-
TV Social
Login
Recent Comments
- Flipit: You’re not crazy, Claire! Some people are able to just click their pic, but for others it doesn’t show...
- Clair: I tried it (I’m on a computer) and while it took me to my profile page, I didn’t see any avatar option.
- RTVfan: @itchy I’ve mentioned a couple times here and there that to add an avatar just click on your blank avatar....
- Madelyne27: @rae – holy exhausting shit, batman… stop! you’ve stumbled...
- Clair: Aww, Flippy, take your time. I was just curious. You’re doing an awesome job – thank you for creating a...
- itchy: I noticed that some people have avatars at the Trashtalk site though. Mr. Dangerous’ avatar is particularly...
- Flipit: thanks susan! it will be!! i am going to be messing with it until it’s right!
- Nads: sooo funny. LOVE YOU, Flipit!
- Susan: I hope you work on the trash top format. * add a next button to read reviews, the numbers to click on each page are...
- Flipit: clair! at some point i will figure avatars out. as you may have noticed i don’t have one yet either. lol...
Hot Shows
-
Fresh Tweets!
Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
6:29 pm
8 Comments
Posted in:
Recaps
Well, folks, I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I think it’s time to switch it up a little bit here at moviegasm. Maybe it’s just the doldrums from the increasingly dull period between the holiday awards contenders and the big summer pictures, or the focus on quality during Oscar season, but after a year and a half, I just think it’s time to do something different.
So, starting this week, I’ll be doing a movie review on Monday or Tuesday instead of the usual box office column. Who knows, maybe I’ll go back to it once summer roles around and the numbers get more interesting, maybe not. For now, though, I’ll try to find something worth checking out, sometimes something old (I’ve been on a Val Lewton kick ever since catching a bit of a Martin Scorcese produced doc on TCM), other times something from what’s out in theatres. I’ll try to pick something that everybody hasn’t already seen, but the bottom line is, I think it’s time to focus on quality more than popularity for a while.
And what better way to start this new trend than by going through the Best Picture nominees. Today we’ll start with Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful There Will Be Blood. Much has been written about the film already, and Daniel Day Lewis in particular, and just about every word of it is true. In case you don’t already know, Blood is the story of Daniel Plainview, a greedy, selfish oil man who is also smart enough to conceal his true nature from almost everyone throughout the film. Paul Thomas Anderson’s script, very loosely based on an Upton Sinclair novel called Oil!, follows Plainview from the first gold nugget he unearths to his rise as an oil baron competing with an evangelical preacher, Eli Sunday (played by a frightening Paul Dano), to his and Eli’s eventual downfall. Daniel Day Lewis is brilliant in the role, charismatic and textured, completely disappearing inside a voice and physicality that makes this, in my humble opinion, his best performance and one of the best I’ve ever seen. But what makes him all the more astonishing is that he has to be that good, or the movie would fail completely. Plainview is, at his core, such an awful person that if he weren’t so compelling, we would have no way into the film.
Many have pointed out the similarities between Blood and No Country for Old Men, another Best Picture nominee that is also a dark tale set in the American southwest revolving around the lure of money (and we’ll talk more about No Country next week), But the biggest difference to me is that the Coens’ give us Tommy Lee Jones’s aging sheriff as a decent man who bears witnesses to the atrocities committed by Javier Bardem’s hitman, Anton Chigurh. While the film is far more violent than Blood, it has an obvious conscience that makes it more accessible and safer. Anderson takes a much larger artistic risk in There Will Be Blood, trusting that Plainview is a compelling enough character that we won’t be completely put off by him, and it pays off because Daniel Day Lewis is there to catch us.
Of course, he is assisted along the way by two exceptional supporting performances. The first is by Dano, who received a lot of attention for his moody and mostly mute performance in Little Miss Sunshine. I was not so impressed with him there, but in Blood, his Eli is a more than capable foil for Plainview and his equal in greed, selfishness, and his ability to hide those qualities behind a more palatable face. Watching these two spar behind such pleasant smiles, I thought of George Clooney’s Danny Ocean in the Ocean’s 11 movies and Redford and Newman in The Sting, and how they would have been eaten alive by Eli and Plainview in a confidence scam.
The other notable performance comes from the far more unlikely Kevin J. O’Connor, as a man who shows up once Plainview gets rich and claims to be his long lost brother. O’Connor has been a favorite of Stephen Sommers, of all people, going all the way back to the low budget Deep Rising, and in none of his performances did I see the skill he brings to the table here. That squeaky, high-pitched voice is used not for comic effect, as Sommers frequently used it, but to suggest a vulnerability that we actually fear for in the presence of the monsterous Plainview. Besides Plainview’s adopted son, H.W., O’Connor’s Henry is the closest we get to putting a recognizably human face on Plainview.
But none of these shadings would be possible without Paul Thomas Anderson at the helm. Anderson is a filmmaker I’ve been wary of (Magnolia, is, to me, his best film, and as much flack as I’ll take for saying this, I remain unimpressed by Boogie Nights and Punch Drunk Love), but I had no idea he was capable of this kind of complexity and subtlety. I can’t stress enough what a bold move it is to hang the film on Plainview’s seductiveness, and to tell his story in such stark, visual terms. The image of an oil-drenched Plainview sitting in front an oil well spewing fire says as much about the character as any line of dialogue, and is just one example of a hundred elegantly composed and thematically resonant images in the film. I can’t help but wonder what influence Anderson’s work with Robert Altman on A Prairie Home Companion had on this startling leap forward for him artistically. Which is not to suggest that Blood bears any resemblance to an Altman film. Rather, I would say that Anderson demonstrates a confidence with the material and with his instincts that may well be counted as another thread of Altman’s impressive legacy.
The final question, though, is will There Will Be Blood win Best Picture? As startling and original as the film is, I don’t think so. As real and relevant and resonant as Plainview’s barely-concealed malevolence is, the notoriously stuffy Academy members will almost certainly be put off by it on some level. And then there is the question of the final scene. I won’t go into specifics, but my initial reaction was that it was a brilliant scene that belonged to a different film. The more I think back on it, though, the more I feel like it works, and as I contemplate seeing the film again tonight, I find myself excited to see how it plays a second time.
Just one last note. When watching the film, pay special attention to the incredible and unusual score provided, most surprisingly, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. It was, for some reason, ruled ineligible for Oscar consideration, but… wow.
TV Social
-
8 Comments
Sutter,
I agree the performances and direction in “Blood” were astonishingly good, but overall while I can say I appreciated the artistry of the movie and the performances, I can’t say I enjoyed it. I sat there for almost three hours thinking about what great performances I was seeing, but never really got sucked into the plot enough to forget I was watching great acting. Day-Lewis is pretty much a lock for Best Actor, but no way this wins for Best Picture.
Completely off topic, is Tommy Lee Jones a great actor, or is he just good a playing a particular character type? Is it just me or did he basically play the same character in “No Country” that he played in “In the Valley of Elah”? For that matter, didn’t he play the same character in the “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” and “The Fugitive”, more or less?
Jason,
I completely appreciate your point of view on Blood. The story isn’t exactly riveting, and the cost of all those elegant and precisely composed shots is that you’re constantly aware of them, unlike, say, a Clint Eastwood or Sidney Lumet film. They’re beautiful to look at, but they can also pull you out of the movie. It worked for me, but I’m not going to argue with anyone for whom it didn’t, and I agree with you about it’s best picture odds.
As for Tommy Lee Jones, I guess it depends on what you mean by great actor. Especially as he’s gotten older, Jones does seem more limited in his range, but I would say the same has been true of Jack Nicholson, although I wouldn’t hesitate to call him a great actor. And you don’t have to go back too far to find some unusual roles on his part, particularly his first Oscar nominated role in J.F.K., a fine piece of acting that bears no resemblance to his recent work.
Point well taken on Jones, Nicholson. No shame in sticking with what you do well, and I suppose when you get to be these guys’ age the types of parts you can realistically expect to get are going to be more limited anyway.
While I quite liked There Will Be Blood (and am seeing it a second time on Tues eve, for a number of reasons) I emphatically disagree that this movie is masterpiece.
PTA really needs to get over himself. He is far from a great filmmaker. Although I quite enjoyed the movie and am glad I saw it, I think there are many flaws in the sketchy (as in lightly sketched vs deep) storytelling of There Will Be Blood.
Where is the character depth, the motivations, the background and the context to these events and this man’s tale?
I did enjoy the tipping see-saw balance of power between Plainview and the Preacher. I do not, however, share everyone’s accolades for Paul Dano. He did his best, but he was ill-suited for this role as a morally ambiguous preacher.
Also — SPOILER — the part when Plainview rubs mud in the preacher’s mouth completely came out of nowhere! WTF?
The only thing that maintained my interest in this movie was the intensity and ferocity of the magnificent performance by Daniel Day Lewis.
Although I have to begrudgingly admit that the director was, in part, responsible for eliciting such a stunningly fierce and chilling performance, I doubt very much that even a crappy director would be left with a crappy performance from Day Lewis. I just don’t think he’s capable of giving less than his all. He is truly one of the greatest actors of our generation.
Also the film’s score is a complete joke and the fault largely resides with the choices of this oftentimes pretentious and perverse director. The score is far too attention seeking and emotionally inconsistent. Although I applaud a director that takes a risk with an atypical score for a Hollywood movie, this one misfires too often to b e considered successful.
Still, There Will Be Blood is definitely worth seeing, for Day Lewis, for a bare-bones story and for seeing what not to do when you are at the helm of a big Hollywood movie with a decent budget.
ALSO (apologies for my extremely long and indulgent double posting)–
Both this score and Into the Wild’s scores were ruled ineligible NOT bc the composers were both rockers.
It was bc the scores were not specifically composed for the movies.
The Oscar is for “Best ORIGINAL Score”, not “best bits of existing music we thought would go well with the imagery.”
I hope that clears that up.
I thought the score for Blood was odd and basically terrible bc it didn’t do what that movie badly needed — namely, to be given it some heart and emotional resonance.
But afterwards I re-thought my first impression– most scores are so predictable and safe and many are just crappy (I expect you are familiar with the term “mickey mousing”) — why, then, do I complain when someone tries to do something completely different?
I am still a bit conflicted about it.
I did like Blood purely for Day-Lewis’s magnificent perf and his char’s arc. I will not be at all surprised if he wins every single Best Actor award this year. (My guy says he should automatically be disqualified bc he’s so far and away better than anyone else, it’s not fair he’s in the race. lol)
But I thought there were so many directorial missteps, in addition to a pointless score. I am not surprised PTA’s movie is getting so many accolades and noms, but it’s really all about Day Lewis.
And I was glad the score didn’t get nominated.
It should have not made the cut purely bc it’s not good enough.
Re Tommy Lee J vs Nicholson:
Tommy Lee’s range is (and I think always has been) far narrower than Jack’s.
In the past ten-twelve years we’ve seen Jack do everything from his multi-character turns in
Mars Attacks! to dysfunctional guys in As Good as It Gets & About Schmidt to a twisted villain in The Departed and also something else entirely in Something’s Gotta Give.
Like Humphrey Bogart, Tommy Lee Jones is very good at playing, well, Tommy Lee Jones, and yeah, I think his grizzled age has a lot to do with that.
But remember, Clint hung onto the script of Unforgiven until he felt he was world-weary enough to play that role, as we are better off for that sophisticated and patient decision.
DMG,
Wow. I haven’t heard you this fired up in awhile. Let’s see… I felt like we got enough context and background on Plainview in his conversations with Henry, but I was more impressed with the subtle ways in which PTA brought out the character (the opening, in particular, tells us everything we need to know about his drive for success).
The mud fight between Plainview and Eli was, I thought, about Plainview’s anger at his son’s condition, and here comes this so-called ‘healer’ asking for money, when he’s obviously a fraud because he can’t help H.W.
As for the score, while I agree that it doesn’t add emotional resonance, instead it added a lot of tension to the film (it’s almost more appropriate for a horror film), and in that paves the way for the final scene and kept me interested. Combined with the title, you know something bad is coming, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what it was.
Prior to Blood, I would have agreed with you a hundred percent that PTA needs to get over himself, precisely because his earlier films felt like the kind of pretentious, thematically scattershot, ‘look at how deep I am!’ indie flicks that I deeply dislike (I’m looking at you, Greg Araki, Smiley Face aside). But here he’s narrowed his focus to a more inclusive theme, the self-destructiveness of greed, and explored it in a beautifully shot, character driven and multi-layered epic.
Basically, it worked for me, but movies are subjective, and if it didn’t work for you, I can’t really argue. I’d be curious to hear, though, if a second viewing changes your opinion at all.
As for Tommy Lee Jones, Bogart is a good comparison, I think. And Nicholson does have more range, but most of the performances have a certain smirking, arched-eyebrow confidence to them (As Good As It Gets, Something’s Gotta Give, even The Departed, in which I thought he was the weakest link). I read somewhere that there are performances in which he’s just ‘Jack’, a general persona he brings to most of his performances, and in that respect I think he’s comparable to Jones. But he can break out of that, and I think Schmidt is the best example, and that does give him more range than Jones.
Whew… always good to hear from you, DMG.
“The mud fight between Plainview and Eli was—”
Well, yes, all that information is in there.
But the scene itself came out of nowhere. It’s like there was a missing scene or something. I put it down to poor direction and editing.
I agree the campfire scene btw Plainview and his brother reveals — rather bluntly — a lot about Plainview’s inner world, that we don’t see articulated elsewhere. Actually, the scene in the pub when Plainview (with his son after he returns from school – trying not to give too much away, here) encounters the big oil guys is very telling of his character. Just look at Plainview’s quiet indignation that the other guys get served first.
I will post again after the second viewing. I don’t agree the cinematography was all that special, tho scenes such as Plainview smothered in oil against a fiery backdrop are truly dramatic…
But I was forced to sit very close to the screen (!) and everything was skewed, so I need to see and hear the movie again to really judge it properly.