| 8 |
I think a lot of great words have been said regarding Paul Thomas Anderson's American epic There Will Be Blood, and I'm going to be adding to that, but I feel like the dissenting opinions need to be heard as well, so before my critique derricks explode, showering the film with gallons of thick, tarry praise, here are the ones who were not bowled over by this film:
"This movie sucked ass...there was like noooooooooooooooooooo blood....The mans crazy..The only good thing about this movie was the acting and some of the movie...But other wise..I found? it completely boring..But the actor made things believable [...] i didnt even know what the movie was about..i saw the title and what completely popped in to my mind was vampires xD"
- thedarknesswithinme, YouTube
"I can without doubt classify this as the worst movie I have ever had the misfortune of suffering through."
- the-flaming-hobo, IMDb
"who wud waste their money n time on this piece of shit trash of a movie?? only fuckin old ass bitches watches dis kind of shit..."
- 831souljah, YouTube
"this movie should be called 'this will be *beep*"
- mc_xtreme_2002, IMDb
"Boring Ass Movie.. I Think This Guy? Said. " Im Just A Oil Man" Like a fucking million times.. IT WAS BORING AND LAME.. Dont waist ur money to go see this.. Better yet ur time"
- armendwhat, YouTube
"YUCK!"
- thmpsnkids, Flixster
"THIS MOVIE FRIGGIN SUCKED DUDE [...] and like 3 scenes of blood..my god..."
- victor1126, YouTube
"how is this scary!?!?!?"
- StreFury, YouTube
There we go, I think that about sums up the naysayers, there are more thoughtful, legitimate and intelligible responses to the film but acknowledging those would ruin a perfectly good joke and I needed a joke before I got into the nitty gritty of it. Basically, regardless of intellect or literacy, all negative reviews amount to the same thing to me: You're missing out on classic cinema.
2007 is what I would call a landmark year for contemporary cinema, certainly for this decade. We saw several film-makers returning to former greatness and several rising film-makers finally reach greatness. We saw some great films and we saw some masterpieces. Until I sat down to watch this movie, my count for genuine masterpieces was one. That was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an example of a rising film-maker achieving greatness.
One masterpiece was still one more masterpiece than most years could muster, but within ten minutes of seeing There Will Be Blood I knew that the count had gone up by one, and once again it's from a rising film-maker achieving greatness.
Paul Thomas Anderson has always been a good/great film-maker, Hard Eight was a solid debut (heavily influenced by Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur, which I have yet to see, but it's on the list), it displayed a technical confidence and the keen ear for dialogue that has served Anderson well in the future, but it lacked that energy that drove the story.
His subsequent films have been experimental, he has not been afraid to try new aesthetics, new ideas, new techniques, and this draws criticism towards his work as derivative: Boogie Nights is PTA doing Scorcese (with knowing flickers of Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba for good measure), Magnolia is PTA doing Altman, and so forth. It's an unfair dismissal of his ability to bend and reshape his storytelling and his film-making technique, but he does wear his influences on his sleeve, albeit in a way that is his own. This is not Tarantino level mimicry, which started out relatively subtle but is now teetering on self-parody. Anybody can "imitate", but they rarely make a film as good as Boogie Nights in the process, so that must go to Anderson's credit.
He has skill as a technician and as a storyteller which raises him above simple 'homage'. Even with his apparent "missteps" (Punch Drunk Love, which I loved but seems to be treated as the Bug's Life of PTA's oeuvre) he has always remained an interesting director. Always willing to move beyond his comfort zone, and test himself to find that perfect combination of factors to give him his first masterpiece.
There Will Be Blood is where he finally achieves that goal. Here he crafts a confident, unconventional and bold new American epic to stand beside the likes of Citizen Kane, if Charles Foster Kane was the type of guy who would take Rosebud and bash your shins in with it.
The film, with what will typify the films unconventional style, opens with 20 minutes where virtually zero dialogue is uttered, the most you will hear is a gasping, pain-stricken "No!", but beyond that the opening 20 minutes of the film belong entirely to Jonny Greenwood's psychotic, sinister score. It sets the tone perfectly. There is something fearful in these scenes, a brooding menace that hints at the promise of darker things to come and no more perfectly is this expressed than in our first encounter with the oil.
Oozing from the ground, deep and dark and rich, the score reaches a fearful frenzy, it feels like a scene from a horror movie. The oil is a primevil force, someting terrifying, indifferent to the concerns of men, much like the creations of HP Lovecraft - it is this coldness, this inability to actually will harm upon us that makes it so frightening - the real evil is in it's influence on the men who pursue it.
The derricks sprout up on the horizon like colossi, spewing black venom and fire into the air. During these scenes it feels like a monster movie, an all consuming fear spreading across the land, the monsters are coming and no one can escape their shadow. The oil creates power and money, and that power and that money fuels the worst in people.
Within the opening 20 minutes the pursuit of this substance has claimed it's first life, an accident with the primitive drilling equipment crushes one of the workers, leaving behind an orphan sat in a suitcase. This is the moment Daniel Plainview meets his son, H.W.
If you ever see Daniel Day Lewis as simply Daniel Day Lewis then you see a gentle, soft spoken man, a very slight presence and a slight unease about him - he looks like a strong wind would knock him down, but when he transforms into his character then he becomes bigger than the screen that is trying to capture him. Daniel Plainview is a monstrous creation, he commands the screen at all times, even when he can only be seen from a distance, he dominates the moment and his presence presses down on you like a loose oil drill smashing down on your skull. His voice fills your ears, you can't help but hear every word he utters and when he roars out, the world shakes around him. He is the true monster of the film, and part of the film's appeal is following this monster and trying to decipher his meaning, his purpose, trying to hammer through the rocky exterior, digging through the mud beneath, desperately trying to find humanity in what seems almost inhuman. Daniel Plainview is one of the richest, most complex cinematic creations in decades - only repeat viewings can really do justice to the complexity of the character. One of the greats, even.
He is driven by greed. He has always been envious of those with more than he possessed and that drove him to have as much as he could get, but the greed drives him even further. Greed is a hunger that can never be satiated once it's appetite has been whet, this is highlighted in a scene between Daniel and his "brother from another mother", Henry. He talks about a house he saw as a child, how he always wanted to live there, eat there, have little children to raise there, but if he saw that house now it would make him sick. I believe deep inside, he does want to live like normal people and he does have needs like we all have, but his greed is a sickness that just keeps him pushing and fighting and clawing for more, more, more. The simple dreams of a small boy are insignificant to his concerns now.
By his own admission he says that he hates people, he sees them all as either competition, gullible fools that can be taken for a ride or as a hurdle standing between him and what he wants. He has no time or patience for time wasters and will walk away from a business deal if these pests get in the way, there are always other places and other ways he can get to his oil. He can put on a smile, give a great sales pitch, offer people exactly what they want and he is a man who is good to his word, if he offers good money, improved agriculture, new roads or any other social improvements that will come with bringing in the oil, then he will give the people exactly that. But it is never out of the goodness of his heart, it is always just a bargaining chip. His smile may be fake but his promises are always true.
There are only two instances in the whole film where you are left to question just how deep Plainview's misanthropy delves, the most prevalent example is his son, H.W. Plainview. There are times of genuine affection in his eyes, it's stilted and awkward and a little harsh, but this is just how Daniel Plainview is, but there's a softness to the edges that make it feel like he is trying to love and care for his son. The problem arises when an explosion at one of the derricks leaves H.W. completely deaf, Daniel just does not have the capabilities or the time to care for this child who desperately needs love and affection after such a trauma and so, in one of the film's most cold hearted moments, he abandons his son on a train to San Francisco with a business associate, sending him to a medical facility where he will be taken care of. This is when it feels like having his son present was more of a business tactic, to sell the "wholesome family business" angle a little better, but when it comes to actually being a family he falters.
In a scene that follows where a rival businessman seems to imply Daniel should take time off to look after his son, Daniel turns exceedingly dark, sickened and angered at the assumption that he doesn't love his son, he threatens to kill the man. This could be mere pride, a fear that his reputation as a businessman is at stake, but I see something more to it. I think he genuinely loved his son, his reactions throughout the film regarding his son are often more heated, passionate and often violent than the simple act of business, as we have seen if a business deal is too much aggravation for him then he will simply walk away, but when his son is concerned he has a tendency to turn violent.
Which begs the question: Does he love his son? Is he capable of love? This is where the film really nails the character down, it refuses to spell out intent on the character's part and instead leaves it down to us to interpret his motivations. He presents the notion that having a son is nothing more than good business, presenting a trustworthy image to clients, but I feel this is merely his rationale for needing human affection. Something he struggles with constantly. Unable to cope with the difficulties of tending to his boy following an accident, Daniel disposes of him, sending him away. Not a decision made lightly, but the actions of a man who struggles with his humanity and simply gave in to his worse nature. Business is simple, loving his son is complex and it feels as though he almost resents how he feels about his boy.
Bonding with his long lost brother, we see a spark of happiness in Daniel but soon he sees through the facade and his distrust and his misanthropy are vindicated, giving him what he believes as just cause to continue his destructive, selfish behaviour in order to get what he wants and needs.
His only real challenge is Eli, played by Paul Dano (he also plays Eli's more opportunistic twin, Paul). Eli comes across as a snake oil salesman. Preaching false hope to the hopeless, and reaping the benefits of the trust people give unto him. Does he even beleive in God? I believe he does, but he was corrupted by the power that God's word yields. He abused the word of God to gain respect and power in his community. He certainly doesn't believe in what he preaches but I do believe he is genuinely fearful of getting his comeuppance from the Lord once the house of cards he built collapsed. Daniel doesn't quite see it that way, he sees just another salesman, a confidence trickster like himself, someone with all the right words to get exactly what he needs. Eli just makes the mistake of trying to peddle his wares on Daniel, you don't try to shit a shitter, as they say. Daniel immediately takes to butting heads with what he sees as a sanctimonious and hypocritical little runt. Eli is often outmatched by Daniel's powerful, forceful presence and only really finds one moment where he has the upperhand, using his position in the community to force Daniel to join his flock - ridiculing and taunting him in public, over Daniel's treatment of his son. Eli is a character who poses as a holy, good man with the good of others at the core of his heart but he is as devious and petty as Daniel. But when it comes to the battle of wills between these two men, Eli is the equivalent of a sapling protruding through the tracks of an oncoming train.
The score is magnificent, jarring and evocative, it nails every scene and lends it an unconventional tone. One of the finest scores I have ever heard.
On a thematic level this film avoids the obvious trappings of a movie about oil in this cynical post-Iraq world mentality, there are no hamhanded allegorical references to "blood for oil", that is simply coincidental to PT Anderson's intentions. His interests lie in the battle between the two pillars of civilization: Money and God. The latter is a deity, the former has become one. They both inspire men to do great and terrible things, they can be propelled by manipulation and they can be abused to that end. The power both things grants a man lead them down a dark and terrible path.
It's method of storytelling - is unpredictable and, once again, unconventional - it does not adhere to the expected three act rule and it shifts pace almost at random. Scenes often skimmed over are dealt with slowly and methodically and other scenes are sped through - it feels like free form Jazz transformed into imagery and story. The unpredictability of it's movement is part of it's power.
Fascinating, rich and rewarding character study. Powerhouse acting. Profound and thoughtful treatise on the base nature of man, something stretching back to biblical times and still with us today. Beautiful Oscar worthy cinematography by PT Anderson's frequent cohort, Robert Elswit. Experimental storytelling. Mature, confident, expert direction. The man who wore his influences on his sleeve has found his voice, and become a legitimate entity in cinematic craft - if you weren't excited at the prospect of a new PT Anderson film before There Will Be Blood, you should be now.
So to return to my opening joke-point: Haters be damned, this is cinema at it's purest and most potent. Proof positive that there are still new places to take the medium and filmmakers still willing to take us there. A masterpiece of the highest caliber.
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| 11 |
This is not a film that should be watched often, it is not something you haul off the shelf and idly toss inside your player to just watch, like the visual equivalent of background noise. It is something precious. Something fragile. It should be stowed away for special occasions, and only watched with extreme delicacy.
This film has such a tender hold on me, it feels safe and warm to the touch, and yet at the same time I can feel the talons ripping into my back, tearing me open and exposing me to a cold, unforgiving wind. It's a movie about emotion at its most raw and yet you'll probably never find a more sedate experience. There's nothing overwhelming in the performances or the look of the film, what stands out and punches you in the nose here is the concept. Anybody who isn't a crazed hermit in the hills knows of that one relationship that they wish never happened, that they wish they could just eliminate every wrong word, every cold look, every painful silence, and live on in blissful ignorance. This film offers a glimpse at a world where that is possible.
Then it shows us that our bleakest wishes in our angriest moments were just utterly wrong. It doesn't matter how bad a relationship is or how bitterly it ended, they are worth holding onto for the moments where life sparkles. The good times. The sweet times. The times where you laughed for hours over the silliest of details. They may be nothing more than a raindrop in the ocean, but if you have experienced those moments then they are worth holding on to. Good times and bad times define us as people and once the bitterness fades, we can appreciate that we shared something special with another human being, even if it all turned to shit shortly afterwards. That message stabbed me directly in the heart when I saw this movie for the first time, and every subsequent viewing has been a further twist of the knife. It's painful, it's scary but it's beautiful and honest at the same time.
Trust Charlie Kaufman to come up with a way to deliver this message that confounds your expectations at all times, Michel Gondry was the perfect director to visualize this amazing and scary mental realm - he delivers the "normal" with such mundane, but alluring colours and the "memory" world with that same familiarity but tainted somehow, the use of sound and lighting here is amazing. It cements each world perfectly and leaves them similar, but distinct.
Pretty much everything in this movie clicks together perfectly. The acting is top notch, restrained but still wide open, exposed. Kate Winslet's greatest strength as an actress is her ability to be honest. She is fearless in her abolity to expose her character's physically and emotionally, every crack and imperfection that exists is torn wide open for everyone to see, one of her finest examples of this is Little Children but I believe she is unsurpassed in her work for Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. she is unafraid to show her character's as weak or even at times unlikable, if need be, and that's what makes her characters so damn wonderful to watch. In Clementine there is an equal share of the good and the bad, that enthralling sense of adventure, a grounded frankness to her where you can understand fully that someone would fall in love with her, and then there is the bitter ugly side, the selfish behaviour, the cruel words and short temper.
Jim Carrey's career best, he showed signs of this in The Truman Show and the unfairly underrated Man On The Moon, but you can tell he was prodded to do some zany stuff there (mostl for The Truman Show, where it stood out more) this time he's with a director who holds him to the character 100%. He is a small man, there is no flash or extravagance to him, he is slight in character but he has a gentle soul, something frail, you could find yourself either charmed by it or find yourself pitying it.
Joel and Clementine are both so well drawn out as characters, with their insecurities playing into their best and worst character traits, that you can completely see how they would fall for each other and how they could work... and also how they could collide head-on and destroy one another. The relationship feels real throughout it's history, from the initial chemistry to the bitter separation.
The music is also perfect, I can listen to the soundtrack and I remember every detail about the movie and I feel that knife in my heart shudder gently, it hurts but it feels good too. That's pretty much what this film is: A sometimes painful but ultimately life affirming experience. It shows us that life, for better or worse, is not something be forgotten lightly, because having a clutter of bad memories is still a fair trade off in exchange for a pocketful of good ones, you just need to have the stomach to dig through and find them.
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| 19 |
Alien came at a time when the science fiction landscape was dominated by the likes of Star Wars and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, space travel and living out in the far reaches looked clean, neat and, to a degree, perfect. Alien was a vitally new and powerful entry into the science fiction annals by not only returning to the classic 40s/50s b-movie tradition of blending science fiction and horror but in an a-list movie from a big studio, but it also presented us with a look into space travel that was no quite so romanticized.
Traveling through the far out reaches of the untamed universe in Alien looked hard, it was literally the new frontier, calling back to the hard and dangerous exploration of American settlers. I thought Oregon Trail was a tough game, so imagine how much worse it was in person. I digress. Space travel in Alien looked dirty and it looked like it could weigh heavy on a man's soul and snap it like a twig trying to balance a cow. Alien made space travel look tough. The set design on the Nostromo, even the cleaner, more presentable areas look so "lived in" and used. It looks very human to have such great, fantastical technologies presented to us but patched up, worn down, a little rusted, a little dented. It felt real.
Of course, that is not what Alien is remembered for, so let's get onto the wet, juicy terror.
This is the closest we have come to seeing a true horror in the tradition of the legendary HP Lovecraft in cinema. John Carpenter's The Thing captures the madness and the paranoia of Lovecraft but it's with Ridley Scott's vision (bringing to life the horrifically beautiful work of HR Giger) that we have seen a true unimaginable horror. The truly other-worldly landscapes, the suggestion of a history that human minds can't fathom. If you woke up and found yourself trapped in that derelict spaceship with the egg chamber you would probably want to shoot yourself with the nearest weapon you could find, but knowing Giger it would probably be some kind of biomechanical-penis that fired bullets made out of tiny razorblade-winged skeleton sperm.
The "chest burster" sequence remains one of the most gut wrenching and uncomfortable sequences in horror. It still works, it still feels hard and nasty and it sticks with you and that is only the beginning. Alien still manages to scare the crap out of me, the mysteries of the xenomorph has been exposed to the world now. Every dark corner of this universe has been explored and we've seen this monstrous bastard up close and personal in far less intense circumstances. The mystery that worked so well that first time you saw Alien is no longer there, so why does it still work?
It's just a fucking good movie, it's as simple as that.
The atmosphere wraps its hands around your throat and chokes you, it dominates you for the entire duration of the film, even before the shit has hit the fan you can feel the wear and tear this life has on the characters and it wouldn't take much to send things packing to Hell in a hand basket, but what they find is so much worse than they could have ever expected and before 1979 I doubt anyone could have.
The one scene that still catches me off guard, no matter how often I watch it, is the scene with Dallas in the vent shaft with the radar blips and as he tries to escape he turns and then there is a quick flash of the alien, it reaches its arms out and that's all she wrote for Dallas. That scene still sticks in my nightmares, it is just perfectly executed and such a freakish image its hard to quite understand what you saw in the shadows, even now when (like I said) the enigma is all but extinguished. Watching Ian Holm's brilliantly psychotic turn as Ash is another moment I will never forget, his bizarre malfunctioning mannerisms moments before he tries to kill Ripley are just wonderfully creepy and disarming.
Let's talk about Ripley, too. Horror movies often have a woman last until the end but until Ripley they really only survived through some divine machinations completely beyond their control or knowledge, she would survive her tormentors rampage of death purely for the reason that she had to survive. Ripley survives Alien because she is a survivor, she is a strong person, a leader, she suffers from doubt and confusion and fear like any person would but she defies those weaknesses when the chips are down and she survives because she is smart and she has that survivors instinct. When Ripley makes it out alive, you believe it. Ripley is one of the first true heroines of modern cinema, and paved the way for many more but none of these imitators had the good fortune of having Sigourney Weaver playing them; a truly iconic turn that has as strong a part to play in the legacy of Alien as HR Giger and Ridley Scott.
The movie is a timeless, cerebral entry into the horror genre, a gritty, grounded entry into scifi and it works every time. Many have tried to top it and none have matched it. The closest we have come to a new Alien is Neil Marshall's The Descent but the big difference is that Alien is a flawless visual product, Ridley Scott is a technical artist and his attention to the minutiae necessary to bring a scene to life borders on the excessive, but when you look at the results you simply cannot fault them.
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