THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)
PLOT: Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a sociopathic oilman. Paul Dano plays his nemesis, greedy revivalist preacher Eli Sunday. Plainview adopts the son of a fellow oilman killed in an accident and raises him on his own. The child, H.W. Plainview, is deafened in another accident and is sent away to a school for the deaf. After killing a con man posing as his brother, Plainview is blackmailed into being baptized into Sunday’s congregation and into retrieving the deaf child. After great financial success, Plainview drives away H.W. after revealing his true parentage and then drunkenly kills Sunday.
Newspaper advertisements assured me that There Will Be Blood is a “masterpiece,” “enthralling,” “wholly original” and “powerfully eccentric”. So I was prepared to hate it. I didn’t! Hating the movie itself is unrewarding. As an inanimate object it can offer no satisfaction. But Paul Thomas Anderson – him I can hate for stealing 158 minutes of my earthly existence and $12 of my hard earned money. It’s possible that the goddess of circumstance will give me the opportunity of retrieving my $12 (167% of New York state minimum wage) from Mr. Anderson. New Year’s resolution #2: brush up on my pickpocketing. But those 158 minutes…
$12 for 158 minutes of looking at Daniel Day-Lewis’ handsome visage isn’t to be sneered at. Day-Lewis makes far too few movies and as it appears that he’s turning into Jane Fonda circa 1975 - he only makes socially significant, “important” films - I’ll have to take what I can get. But 158 minutes is forty minutes longer than Citizen Kane, a movie on the same theme, the corruptive power of money and greed on a emotionally stunted man, and generally accepted as a masterpiece. Forty more masterpiece minutes than Kane – what are they? Extraneous but technically fluent shots of scrubland, irrelevant plot developments, cornball devices, poorly edited action sequences, and wasted acting.
The movie opens with a dialogue-free sequence showing Plainview digging for gold and breaking his leg in the process: frightening but pointless. Anderson then takes twenty minutes to show us Plainview exploring for oil, his partner's death and Plainview's somewhat casual adoption of this partner's child’s. Five well-edited minutes would suffice. Another sequence shows Plainview buttering up landowners for access to their oil-rich property, and like many of Blood’s dialogue sequences it’s played at half-speed, every word enunciated with a cloud of pauses floating around it. The mid-movie reunion between Plainview and his adopted son is shot from a distance, which allows for a nifty tracking sequence but not for the viewer’s involvement. The confrontations between Plainview and Sunday (Paul Dano) are irrational,and Dano is so irritatingly shrieky an actor that the he loses the audience’s affection and so any dramatic tension between the two men is muted to inaudibility.
I can’t think of a movie, apart from any number of Godard films, that so resolutely refuses to accumulate dramatic momentum. The two most engaging parts of the film, a nighttime oilwell explosion and Plainview's baptism, are both followed by sequences so flat that they cancel out the viewer’s enthusiasm. And Anderson’s corny attempts to let the audience “experience” the child’s deafness – the movie’s sound goes off, ooh! – pure cheese. I was kind of wishing the child had been blinded. Then Anderson would turn off all the lights and I could have taken a nap.
Ciaran Hinds, an incisive and distinctive actor, plays Plainview’s second-in-command, a part so sparsely written thatit's a waste of Hinds' considerable presence. The problem with casting an actor like Hinds and then underusing him is that the actor’s charisma leads the audience to expect something from him, and when nothing happens we feel cheated.
This charisma cheat is magnified with Day-Lewis. He’s got a some great moments – the baptism, his murder of the con man, the comic mayhem of the finale, – but mostly all he gets to do is lope around alone looking deranged. Blood reminds me of Mommie Dearest. The audience is supposed to love/hate Mommie, like we should love/hate Plainview – but they’re the most interesting people in their movies, more vibrant, more exciting, so we root for them instead. The balance of ambiguous allegiance, necessary for dramatic tension, is lopsided. So Mommie Dearest becomes campy, and Blood is inert.
I can’t blame Day-Lewis for taking the part. On paper it probably looked great, but once Anderson gets jiggy with the camera any dramatic opportunities are, like my 158 minutes, gone with the wind.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Another Lurid Saturday Night
Are you stuck at home and need to feel kinda dirty? Here’s a finely-tuned list of some lurid cinema to help you along.
The Eyes of Laura Mars (1977)
Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, exotic high fashion photographer whose work uses sex and death for fashion thrills (it’s really Helmut Newton’s). Unfortunately for Laura, someone is imitating the photographs and killing all of her friends. Even more alarmingly, Laura sees the murders as they happen. Naturally these visions are in soft focus, from the murderer’s viewpoint and cause temporarily blindness, so Laura never gets to the phone in time to warn the victims. Watching Faye lurch around “looking” for the phone is a masterclass in overacting.
Helping Faye is Tommy Lee Jones, as a policeman who badly needs to get his unibrow waxed. This fashion faux pas does not stop true love, and the movie’s first and only love scene, which takes place right after a funeral, is a camp classic. Tommy’s acting style, minimalist at best, highlights Faye’s uninhibited scenery-chewing all the more.
Eyes also offers some Hollywood-style faux-kinkiness, 70s department, i.e. gay guys, dwarves, and lesbian models. Other highlights are Faye’s deluxe Halston-style apartment, a weirdly spacious Soho gallery opening, and Faye’s frumpy costumes and librarian hairstyle, bizarre in a supposed fashionista. One real plus is the location work, which shows the dirty, grimy New York City I fell in love with and miss so very much.
The Best of Everything (1959)
Advertising tag line - The Female Jungle Exposed!
Great-Grandbitch to Cashmere Mafia and The Lipstick Jungle, Best is the story of three young career girls in 1950s Manhattan. Hope Lange is pretty and sensible, Diane Baker is pretty and naïve, and 50s supermodel Suzy Parker is gorgeous and therefore crazy. The plot is sex, abortion, sex, stalkers, sex, drunkenness - plus Joan Crawford as a queen bitch book editor!
Bland but handsome Louis Jourdan plays the roué director that Parker falls for and cleft-chinned hottie Stephen Boyd (Messala from Ben Hur, another turgid classic) plays Lange’s alcoholic amour. Crawford’s spinster editrix Amanda Farrow is a frightening portrait of one of Hollywood’s perennial horrors – the unmarried (and by movieland logic doomed to unhappiness) middle-aged woman. Joan’s face is like Mount Rushmore – it’s impressive and it never moves. The cast is filled out by Brian Aherne as a Mr. Shalimar, a randy oldster, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) as randy prepster Dexter Key. Gotta love those names!
Best's impressive production values include a Johnny Mathis theme song, on-location shots of 50s New York, and color by DeLuxe. As a child, I thought DeLuxe was a person, like DeVol, the composer of the Family Affair and Brady Bunch theme songs. But there is no Mr. Deluxe, sad to say.
The movie is based on Rona Jaffe’s eponymous novel, which is far superior to the glossed-up movie. Published in 1951, the book is still racy and destroys the theory that sex was invented in 1963.
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Karen Black in a 1975 made for television scream-a-thon – need I say more?
Our Karen always guarantees a good time, intentional (Family Plot, Five Easy Pieces) or otherwise (Airport 75). Trilogy’s final segment - an unfortunate encounter with an African doll - is the pick of this demonic litter and will ensure that you never ever buy any tribal knickknacks, ever ever again, ever.
The Story of Esther Costello (1957)
Deeply weird melodrama, starring Joan Crawford as a well-meaning rich woman who adopts a deaf and dumb orphan girl whom she turns into a Helen Keller-type celebrity. Problems arise when Joan’s estranged husband takes more than a shine to the fetching little deaf-mute.
Story is the kind of simpleminded Hollywood product where the husband must be bad because he has a foreign accent and Joan Crawford is admirable and good because she’s rich and she’s Joan Crawford. The weirdness comes in with the kicker to the plot. I can’t reveal it here but the manner by which the little girl gets her senses back would make Sophocles roll in his grave.
Crawford, as usual, substitutes stone-faced hyperventilation for acting. Her finest scene is when she discovers her husband’s perfidy and goes about her enormous house turning off all the lamps, one by one, with mascara-stained tears dripping down her face. I dare you not to laugh, and I dare not to want to relive the scene in your own home.
Mahogany (1975)
A cornucopia of ineptitude and the movie that killed Diana Ross’s film career, Mahogany is best watched with a large group of snarky, preferably tipsy friends.
Ross plays Tracy, a girl plucked from the ghettos of Chicago by lecherous photographer Anthony Perkins and transformed into world-famous fashion model Mahogany. Tracy/Mahogany really wants to be a fashion designer, misses hometown true love Billy Dee Williams, is being stalked by the rejected Perkins and goes to too many Eurotrash shindigs, so her redemption is quite the uphill struggle.
You’ll never forget the fountain scene, the “twirl, Tracy, twirl” scene, the wax-candle torture scene, the “due due” scene, or the flameout finale, and those are just of a few of the lows this film stoops to. My favorite nadir is Tracy’s first fashion show, a psychotic marriage of Ming the Merciless and Claude Montana circa 1985. Phyllis Diller once described her own stage outfits as “I dressed up as a lampshade in a Chinese whorehouse.” Once you see Mahogany’s couture classics, you’ll know where Phyllis shops.
Don’t forget to sing along with the he ineffable theme song, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? Do you know what life is showing you? Do you know? Well, do you?
The Bad Seed (1956)
There’s a blue chair for boys and a pink chair for girls!
Stage play translated to the screen with all its staginess intact, and a camp delight. Patty McCormack plays titular demonchild Rhoda Penmark, and Nancy Kelly plays her at first disbelieving and then horrified mother. The Bad Seed is an actor’s delight, full of hammy moments, and none of the actors disappoints. Best of all is Eileen Heckart as the mother of one of Patty’s victims. Her second scene, complete with an irrational drink cart, is a highpoint of cinematic dipsomania. And the finale is electrifying!
The Eyes of Laura Mars (1977)
Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, exotic high fashion photographer whose work uses sex and death for fashion thrills (it’s really Helmut Newton’s). Unfortunately for Laura, someone is imitating the photographs and killing all of her friends. Even more alarmingly, Laura sees the murders as they happen. Naturally these visions are in soft focus, from the murderer’s viewpoint and cause temporarily blindness, so Laura never gets to the phone in time to warn the victims. Watching Faye lurch around “looking” for the phone is a masterclass in overacting.
Helping Faye is Tommy Lee Jones, as a policeman who badly needs to get his unibrow waxed. This fashion faux pas does not stop true love, and the movie’s first and only love scene, which takes place right after a funeral, is a camp classic. Tommy’s acting style, minimalist at best, highlights Faye’s uninhibited scenery-chewing all the more.
Eyes also offers some Hollywood-style faux-kinkiness, 70s department, i.e. gay guys, dwarves, and lesbian models. Other highlights are Faye’s deluxe Halston-style apartment, a weirdly spacious Soho gallery opening, and Faye’s frumpy costumes and librarian hairstyle, bizarre in a supposed fashionista. One real plus is the location work, which shows the dirty, grimy New York City I fell in love with and miss so very much.
The Best of Everything (1959)
Advertising tag line - The Female Jungle Exposed!
Great-Grandbitch to Cashmere Mafia and The Lipstick Jungle, Best is the story of three young career girls in 1950s Manhattan. Hope Lange is pretty and sensible, Diane Baker is pretty and naïve, and 50s supermodel Suzy Parker is gorgeous and therefore crazy. The plot is sex, abortion, sex, stalkers, sex, drunkenness - plus Joan Crawford as a queen bitch book editor!
Bland but handsome Louis Jourdan plays the roué director that Parker falls for and cleft-chinned hottie Stephen Boyd (Messala from Ben Hur, another turgid classic) plays Lange’s alcoholic amour. Crawford’s spinster editrix Amanda Farrow is a frightening portrait of one of Hollywood’s perennial horrors – the unmarried (and by movieland logic doomed to unhappiness) middle-aged woman. Joan’s face is like Mount Rushmore – it’s impressive and it never moves. The cast is filled out by Brian Aherne as a Mr. Shalimar, a randy oldster, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) as randy prepster Dexter Key. Gotta love those names!
Best's impressive production values include a Johnny Mathis theme song, on-location shots of 50s New York, and color by DeLuxe. As a child, I thought DeLuxe was a person, like DeVol, the composer of the Family Affair and Brady Bunch theme songs. But there is no Mr. Deluxe, sad to say.
The movie is based on Rona Jaffe’s eponymous novel, which is far superior to the glossed-up movie. Published in 1951, the book is still racy and destroys the theory that sex was invented in 1963.
Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Karen Black in a 1975 made for television scream-a-thon – need I say more?
Our Karen always guarantees a good time, intentional (Family Plot, Five Easy Pieces) or otherwise (Airport 75). Trilogy’s final segment - an unfortunate encounter with an African doll - is the pick of this demonic litter and will ensure that you never ever buy any tribal knickknacks, ever ever again, ever.
The Story of Esther Costello (1957)
Deeply weird melodrama, starring Joan Crawford as a well-meaning rich woman who adopts a deaf and dumb orphan girl whom she turns into a Helen Keller-type celebrity. Problems arise when Joan’s estranged husband takes more than a shine to the fetching little deaf-mute.
Story is the kind of simpleminded Hollywood product where the husband must be bad because he has a foreign accent and Joan Crawford is admirable and good because she’s rich and she’s Joan Crawford. The weirdness comes in with the kicker to the plot. I can’t reveal it here but the manner by which the little girl gets her senses back would make Sophocles roll in his grave.
Crawford, as usual, substitutes stone-faced hyperventilation for acting. Her finest scene is when she discovers her husband’s perfidy and goes about her enormous house turning off all the lamps, one by one, with mascara-stained tears dripping down her face. I dare you not to laugh, and I dare not to want to relive the scene in your own home.
Mahogany (1975)
A cornucopia of ineptitude and the movie that killed Diana Ross’s film career, Mahogany is best watched with a large group of snarky, preferably tipsy friends.
Ross plays Tracy, a girl plucked from the ghettos of Chicago by lecherous photographer Anthony Perkins and transformed into world-famous fashion model Mahogany. Tracy/Mahogany really wants to be a fashion designer, misses hometown true love Billy Dee Williams, is being stalked by the rejected Perkins and goes to too many Eurotrash shindigs, so her redemption is quite the uphill struggle.
You’ll never forget the fountain scene, the “twirl, Tracy, twirl” scene, the wax-candle torture scene, the “due due” scene, or the flameout finale, and those are just of a few of the lows this film stoops to. My favorite nadir is Tracy’s first fashion show, a psychotic marriage of Ming the Merciless and Claude Montana circa 1985. Phyllis Diller once described her own stage outfits as “I dressed up as a lampshade in a Chinese whorehouse.” Once you see Mahogany’s couture classics, you’ll know where Phyllis shops.
Don’t forget to sing along with the he ineffable theme song, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? Do you know what life is showing you? Do you know? Well, do you?
The Bad Seed (1956)
There’s a blue chair for boys and a pink chair for girls!
Stage play translated to the screen with all its staginess intact, and a camp delight. Patty McCormack plays titular demonchild Rhoda Penmark, and Nancy Kelly plays her at first disbelieving and then horrified mother. The Bad Seed is an actor’s delight, full of hammy moments, and none of the actors disappoints. Best of all is Eileen Heckart as the mother of one of Patty’s victims. Her second scene, complete with an irrational drink cart, is a highpoint of cinematic dipsomania. And the finale is electrifying!
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
LIKE, DUDE, I'M HAVING YOUR BABY
Unwed mothers aren’t what they used to be, to judge by Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s Juno. Not for their heroine is the shame of the scarlet letter or the deadly gossip of provincial neighbors. Instead, the 16-year old Juno, played by the angel-faced Ellen Page as a cynical but levelheaded romantic, seeks out adoptive parents (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), arranges the adoption, and then experiences the unexpected but hardly dramatic results. Juno isn’t ostracized, her parents express only concern, the topic of abortion is lightly touched on and just as lightly discarded, and then everyone lives happily ever after. Instead of treating the story as melodrama or as social commentary, director Reitman (son of Ivan, auteur of Ghostbusters) and writer Cody use Juno’s predicament for some lightweight comedy and some shallow character observation. It’s the easiest ninety-two minute childbirth I’ve ever experienced.
Juno’s greatest charm is its acting – specifically that of Juno and her family. Her parents are played by Allison Janney, clearly enjoying herself as a strangely glamorous lower-middle class mom, and J.K. Simmons, more familiar as the comically gruff Jonah Jameson of the Spiderman series. Cody gives Juno and her parents verbal slapstick that suggests Roseanne Barr meets Joseph Mankiewicz, without the former’s comic bitterness or the latter’s sustained pyrotechnics.
The other characters function as a chorus of sincerity; they do not get to make jokes but are the butt of them. This is particularly true of Juno’s boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Paulie is adolescent ineptitude personified: geeky, seemingly friendless, and a terrycloth-headbanded fashion disaster. Cera underplays Paulie to the point of somnambulism – he barely reacts to the news of the pregnancy or to Juno’s declaration of love at the end of the film. Perhaps Paulie is a sullen teenager, perhaps the filmmakers’ didn’t think out his character very clearly - or maybe blinking is the latest in method acting.
A lack of nuance – exemplified by Juno having only one friend, and her lack of interaction with her fellow students at all – is the movie’s biggest problem. Her parents’ banter is entertaining, but their reaction to their daughter’s news is unbelievably blasé. And Juno herself isn’t very believable. Her arrangement of the adoption is a case in point: Juno reads three ads in the local pennysaver and discovers the perfect parents, two well-salaried yuppies who have it all. They're unlikely advertisers in the pennysaver, especially for an adoptive baby, and it's just as unlikely that their lawyer would show up with papers drawn up and ready for signing at the first meeting with Juno. At least Reitman and Cody do not condescend to their characters, which is refreshing in a movie about working class characters.
Juno does have one very distinctive feature – its production and costume design. From the opening credits, a mix of animation, line drawings and film, to the décor of Juno’s home and the appearance of her suburban neighborhood, the movie looks just as it should – slightly claustrophobic, a little tattered on the edges, and well loved.
If you are looking for more comic takes on unwed mothers, search out Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) or People Will Talk (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1951). Miracle - the hilarious tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, who knows she’s married but can’t remember the fella’s name, and her devoted but dimwitted beau Norval Jones - is one of Hollywood’s comedic peaks and has caused me to weep with laughter even after repeated viewings. People will Talk is Mankiewicz (All About Eve) as comic social commentator – he conjures up Cary Grant as a doctor who befriends an unwed mother and then has to deal with unpleasant consequences, namely rival professor Hume Cronyn. It’s a little dated as social commentary, but Grant is his usual expert self and is a great pleasure to watch.
Juno’s greatest charm is its acting – specifically that of Juno and her family. Her parents are played by Allison Janney, clearly enjoying herself as a strangely glamorous lower-middle class mom, and J.K. Simmons, more familiar as the comically gruff Jonah Jameson of the Spiderman series. Cody gives Juno and her parents verbal slapstick that suggests Roseanne Barr meets Joseph Mankiewicz, without the former’s comic bitterness or the latter’s sustained pyrotechnics.
The other characters function as a chorus of sincerity; they do not get to make jokes but are the butt of them. This is particularly true of Juno’s boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Paulie is adolescent ineptitude personified: geeky, seemingly friendless, and a terrycloth-headbanded fashion disaster. Cera underplays Paulie to the point of somnambulism – he barely reacts to the news of the pregnancy or to Juno’s declaration of love at the end of the film. Perhaps Paulie is a sullen teenager, perhaps the filmmakers’ didn’t think out his character very clearly - or maybe blinking is the latest in method acting.
A lack of nuance – exemplified by Juno having only one friend, and her lack of interaction with her fellow students at all – is the movie’s biggest problem. Her parents’ banter is entertaining, but their reaction to their daughter’s news is unbelievably blasé. And Juno herself isn’t very believable. Her arrangement of the adoption is a case in point: Juno reads three ads in the local pennysaver and discovers the perfect parents, two well-salaried yuppies who have it all. They're unlikely advertisers in the pennysaver, especially for an adoptive baby, and it's just as unlikely that their lawyer would show up with papers drawn up and ready for signing at the first meeting with Juno. At least Reitman and Cody do not condescend to their characters, which is refreshing in a movie about working class characters.
Juno does have one very distinctive feature – its production and costume design. From the opening credits, a mix of animation, line drawings and film, to the décor of Juno’s home and the appearance of her suburban neighborhood, the movie looks just as it should – slightly claustrophobic, a little tattered on the edges, and well loved.
If you are looking for more comic takes on unwed mothers, search out Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) or People Will Talk (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1951). Miracle - the hilarious tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, who knows she’s married but can’t remember the fella’s name, and her devoted but dimwitted beau Norval Jones - is one of Hollywood’s comedic peaks and has caused me to weep with laughter even after repeated viewings. People will Talk is Mankiewicz (All About Eve) as comic social commentator – he conjures up Cary Grant as a doctor who befriends an unwed mother and then has to deal with unpleasant consequences, namely rival professor Hume Cronyn. It’s a little dated as social commentary, but Grant is his usual expert self and is a great pleasure to watch.
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