Tony for her portrayal of Velma Kelly was replaced by Zeta Jones. Otherwise, bring it.

3) Daniel Day Lewis can sing? The same guy who apparently prepared for There Will Be Blood by recording his character’s voice using early 20th century phonographic technology? I am there.

d) I’m fascinated by the presence of female pop stars in contemporary film musicals. As the golden age of film musicals has long since passed, it seems like the ones that do make it to the screen need a familiar face and voice, and they are almost always women with celebrated recording careers. Just as I wondered what Madonna brought to Evita, Queen Latifah brought to Chicago, and Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson brought to Dreamgirls, so too am I curious what Fergie is going to bring to Nine. While detractors might snigger that it’s fitting for the woman who sang “My Humps” and “London Bridge” to play a whore, I’ll counter that she’s the only singer we hear in the trailer. Yes, that’s her singing “Be Italian.”

e) In the movie, I’m interested in seeing a whore play a teacher to our genius director protagonist man. In real life, I advocate the decriminalization of prostitution and would like sex workers to get worker rights and benefits.

f) While I worry that these women are going to be portrayed as long-suffering, one-dimensional objects of Condini’s affection, I want to see a movie that boasts so many actresses. I haven’t seen this many women in an ensemble since I saw Cruz in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (note: Cruz is also starring in Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces and I can’t wait for it to start playing in Austin). 

As an aside, the gossip enthusiast in me is also curious about Cruz and Kidman starring in a movie together. Ever since Tom Cruise split with Nicole Kidman and dated Cruz, I always wonder what their interactions are like every time they show up on a magazine cover together. It’s a catty curiosity, but a curiosity nonetheless. I wonder how they would be portrayed in a movie about Tom Cruise’s life, but want very much for this movie not to be made.

Vogue cover girls Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, and Kate Hudson; image courtesy of latimesblogs.latimes.com

Nicole Kidman and Penélope Cruz bookending Vanity Fair's 2001 Hollywood Issue cover; image courtesy of abc.net.au

Whether this movie is good or not remains to be seen. That said, I’ll see you at the multiplex.

'Syndromes and a Century'

It’s ten years now since Tony Soprano first waddled onto small screens around the world. In the decade since we’ve seen something of a revolution in the way that television shows are made and watched, with programmes like The Wire, Mad Men and Six Feet Under representing a new, smarter kind of television drama. Here in the UK, DVD box sets of HBO shows are phenomenally popular, in a way that could barely have been imagined fifteen years ago.

The HBO revolution is generally seen as having been a good thing for television, encouraging good writing, experimentation and ‘dumbing-up’ in what can be a pretty dumbed-down medium.

What’s less often explored is the impact that HBO has had on cinema. On the face of it, things don’t look good. There’s a widespread feeling among people of my generation that the cable channel has beaten cinema at its own game. Having stolen cinema’s clothes by incorporating cinematic techniques into small-screen storytelling, it has proceeded to create narratives of a length and complexity that cinema simply can’t rival. Most films have two or, at a push, three hours to tell a story. HBO dramas have at least ten, spread out across a season. You only have to dip into Mad Men to see how much pleasure its writers take in delaying, deferring and waylaying the kind of narrative developments that in a two hour film would have to come thick and fast every ten minutes. 

I’d like to suggest though, that things aren’t as bad as they might seem. Some prominent film directors (cough! – Martin Scorsese) have certainly had their fingers burned, but cinema continues to grow and develop in directions that are not easy for TV shows to follow.     

On a basic level, there are still plenty of genres that TV can’t really convincingly do. The action-adventure film is an obvious example. You can put a brutal fight or a chase through the streets into an episode of The Wire or 24, and you can even throw a Hollwood-style budget into filming it, but you’ll always be outgunned by what Hollywood can do on a bigger canvas, with big Dolby speakers. Can it be a co-incidence that in the last ten years the action film has re-invented itself, with the Bourne trilogy, a re-tooled James Bond, The Matrix, Christopher Nolan’s Batman etc.? Well, yes it could be, but you see my point.

Alongside this big noisy transformation, there’s also been the kind of quiet growth that you’ll always find going on in cinema if you look hard enough, with new directors searching for new cinematic directions.

Film-makers like Alexander Sokurov, Claire Denis, Carlos Reygadas and David Lynch, to name but a few, have spent the last ten years staking out their own unique cinematic territory, producing work that wouldn’t fit easily onto the small screen. And then there are those like Paul Thomas Anderson who, having had the multi-layered, ensemble style of his early work (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) so convincingly appropriated by TV drama, has set off to plough new, equally exciting cinematic furrows. There Will Be Blood is a character study, sure, but a character study of such all-encompassing, deranged energy that it clearly belongs up on the big screen.

'There Will Be Blood'

Perhaps most strikingly different from anything HBO has to offer is the work of the Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a man whose name, if nothing else, would put you well ahead in a game of Scrabble. David Thomson once described his first viewing of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as ‘the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies’, and I have to say I felt much the same after my first viewing of Apichatpong’s 2006 film Syndromes and a Century.

In it, the director tells two mirrored stories of love, one set in a rural and one in an urban hospital. We, the audience, drift languidly, dreamlike through the film, overhearing gentle conversations and witnessing private, unguarded moments. What at first seems like a collection of trivial, unimportant moments gains weight through repetition and the change of perspective and, slowly, steadily, becomes compelling. It is a ‘difficult’ film, I suppose, but an easy one to watch, and infused with a uniquely Buddhist sensibility (in case you’ve ever wondered what Buddhist cinema might look like).    

Apichatpong’s earlier work contains the same intriguing mix of languor and mystery. His 2004 film Tropical Malady begins with an intense friendship between a soldier stationed in the countryside and a young local man. The relationship is possibly homosexual or possibly not – in the context of the film it doesn’t really matter – but it does contain from the start something primal and non-human: in one distinctly odd scene the young man is seen sniffing the hand of the soldier. Like Lynch’s Lost Highway, the film fractures in the middle, and we find that the young man has now become a ‘beast’ who the soldier must pursue through the jungle and kill in order to protect villagers’ cattle. As the two characters retreat further into the jungle they encounter talking glow-worms and the ghost of a cow, and the director draws on old Thai myths about shape-shifters and shamen. 

'Tropical Malady'

If these two films sound a bit trippy then, erm, that’s because they are. But they’re also powerful and moving in a way that is uniquely cinematic, and that helps to distinguish the cinematic experience from the televisual one.

Narratively then, with its ten hour plus running times, HBO may well have backed cinema into a corner. But to speak of an exhausted, half-dead art form is to assume that cinema is about nothing but narrative storytelling. Storytelling is important in cinema, obviously, but it’s always been capable of much more than that. At its best it can achieve something that cannot be found on TV, something spiritual and transformative (and I don’t mean Transformers – The Movie).     

So, while I love The Sopranos and Deadwood as much as the next box-set owning 31- year-old, I’d suggest that if you’re looking for the future of cinema, you should probably look elsewhere.

Primitive, a video installation by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, can be seen at the FACT Gallery in Liverpool until 29th November.

Misleading Teasers

I so wanted to see this film at the cinemas, but before I could get around to it, it was gone.

Having seen it, I will say one thing. The film had very little to do with what seemed to be peddled in the trailers. All I went on was Daniel Day-Lewis reprising a scary bastard in the mold of his Bill the Butcher from ‘Gangs of New York’, meeting the incendiary topic of how the oil barons came to be. The film is partially about that, but a surprising amount of it is a picaresque where you find yourself rooting for this bastard of a hateful man to be able to drill his wells and make his pipeline and beat the big bad Standard Oil and so forth, all on the account of his seeming humanity of adopting the baby son of one of his companions. But more on that later.

What’s Good About It

You can spend a long time looking for a film that’s deeply satisfying to watch. It doesn’t come along regularly and when it does, you’re always taken by surprise. I expected the film to be more grim, but it is more darkly funny than grim. The film oozes with good craft and good writing, and there are moments in it that you know you won’t forget.

Even the much parodied “I drink your milkshake” scene at the end is full of surprise and invention. There is something deeply baroque about the narrative and the story’s concern that you don’t quite expect the turn of events. In the end, we are faced with a main character who is at once a protagonist for the forces of industrialisation come full circle to venting his fury at the humiliation once exacted from him. It’s morally complex and deeply thought-provoking, and any film that leaves you with a cathartic resonance like that is great.

What’s Bad About It

Not much. It’s a trifle long and you’re never sure which part of the plot the central conflict is meant to hang upon, but then it’s fun to sit there and wonder where all the drama and fracas is going. It’s a great film. Picking faults with this one is picking nits and not worth the time. Go watch this thing if you haven’t seen it.

What’s Interesting About It

The character of Daniel played by Day-Lewis adopts an orphan who he then uses to pitch his image as a family man. Several times in the film, he makes the explicit point that the adopted son is there for show, but goes on to show great passion as a father. Daniel’s ploy works in most parts of the film as he pitches his deals to land owners and sets forth to dramatic effect.

We see many scenes where Daniel shows love and care for his adopted son H.W. (whose real name we never learn), that we as audience are also sucked in by Daniel’s apparent humanity. His rage at Tilford in defense of how he runs his own family and how he accepts Henry as his half-brother (until he finds out he’s not his brother) all build towards our understanding of the man that allows us to root for his interests in the story. In other words, we as the audience are just as big dupes as the people who buy his “me and my son H.W.” routine. It’s an interesting construct.

What’s also interesting is the dogged exploration of the physicality of drilling for oil. We see a progression of skills and apparatus applied to the task as we visually understand the difficulty of drilling for oil. In as much as oil has underpinned our modern civilisation, it is this very technology that has underpinned the oil business itself and it is a fascinating view. It’s a film that goes to the core of materialist dialectic as it plays out in American soil.

By the way, I own shares in a company that makes drill bits for these things. Howard Hughes’ immense wealth started from making such drill bits. It’s a good business to be in as we exhaust oil reserves, hunting ever more for the final reserves. I’m oddly comforted by this film.

I Drink Your Milkshake

This is the scene that leads up to the milkshake analogy:

Eli Sunday: Daniel, I’m asking if you’d like to have business with the Church of the Third Revelation in developing this lease on young Bandy’s thousand acre tract. I’m offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of Little Boston!
Plainview: I’d be happy to work with you.
Eli Sunday: You would? Yes, yes, of course. Wonderful.
Plainview: But there is one condition for this work.
Eli Sunday: Alright.
Plainview: I’d like you to tell me that you are a false prophet… I’d like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet… and that God is a superstition.
Eli Sunday: …but that’s a lie… it’s a lie, I cannot say it.
[long pause]
Eli Sunday: When can we begin to drill?
Plainview: Right away.
Eli Sunday: How long will it take to bring in the well?
Plainview: Should be very quick.
Eli Sunday: I would like a one hundred thousand dollar signing bonus plus the five that is owed with interest.
Plainview: That’s only fair.
Eli Sunday: I am a false prophet and God is a superstition. If that’s what you believe, then I will say it.
Plainview: Say it like you mean it.
Eli Sunday: Daniel…
Plainview: Say it like it’s your sermon.
Eli Sunday: This is foolish.
[long pause]
Eli Sunday: I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! I am a false prophet! God is a superstition! I am a false prophet! God is a superstition!
[pause]
Eli Sunday: Is that fine?
Plainview: Those areas have been drilled.
Eli Sunday: What?
Plainview: Those areas have been drilled.
Eli Sunday: …no they haven’t…
Plainview: It’s called drainage. I own everything around it… so I get everything underneath it.
Eli Sunday: But there are no derricks there. This is the Bandy tract. Do you understand?
Plainview: Do you? I drink your water, Eli. I drink it up. Everyday. I drink the blood of lamb from Bandy’s tract.

It’s a fantastic scene, and it’s surprising to see that this is actually what the central conflict in the film is about. While the narrative meanders over the vast tracts of Daniel’s Oil empire, it comes down to a single pipeline, and the pipeline must be built through the land of a man who asks Daniel to join the church. The event is clearly the greatest humiliation visited upon a proud man and it happens so close to the end of Act 2 that we just don’t see it as the turning point.

That Daniel doesn’t and will not find succor from the baptism is obvious. What is not is the amount of seething hate he harbors for 20 odd years to visit upon Eli with vengeance; and it is a brutal, nasty, blood-curdling, dark, volcanic fury of vengeance. Daniel Day-Lewis is even scarier than Bill the Butcher; there is absolutely no ‘give’ in the most emotionally sadistic scene I’ve seen. And the thing is that it’s so breath-taking because it is during this very scene we are shown what very matter for which we’ve been watching the film.

I don’t know how many films or scripts that can pull this sort of thing off where they keep the audience sucked in for 140minutes without actually giving away which shell the pea of dramatic concern is sitting under, and then unloading with a furious finish. It’s a remarkable achievement.  I’m hard pressed to think of another film that does the same thing.

As the ’00s wrap up, I think it’s a good time to make a list for the ten best movies of the decade.

1. No Country for Old Men (2007)
2. Mulholland Drive (2001)
3. Let the Right One In (2008)
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
5. Donnie Darko (2001)
6. Inglourious Basterds (2009)
7. Children of Men (2006)
8. Kill Bill (2003/2004)
9. There Will Be Blood (2007)
10. Unbreakable (2000)

I guess this list reveals my penchant for sci-fi and Quentin Tarantino.

I didn’t get time to really sit down with this week’s picks because of tonight’s impromptu Thursday night game (that I’ve been aware of for at least 2 weeks) between the Bears and 49ers. It’s probably better off that I am making these picks on the fly, considering I was 5-8 last week and my fantasy football team is sinking like the Lusitania. In other words, I don’t know anything about football right now. So, to waste as little of your time as possible, let’s do some quick picks, with my analysis for each pick whittled down to a movie title. The NFL picks have gone Hollywood!

Per the usual, all home teams in caps…

SAN FRANCISCO (-3) over Chicago

Zombieland. Dedicated to Jay Cutler and Alex Smith. I can’t believe how many people piled on the Bears bandwagon before this season. Like Jay Cutler could ever lead a team to the Super Bowl. That would be like thinking Rex Grossman could lead a team to the Super Bowl. We all know that would never happen….wait….

*Note: By the way, I picked this game before last night, I just didn’t have time to get the column up before it was over. On a related note, I’m glad I don’t have the NFL Network after finding out what an awful game that was. 10-6, Niners. Really.

NY JETS (-7) over Jacksonville

The Green Mile. Dedicated to Jets head coach Rex Ryan. Congratulations on coaching a 4-4 team with possibly the biggest collective ego in the history of 4-4 teams. It seems like you’re miles away from that 3-0 record and all the Super Bowl talk that came with it. In Week 4.

Denver (-3.5) over WASHINGTON

The Hangover. Dedicated to the Washington Redskins. I’d rather have a massive hangover than watch a Redskins game. Also, I know the Broncos are on a slide and everything, but we’re content to make them only 3.5 point favorites over the Redskins? Really? The Washington Redskins?

Cincinnati (+7) over PITTSBURGH

Big Fish. Dedicated to the 2009 Cincinnati Bengals. If the Bengals want to convince everyone that they’re truly the contenders that Ochocinco says they are, then they have to keep taking down the Big Fish of the AFC North. They beat the Steelers in their first meeting back in Week 3 and have already swept the Ravens. With a 4-0 record within their division, a win on Sunday over Pittsburgh would go a long way in helping Cincy secure a division title. If you would have told me at this time last year that the 2009 Bengals would be in position to take over first place in the division in Week 10 I would have punched you right in the face.

TENNESSEE (-7) over Buffalo

Up. Dedicated to Vince Young’s stock. It could be because of the fact that a scarecrow could probably play better quarterback than Kerry Collins, or it could be because of one of my favorite things to say in all caps: VINCE YOUNG WINS FOOTBALL GAMES. Heck, who’s to say that they won’t roll off 10 straight wins and make the playoffs? Actually, I say they won’t, but it doesn’t matter. It can only get better from here for the Titans and Vince Young.

MINNESOTA (-17) over Detroit

Gran Torino. Dedicated to Brett Favre because he reminds me of Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino: as old as dirt but still kicking ass. For now.

New Orleans (-13.5) over ST. LOUIS

V for Vendetta. Dedicated to Drew Brees and the Saints. Why? Because every week it seems like they have a personal vendetta against the league. For years everyone has talked up their offense but said that they couldn’t get the job done on defense and that’s what would prevent them from being a true championship contender. Now? Their defense is almost as strong as their offense and they are ripping through this league with a vengeance. Hell hath no fury like a Drew Brees scorned. Seriously, I’m afraid of the Saints right now.

Atlanta (-1.5) over CAROLINA

Saving Private Ryan. Dedicated to Matt Ryan. If anyone needs saving, it’s this guy. Maybe I wouldn’t notice his recent decline (more like freefall) if he wasn’t the starting quarterback on my fantasy team, but he is, so I’m noticing. It’s like he got involved with a shady mob guy who told him he would break his kneecaps if his QB rating went over 80 for the rest of the season. This is why I am now involved with my ex-QB Donovan McNabb once again. If there’s one thing I have learned from fantasy football, it’s this: try as hard as possible to stay away from your exes. Bad news.

Tampa Bay (+10) over MIAMI

The Third Man. Dedicated to Bucs QB Josh Freeman. They tried Byron Leftwich and that didn’t work. Then they tried Josh Johnson for a few seconds. That didn’t work either. Now it’s Josh Freeman’s turn. The rookie out of Kansas State looked impressive last week in the Bucs thrashing of Green Bay, and many scouts considered him the best overall athlete in the 2009 draft. Will Josh Freeman be the answer for Tampa Bay? I have no clue. And neither does Vegas, which is why they’re 10 point underdogs to the Dolphins.

OAKLAND (-2) over Kansas City

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dedicated to…the Raiders. Not only is the ark lost, but we can count a good chunk of their fan base and pretty much most of their dignity as a franchise gone too. Can we move them back to Los Angeles after this season and forget this ever happened?

ARIZONA (-8.5) over Seattle

No Country for Old Men. Dedicated to Kurt Warner and Matt Hasselbeck. The glory days are quickly passing by for these two QB’s and I think Kurt had his last legitimate shot at another title last season. I don’t think the Cardinals have what it takes to make it back again and I don’t think the Seahawks would have a shot if they consolidated the NFC West down to two teams.

Philadelphia (+1) over SAN DIEGO

Destroying Fantasy Teams in My Sleep. Dedicated to LaDainian Tomlinson. I know that’s not a real movie, but LDT should be arrested for what he has done to fantasy owners who have taken the risk of drafting him for the last two years now. It’s obscene. He’s like the Ted Bundy of fantasy players, killing teams left and right.

Dallas (-3) over GREEN BAY

The Shining. Dedicated to the Green Bay Packers defense because I’m going to reenact that scene with Jack Nicholson and the axe in the bathroom door if they decide to allow another 38 points this week.

INDIANAPOLIS (-3) over New England

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Dedicated to Tom Brady because he is the Lord of the Rings in the NFL right now and until someone takes the throne from him, he is still the king. Although this is the perfect opportunity for Peyton Manning and the Colts to snatch the throne out from under Brady and the Pats. Peyton, in a night game at home, is almost unbeatable as of late. This will be the night when we find out whether the Patriots are back or whether the Colts have arrived. Either way, this game needs a bonus movie: There Will Be Blood.

Baltimore (-11) over CLEVELAND

This is Really the Monday Night Game? Dedicated to the people at ESPN who scheduled this snoozefest. The Brady Quinn-Derek Anderson debacle is on it’s 25th cycle right now with Quinn set to make the start on Monday night. They’ve flip-flopped QB’s so many times that I’m starting to get nauseous.

Last Week: 5-8

Season Total: 74-55

Hoy en PRINCIPIO Y FIN, un maravilloso final de la mano de Paul Thomas Anderson, el hombre que nos regaló Boogie Nights o Magnolia (la única película en la que Tom Cruise ha estado bien en su vida, por cierto). En “There will be blood“, Anderson nos sorprende con un registro inesperado, construyendo una epopeya trágica alrededor del petróleo, la codicia y la familia, sin duda una explosiva combinación. En este final, el monstruo Daniel Day Lewis y un deslumbrante Paul Dano bailan un dueto interpretativo que es puro gozo. Así, cuando el simiesco Daniel Plainview se enfrenta al showman Eli Sunday, nos recorre un escalofrío de felicidad, esa descarga que ocurre cuando ves lo mucho que están disfrutando unos actores. En fin, una delicia, como el resto de esta opresiva e intensa película.

Por cierto, atención a la banda sonora, firmada por el cabeza de radio Jonny Greenwood. Aquí una perla.

originally published in the middlebury campus

Indie auteur Paul Thomas Anderson was a critical darling of the late 1990s, with his films Boogie Nights and Magnolia firmly cementing his reputation as one of the most prominent rising directorial stars. His films tend to be paradoxical. They are dramatic, but have a strain of absurdist comedy running them. They are intimate, but have an epic vision. They are simultaneously about one person and all people. His latest release, There Will Be Blood, is different, though. Anderson jettisons the tongue-in-cheek humor one usually finds in his films and instead focuses on crafting a sweeping epic.

Using Upton Sinclair’s muckraking 1927 novel Oil! as a jumping off point, Anderson tackles the California oil boom, which we see between the early 1890s to the mid 1930s. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, as the film follows his rise from one man mining crew to a ruthless oil baron. The key to his success is the dusty backwater town of Bakersfield, California, a town where Plainview finds an ocean of oil waiting for him just under the ground and settlers all to willing to sell their land. The thorn in Plainview’s side comes in the form of a 19 year old boy (played by Paul Dano), a self styled preacher who, like most people in the film, is looking for money so that he might expand his small country church.

P.T. Anderson has made a film that some might find difficult to like. The characters are selfish, greedy, and nearly impossible to connect with. Even the character of the preacher, who in most other films would be seen as a protagonist, comes off as shrill and irritating. But those characteristics that most would find off-putting makes the characters fascinating, and because the film is so long its easy to see how greed insinuates itself into the very fiber of their being. Anderson is less interested in the social history of the California oil boom, but is instead setting himself to work on showing the dark side of the American success story. He and Day-Lewis have made a modern day Charles Foster Kane, a man who has set out to better his living situation, and in so doing loses touch with the rest of mankind as greed overtakes his entire world view. Day-Lewis delivers a titanic performance as Plainview. He allows himself to become Plainview, and pays little mind to whether or not the audience can connect with the monster he has created. It is one of the gutsiest and best performances in recent memory, and further cements Mr. Day-Lewis as one of the screens greatest actors. Also impressive is young Paul Dano as the irritatingly self-righteous priest, Eli Sunday. It takes a lot to stand alongside to Day-Lewis’ amazing performance, but Dano more than holds his own. As much as I would like to go through and praise every performance in the film, but space prevents it so I will just say, all the performances are fantastic, from Day-Lewis to Kevin J O’Connor as an interloper claiming to be Plainview’s brother.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the score, by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood. His first foray into film scoring is fabulously successful. Drawing on influences from modern classical music he uses dissonant chords in the string section and unusual time signatures that, along with the stark cinematography of Roger Elswit, gives the film an unsettling feel.

I’m not sure if it would be correct to say that Anderson has grown as a film maker, he has always been a fantastically talented writer-director, but what is true is that this film has a drastically different feel from his other films. It is more mature, and he has a confidence in his images that some of his films seemed to lack at times. He allows his camera to linger on people as they work. Unlike his earlier films, he allows his characters’ actions to speak for them (in fact you have to wait for eleven and a half minutes before you hear a character speak), and it’s breathtaking. There Will Be Blood is a sensational film and one that marks the emergence of Paul Thomas Anderson as a mature filmmaker who is a force to be reckoned with.

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The following is a list of the ten albums that I feel, are the best releases in the last 10 years.  None of the decisions were made based on critical acclaim but merely on what I think are the most progressive and meaningful albums from 2000 to the present.  Every band is trying to do something different with their music and the following are examples of success in that goal.  Every one of these has a quality or style that is purely unique and influential.

10: TV On The Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain (2006 – 4AD, Interscope)

While Return to Cookie Mountain is not the most recent release by the band it is certainly the most notable.  On this album billows of drum and guitar sound accompany a very vocal-based album that is melodic and sing-able at times and merely a wall of sound at others.  The band, which operates out of Brooklyn, has created a name for itself in its unique genre-less compositions similar only to that of Radiohead and top 40 radio in Mars.

Notable tracks:

03. Province (this track features David Bowie on backing vocals)

06. A Method

9: Akron/Family – Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free (2009 – Dead Oceans)

While everything on the album is recognizably Akron/Family, the album spans genres inexplicably.  Starting in a bit of a dirty blues-rock feel and moving through electronic tracks and folk concoctions, the band even hits on some borderline scream punk just to say they did it.  Often, transitions between acoustic and more electronically derived tracks are rough and uncomfortable but this Frankenstein of an album dances gracefully the entire time.  The band, from New York City, remains relatively undiscovered but they ought to be.  Akron/Family has a lot to add to the musical scene and effectively captures the style that many bands strive for.

Notable tracks:

01. Everyone Is Guilty

03. Creatures

07. Many Ghosts

8: The xx – xx (2009 – Young Turks)

The xx is amazingly simple but still a sound that’s very rarely made.  The London quartet functions with two vocalists in what seems like a dialogue relationship.  Overall, nearly every song has a calm intensity to it that satisfies repeatedly.  xx is greatly successful for the group’s first release so releases in the future will surely be under radar.

Notable Tracks:

03. Crystalized

07. Shelter

7: The Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004 – Merge)

I don’t know what to call The Arcade Fire’s but after I saw a concert on the Neon Bible Tour I was convinced that they were the house band from Eli Sunday’s church in There Will Be Blood. Apparently, living in Haiti leaves you pretty oblivious to American culture and the way music is being made over here because The Arcade Fire has created in Funeral an experience that is completely different than anything…ever.  There is a very eerie vibe surrounding the album and a deep emotion that lies within it.

Notable Tracks:

04. Neighborhood 3 (Power Out)

06. Crown of Love

07. Wake Up

6: Why? – Alopecia (2008 – Anticon)

Lead singer Yoni Wolf’s music is disturbingly honest but for some strange reason that is what keeps you coming back for more. Alopecia says everything you’ve wanted to say but haven’t had the guts.  It’s Jewish hip-hop that in all the ways Matisyahu is not.  Whereas most hip-hop is about the ego, Alopecia is about life.  These are stories of bad decisions, failures, and missed opportunities and they are all presented in very honest and effective ways.

Notable Tracks:

02. Good Friday

08. The Fall of Mr. Fifths

10. A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under

5: The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love (2009 – Capitol)

With the bands fifth release, The Decemberists delve even deeper into the story-telling style that they are known for.  On this album every track flows seamlessly to the other and themes come and go throughout the duration of the album representing the stories that are interwoven inside it.  The band draws on its resources for The Hazards of Love as Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, Becky Starke of Lavender Diamond, and Jim James of My Morning Jacket are all brought in to play various characters in the stories and provide vocals for the album.  The Hazards of Love is a seamless blend of music steeped in an ancient troubadour tradition and converted by modern themes and musical styles into what can best be described as a musical.

Notable Tracks:

03. A Bower Scene

08. The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid

10. The Rake’s Song

4: Architecture in Helsinki – Places Like This (2007 – Polyvinyl)

This album is beautifully fucking crazy.  Enough said.

Notable Tracks:

02. Heart It Races

03. Hold Music

08. Lazy (Lazy)

3: Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake Its Morning (2005 – Saddle Creek)

When Conor Oberst double released Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning in 2005 he had officially divided his music in two.  Previous albums, which had mixed darker and more electronically-derived tracks like “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” with folk tunes like “Bowl of Oranges” had given birth to both a pair of very different-looking twins.  While Digital Ash was ill-recieved, I’m Wide Awake its Morning broke into an entirely different well of musical possibilities.  Not only did this album influence every Bright Eyes release since, it also spawned tons of followers in what is now “indie-folk”. Conor Oberst is the Bob Dylan of his time.

Notable Tracks:

04. Lua

06. First Day of My Life

10. Road To Joy

2: Radiohead – Kid A (2000 – Parlophone, Capitol)

Kid A marks the transformation of Radiohead from a band to a soulless fucking robot.  Fortunately it is the soulless fucking robot that people prefer.  Its amazing that an album as experimental as this one achieved as much success as it did but even though Kid A debuted without a single or music video, it was able to draw itself enough attention to go platinum in a week.  You know the rest.

Notable Tracks:

01. Everything In Its Right Place

03. The National Anthem

08. Idiotheque

1: Department of Eagles – In Ear Park (2008 – 4AD)

You may not have expected this one but I have a strong faith that, although very undiscovered In Ear Park is the greatest album that has been released all decade.  There is a huge difference between bands that record songs and bands that record art.  In Ear Park is not about chords and progressions but about what the music does when it gets inside your head.  While Department of Eagles consists of just Daniel Rossen (also known for work in the band Grizzly Bear) and Fred Nicolaus, this particular album was scored on a huge scale.  Starting out from the very beginning with a pretty simple guitar melody the album soon erupts into a very symphonic experience that will make your hairs stand on end.

Notable Tracks:

01. In Ear Park

03. Phantom Other

07. Classical Records

Wow, it’s been so long since I posted on here I almost forgot how.

So first let me apologize and explain why it has taken me so long to provide the updates that absolutely no one was asking me for during the downtime.

Firstly I bought a house! Regular readers of this site will know that was a long arduous process (and I’ve only put the first half of the story on here!) and I am so glad to have it finished. Kelly and I found a place in Fridley that we liked quite a bit, and having lived there almost two months we’re happier with it each day. I’ll throw some pics up here possibly once we have things we a little more situated.

Secondly I got married last month. This obviously took up a lot of my time and attention and I just wasn’t able to make pop culture commentary a high priority during that period. The wedding was awesome. Anyone who knows me well knows I love making mixes and playlists and consider myself pretty good at it (despite virtually nobody else thinking so). The wedding was the ultimate chance to put a playlist together and I had a great time doing it. I had a 4 hour cocktail hour/dinner playlist that Kelly also heavily contributed to that featured a lot of the classics like Dean Martin and Etta James as well as weirder stuff like Richard Cheese and tracks of the Ren and Stimpy “You Eediot” album. Putting together the music for the dance took over a year to finish but I think it went really well and as it was one element of the wedding that was almost exclusively left to me to plan myself I was super proud watching all those rumps shaking on the floor.

Thirdly, and you can consider this a full Champion of the Sun ‘admission of guilt’, I got banned from using the internet at work. It wasn’t just me, the entire credit department was banned from the ‘net due to overusage. Now I shouldn’t admit this, but a large portion of my posts were made from work, at the time I started this site I didn’t even have the internet at home. The day the posts began to really dry up on the site was the day I was told using personal internet sites at work could get me fired. I love this site, but not that much.

Despite those three reasons I really have no excuse for the fact that I pretty stopped posting completely. And I promise to rectify this situation from here on out with somewhat regular posts. My thanks to Brendon for doing his part to keep at least some new content up on the site.

By way of apology here’s five embarrassing Admissions of Guilt.

1. I love the song ‘Since U Been Gone’ by Kelly Clarkson. Not like, love.
2. I think Seth Meyers is a great anchor for Weekend Update. I think he’s funny and I don’t get the criticism that he’s too smug.
3. I consider the score one of the weakest aspects of ‘There Will Be Blood.’
4. I compiled a list of about 10 things WWE could do to improve their product and it wasn’t even for this site, just a conversation piece with my friend Dave.
5. The list of movies I’ve never seen all the way through includes: “Chinatown”, “Pyscho”, and “The Crying Game.”

En el 2007, uno de los mejores directores de los últimos tiempos estrenó la tercer obra maestra de su no muy prolífica carrera. Me estoy refiriendo a Paul Thomas Anderson y a Petróleo Sangriento.

Después de las enormes Boogie Nights (1997) y Magnolia (1999), Anderson se despachó con otra película magistral.

El film, que se inspiró libremente en la novela ¡Petróleo! (Oil!), de Upton Sinclair, publicada en 1927, se desarrolla en la California de principios del siglo XX, en pleno auge del negocio del petróleo. Allí, un minero pobre, Daniel Plainview, (Daniel Day Lewis) se transformará en un magnate multimillonario y ese será el punto de partida para contar una historia impregnada de poder, ambición, corrupción, religión, y por supuesto, petróleo.

En los primeros 15 minutos el director deja en claro que las cosas se hacen a su manera. Empieza el relato con una larga introducción en la que no hay una sola línea de diálogo y en la que se muestra el vertiginoso ascenso de Plainview. Narrativamente, uno de los comienzos más demoledores que se puedan encontrar.

Lo que sigue a continuación es un viaje perturbador a la parte más oscura del alma del ser humano. Esa parte que está gobernada por la codicia, la mentira y la falta de escrúpulos. Pero la historia es de por sí ambiciosa y también puede funcionar como una metáfora del capitalismo más salvaje. En ese sentido, se puede afirmar que estamos ante una obra anticapitalista.

Y la religión, representada por el personaje de Paul Dano (aquel joven actor que hiciera su aparición en Pequeña Miss Sunshine), no es más que la otra cara de la misma moneda.

Daniel Day Lewis, soberbio una vez más, da cátedra, mientras que su partenaire Paul Dano no se queda atrás y sale muy bien parado del duelo interpretativo. La fotografía y la banda sonora compuesta por Johnny Greenwood (guitarrista de Radiohead) sobresalen y se convierten en un protagonista más dentro de la película.

Petróleo Sangriento es un film épico y grandilocuente. Su título original nos previene: Habrá Sangre. Y vaya si la hubo.

Pirate Radio: opening in theaters Nov. 13, 2009.
Directed by: Richard Curtis
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Rhys Ifans

This British film has been out in the UK since April and the fact that its coming to the US at all is a good sign (only the British creme de la creme makes it to this side of the pond). Originally titled The Boat That Rocked, this little comedy was directed by Richard Curtis, the man that brought us Love Actually, Notting Hill and almost every other British romantic comedy that is loved by Americans. With such a stellar cast, the film is bound to offer a bounty of chuckles.

Broken Embraces: opening in theaters Nov. 20, 2009.
Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar and Blanca Portillo

The Cruz-Almodóvar team is nearly infallible. These two Spaniards last collaborated in the 2006 drama Volver and it came out beautifully. This film seems to follow in that same vain. Not only does the film look visually stunning, but its premise—that of a man who loses his love in a car accident—and performances are sure to be Oscar-worthy.

Nine: opening in theaters Dec. 25, 2009.
Directed by: Rob Marshall
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren and Kate Hudson

There are two very important reasons as to why I want to see this film. First, Daniel-Day Lewis is in it. This man makes a movie as about as often as Radiohead releases a record (which is pretty seldom), but when he does his performance is always flawless (There Will Be Blood anyone?). Second, Rob Marshall is directing. With his last musical, Chicago, Marshall blew me out me of the water. It is still one of my favorite films of all-time. Every dance sequence was beautifully choreographed and well-translated onto the screen. It is difficult to bring stage shows to the big screen because they often come off like a showtune, but Marshall’s Chicago was in a league of its own. This one looks to be just as amazing.

So look, we’re not exactly snobs when it comes to our movies. We’ve praised classics like The Searchers, loved more modern epics like There Will Be Blood but we’re not above salivating with excitement at the latest Batman or Indiana Jones instalment.

That’s just who we are. But if you take your films a little bit more seriously than we do, if you want to watch old foreign classics and discuss them with like-minded film-buffs, then there’s no better place on the internet than The Auteurs.

In their own words: “The Auteurs is not just about discovering wonderful new cinema or classic masterpieces. It’s also about discussing and sharing these discoveries, which makes us like a small coffee shop—… a place where you can gather and talk about alternative endings, directors’ cuts, and whatever those frogs in Magnolia meant. Heated debates and passionate arguments are welcome.”

And they’re not kidding. It’s a genuinely ’social media-oriented’ site. Not only does it feature a wealth of discussion forums but you can also link your activity on the site to your Facebook or Twitter account and have updates posted directly whenever you watch, review or discuss a film.

Check it out.

Cover of Persepolis (Pantheon, 2007); image courtesy of shelflove.wordpress.com

When I saw the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, it was a pretty rad time to be a feminist moviegoer. In the last month of 2007 and the first month of 2008, this movie came out, along with Juno and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Having just completed a girls’ studies course, I was ecstatic that three different movies, each from a different country, were released with complex, resilient protagonists who were girls and young women.

Two of these movies earned Oscar nominations a few months later. Juno won Best Screenplay. Persepolis was nominated for Best Animated Feature, but unfortunately lost to Ratatouille. 4 Months, which documents the harrowing day of one college student trying to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate during the last years of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s in Romania, won the Palme D’Or at Cannes earlier in 2007, but failed to receive any nominations. For some reason. Perhaps it escaped nomination as a technicality, but I don’t understand why no one, particularly writer-director Cristian Mungiu or lead actress Anamaria Marinca, got any Academy recognition. Perhaps because it lacked the allegorical importance of No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood and cut to very real (and tremendously gendered) issues facing real people in the real world, many of whom reside in developing nations. 

But it is really no matter. No Country, There Will Be Blood, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There were but more examples of what a very fine time this particular two-month period was for movies. But 4 Months was easily my favorite movie of that year. The movie whose source material will be the focus of this post was a very close second.

Having seen the movie upon its U.S. release, some context has changed considerably upon revisiting Satrapi’s autobiography about coming of age inside and outside of Iran from the late 70s to the early 90s, a time period where the country witnessed the fall of the Shah (aided by the United States), the swift and crushing oppression of its citizens by Islamic extremists, a devastating eight-year war with Iraq, and the neighboring country’s launch of the Persian Gulf War. In late 2007, we were still living under the Bush Administration, so the country’s positioning as part of the ”axis of evil” was in my mind, but being pretty ignorant about the country’s political history and our involvement with it past the Iran-Contra Affair, Bush’s branding of the country read more as a promise that the United States were, in fact, going to try and spread democracy by force to all of the Middle East, snatching up its real or imagined WMDs and drain its oil resources in the process. And I knew about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and was disgusted by his views on the Holocaust and heartened by the student protests around his adminstration, but was not yet aware of just what a dangerous despot he is.     

This was, of course, before this year’s highly controversial presidential election, which Ahmadinejad “won” by a suspiciously high margain over rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, an Independent reformist. At the time, what seemed more present in our minds in the states was what Twitter was doing to help cover and contextualize the civic protests and how quickly mainstream broadcast news was going to incorporate the still-emergent micro-blogging site’s Tweets into their 24-hour cycle, regardless of how accurate they were. 

As a result, I was a little jaded by the “Twitter users coverage of the Iran election is going to change news reporting” angle many seemed to be taking and instead wanted to know more about how the election was fraudulent, why certain people (specifically journalists, protesters, students, and politicians) were being arrested, what the stakes were, who was doing a good job covering this news story, and, most importantly, what circumstances led to the current iteration of Iran. Remembering that local branches of Barnes & Noble were donating proceeds to the Paramount upon purchase last weekend, shilling out my money to the big box chain for the sake of preserving a historical movie theater seemed as a good an opportunity to buy the book that may provide answers.

And, I’ll be honest. Reading the book left me with more questions than anything else (a similar feeling came over me when reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, two books whose timelines stretch past the 70s-90s, but contain a considerable overlap in terms of time with Persepolis, focusing on what was going on with ordinary people in Afghanistan, another contentious Middle Eastern country that borders Iran). It was hard not to check some ugly American tendencies I have toward Islamic traditions — particularly toward its views on marriage, sexuality, gender politics, and dress. At the same time, I was incredulous of how pro-West rhetoric and ideology, alongside our smuggled trinkets of popular culture, could possibly reform a nation, or at least save a person.

Luckily, Satrapi is skeptical of both and, like me and other feminists from all over the world, has a lot to negotiate. She grapples with these issues head-on. She argues with teachers against the physical restrictions and societal double standards that come with the hijab and the burka (sidenote: I know that Faegheh Shirazi, who teaches Middle Eastern Studies at UT and rejects traditional Islamic dress, has written and taught courses on gender and clothing in the Middle East, but any other suggestions for further reading are welcome). She watches her female peers grow up to only want marriage and children, in large part because these are the only things their nation’s leaders believe define their worth. Particularly poignant for this co-habitator, she regrets getting married to a man named Reza because they could not legally live together (or even walk the street) without proof of marriage, dissolving the marriage and leaving for France.

Marjane and friends reject the hijab; image courtesy of rand.org

Satrapi is a smart rebel who reads constantly, thinks clearly, and never backs down from an argument. She yells at authority figures who bully her or deny that there are any political prisoners in Iran after learning about the loss of her grandfather, who was son and prime minister to the ousted king (a tie that Satrapi suggests is not uncommon).

College student Satrapi damns the man; image courtesy of butterfliesandbears.wordpress.com

Luckily for Satrapi, she gets through all of this with the love and support of her politically aware and resistant parents, their friends, and one rad paternal grandma. Not so luckily, she also knows and meets lots of folks who suffered for speaking up, speaking out, or just living in the wrong house during an aerial bombing. Something tells me that many Iranians could recount similar tales of horror.

Satrapi also learns that the ways of the West are not always ideal, either. While a pre-pubescent in Iran, she hangs Iron Maiden posters on her wall her parents smuggle from a vacation in Turkey when the government lifted border restrictions. She defiantly walks around her neighborhood, blaring Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” from her Walkman while sporting a Michael Jackson pin. But noting that their daughter’s rebelliousness is hardly a phase and that escalating conflict with Iraq could mean the imprisonment or death of their mouthy teen, her parents send her to live with a friend of her mother’s in Vienna.

Still from the film; image courtesy of whatsontv.co.uk

Satrapi finishes high school, barely scraping by as she finds odd jobs, dates dumb boys, takes a lot of drugs, and runs into authority figures who want her to tow the line and behave. She also falls in with a group of radical misfits who dabble with nihilism, Marxism, hair dye, and punk. While Satrapi initially finds a home with these punks and new wave kids, she soon discovers their privilege has made them cowardly, pretentious, self-righteous, entitled, and lazy. Her outsider status also makes her cool, her Austrian peers clearly jealous by what she has seen and experienced without really processing the weight of it between drags off their joints and skims through their copies of the Marx-Engels Reader in their well-appointed bedrooms. It’s small wonder that, when Satrapi finally returns home to Iran after she finishes high school homeless and afflicted with bronchitis, she washes off a punk stencil from her bedroom wall. And while she’s sad that her mother gave away her cassette tapes, she probably wasn’t going to listen to them anyway. She would’ve kept the Kim Wilde tape, however.

So, ultimately, I do feel this revisit of Persepolis helped clarify my feelings about the state of Iran. It also left me with several questions and a need to know more. Ultimately, though, it left me with the sense of universality that exists between people, especially tough, smart women and girls, while at the same time recognizing the particularities that inform their realities. And continues to inform them. Back in June, Satrapi spoke out against the election results with filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalba. Something tells me that her grandmother, who passed away shortly after Satrapi moved to France at the close of the book, would be proud.

Quality time with grandma; image courtesy of rwor.org

Digging for Salvation

Hier sieht man zu, wie Daniel Day Lewis die Vorstellung seines Lebens gibt. Als besessener, wahnsinniger und konzentrierter ‚Oilman’ Daniel Plainview, der ohne Skrupel und schlechtes Gewissen in allem nur eines sieht: Das nächste lukrative Geschäft. Vor Mord (allerdings aus anderen Motiven als vermutet) und Wahnsinn (der ihn nicht von seinen Zielen abbringt) schreckt er dabei genauso wenig zurück, wie ihn auch Schicksalsschläge und Wendungen der Geschichte nicht zu verändern scheinen, er bleibt das Abbild des sturen Verfalls. Untermalt von einem stellenweise genial deplatzierten Score vom heimlichen Radiohead-Mastermind Jonny Greenwood gibt es eine einfache und fokussierte Story, deren Destillat nach zweieinhalb gleichwohl nie drögen Stunden eine Perspektive auf Schuld und Sühne, Rache und Revanche ist. Aber nicht nur Day Lewis brilliert, ein mindestens ebenso ausgezeichneter Paul Dano wird durch seine grenzwertig gestörte Vorstellung als Prediger und Sünder Eli Sunday hoffentlich auf eine große Karriere in Hollywood schauen. Bei der Filmlänge so narrativ und geschlossen zu erzählen ist eine Kunst, die von wenigen wirklich beherrscht wird. Paul Thomas Anderson kann sich spätestens jetzt auch zu diesen zählen. [22. Juli 2008]

9/10

Titel: There Will Be Blood
Regie: Paul Thomas Anderson
Genre: Drama
Länge: 158 Minuten
Produktion: USA 2007

For one, let’s not think that There Will Be Blood is a departure for Paul Thomas Anderson, who loosely adapted the film from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!. It was Anderson’s whimsical, lovely Punch-Drunk Love (2002) that left behind the director’s admirable, but portentous megagoliath films Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). His last film turned towards crafting an almost expressionistic mise-en-scène, one built around a character, a world-view, a feeling, and not a smearingly glossy, over-broad narrative of grandiose linkage and showoffery. That most strange of Adam Sandler vehicles has as unified—and off-kilter—a film world as that of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood: a style of cinema that finds its natural place as it tries to become accustomed to the eccentricities of the most eccentric of characters.

And Daniel Day-Lewis’ early 20th century oil prospector Daniel Plainview is indeed eccentric, showcasing a proclivity to absurd obstinacy and capitalistic tenacity, and blessed with a gift of gab that, when tied to the cut-throat business of the booming oil trade, soon reveals in the character a merciless hatred for the people around him. He even says as much, in a moment of rare, though clearly relished, frankness; Day-Lewis practically lavishly smacking his lips as he curls his words of condemnation and isolation to his nighttime confessor. But to get back to Anderson, with the inestimable help of regular collaborator Robert Elswtt’s naturalistic photography and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood’s score (part Jon Brion’s avant-garde percussive work for Punch-Drunk Love, part the Penderecki/Ligeti of Kubrick), piece by piece he constructs his film around this oddity, this character of Plainsview.

It is noticeably an incomplete view of the man, as if from a book not with missing pages, as it is not that There Will Be Blood suggests other, off-camera parts of the man’s life and character, but rather it is a view of a book where the edges of the page leave off. It is artistically incomplete and fragmented, ideas gathered about this man’s dogged lifestyle and thoughts, his cruel, passionate character, but never truly brought together, strands connected, everything fleshed out to a reassuring depth of artistic perception. Anderson’s film is like a vision of notes he took on a Great American Epic, ideas and angles introduced but rarely followed through. Instead, we get a narrative that skips at will from the initially days of Plainview’s silver prospecting to the accidental adoption of another miner’s son, who takes Plainview’s own name under the initials H.W. (Dillon Freasier). The film finally moves elliptically to the older man’s fateful arrival at the promising field near the podunk town of New Boston. Here we seem to get at the meat of the film, Plainsview convincing a town that exploiting their bountiful oil will bring modernization and wealth all around, a promise that also suggests an inevitable clash with locals. The oilman’s nemesis takes the form of a young Christian minister, Eli (Paul Dano), who claims to be a healer and seems to threaten to turn the town, and potentially the employees of Plainview’s oil rig, towards a fevered fundamentalism.

We see snatches in Anderson’s sprawl: Plainview’s early injury in his mine and his wherewithal dragging his mangled leg along with his silver find to the assayer; brief moments of love, or at least care, between Daniel and his adapted son; the gab with which he wraps up an oil deal with a small town assembly; stuttered but never complete confrontations with Eli, and so on. It is not that the film moves at a montage-like clip as does much of Anderson’s two mega movies, but rather the narrative touches down at telling details, small and large, to suggest something of Daniel Plainview and the world he represents, and then moves on to another idea, rarely finishing the first.

Plainview is, like The Shining’s Jack Torrence, to which the film implicitly compares him, is as much a monster as a mystery. A man in a quintessentially American position, here the capitalistic prospector and entrepreneur (Torrence, the trouble writer, middle-class family man), he gradually turns monstrous—or, perhaps, reveals his monstrosity—piece by piece as he voraciously uses his passion to better his position. I do not wish I had take him at his own word, but Anderson does ets him explain himself in terms that leave little ambiguity to the character, his obsessive need to find a method to get the man out in the middle of nowhere, near only a representative and minimal amount of humanity. It is this mysterious drive and this mysterious misanthropy that is the center of There Will Be Blood’s appeal, and Anderson’s inadequate plotting often helps underline the gulf of understanding between Plainview and the audience. He seems to have a bit of everything in him, but with not enough given to us to explain him thoroughly.

Jonny Greenwood’s atonal score and Elswit’s long takes, many using tracking shots or the Steadicam and limited camera coverage, clearly present Plainview with an almost total strangeness. There seems little dissonant stylization as there was to Sandler’s idiosyncratic relationships in Punch-Drunk, or the slick, omniscient/omnipresent direction of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Shot principally on location, There Will Be Blood views its subject with a fascination but also a kind of restraint or naturalism (a few shots early on, and a later, amazing confrontation at a restaurant, are covered like a Hou Hsiou-hsien film) that lets Day-Lewis’ rich acting dig itself into its own hole. Anderson holds back in muffled awe at the potential, growth, and finally the blossoming of Plainview’s warped character, of the mania that transforms from capitalistic fervor to psychopatholical in minute, elliptical shifts in Day-Lewis. As the film’s skittish plot and ideas fail to gel, it is only the presence of Plainview that holds the film together, and Day-Lewis’ fierceness makes up for, and helps cover, much of the film’s gaps and immaturities.

The perhaps inadvertent side effect of There Will Be Blood’s problems is that the discrepancy between the film’s knowing, considered distance and the oddness of its subject provides a gross dissonance in the film’s tone, producing a remarkable, ungainly strangeness, an inability to nail down purpose, meaning, and direction in even the most over-planned moments, the most over-scripted dialogs. Anderson has his plans, that’s for sure. The film has a propensity to hit its Biblical notes, its Kubrick influences, its doublings (brothers and twins, fathers and sons, mostly) as hard as it possibly can. Yet the film’s strangeness is so potent that the film escapes the aims of these over-determined structures, which seek to close the film off and seal in particular meanings, explanations.

The sprawl of the film, its somewhat ragged and unusual structure (perhaps sloppy), are where the film’s crevasses of mystery are to be found. In Day-Lewis’ swallowing of his ur-American comicbook villain from Gangs of New York into a more psychological and thereby more of-this-world, believably unhinged psychosis, and in the film’s avoidance or, as the case may be, eccentric versions of conventional or assumed plot high points are the film’s most powerful, strange visions. Eli and Daniel’s confrontations, breaks and re-unions between father and son, and inevitable oilrig disasters are not done as one would assume, an indicator both of Anderson not seeing his ideas through to the end, as well as his ability to idiosyncratically divert the film away from convention. How else to explain the turgid father-son concluding scene of the film juxtaposed against the brilliant grotesqueness of the final bowling alley showdown?

We can still see the old Anderson in There Will Be Blood, determined to control the film and the meaning, the experience itself, but thankfully we are blessed with the artist who grew into someone who could direct—believe it or not—the most plausible and lovely Adam Sandler romance ever to be made. We find someone embracing the strange; dedicating not just a film to it, but letting it, for the most, and brilliant, part letting that strangeness move and alter the film in frustrating, tantalizing, and often unknown and unknowable ways. The pleasure, then is to see this film, perhaps yet another re-invention of Citizen Kane (crossed with The Shining), find in its look at an American passion for moneymaking and adventure, its somewhat less fleshed out attraction to the security of the church, and both institutions bonds with human relationships and building foundations for tomorrow, a new weirdness, a freshness that finds in the these warped American archetypes evil itself.

Article can be found on The Auteurs website (http://www.theauteurs.com/film_articles/88)

In the months leading up to the release of “There Will Be Blood” (2007), the online film community was buzzing with controversy. Fans of director Paul Thomas Anderson had major concerns: Would there be blood? How much blood would there be? And what if there wasn’t any? Reputations were on the line.

According to conventional wisdom, P.T. Anderson was a director who delivered the goods. “Hard Eight,” “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” were evidence of a genius auteur in the making.

But there were clear reasons for concern. Based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil,” the title of Anderson’s new picture was clearly allegorical. Would he really entice viewers with the promise of blood, only to deliver oil in spades?

The answer is unequivocally, “no.” The film delivers on all fronts. Anderson has made his best film yet, a tale which mixes timeless themes with stylized Americana.

His directing prowess is on display in every shot, but especially in the first twenty minutes of the film. These scenes have no dialogue, but the striking images and musical score let viewers know they are in for a real treat.

The score is courtesy of Johnny Greenwood, guitar player for rock band Radiohead. The compositions are masterful, and a major asset to a film brimming with assets.

Most notable is Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of tycoon Daniel Plainview. It’s a good thing he won the Oscar for Best Actor at the recent Academy Awards ceremony, because anything less would have been downright criminal. This is a towering, epic performance with parallels to Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane. You will not see better acting in any film this year. Fans of director John Huston will also find plenty to enjoy, as Day-Lewis’ vocal inflections are a memorable homage to the late director and his distinctive pattern of speech.

Plainview’s determination for wealth and hate for humanity are the engine which drive this story forward. His main competition comes in the form of a frontier preacher and false prophet, played with great zeal by the young Paul Dano. Their clash of wills leads to a bizarre and violent confrontation in a bowling alley, the scene in which the film ultimately makes good on its title. While many critics feel that this scene is “over the top” or perhaps a contrived addendum of sorts, it brings a needed resolution to the arcs of both main characters.

See for yourself, and you will not be disappointed. Like “No Country For Old Men,” this is a literate film with the breadth and depth to look meaningfully at greed and evil in America.

“There Will Be Blood” is a film that delivers on its promises. It is surely one of the ten best films of the year.
Grade: A