Filed under: Movies, movie review | Tags: bad jokes, movie review, there will be blood
Not so long ago there was a time when a man could venture out into the barren frontier and make his fortune from the sweat off his back. The road to success was hard, dark and full of many adversities and pitfalls. Only the strong would survive and only the sly-est and most ambitious of the lot could ever stand to see any riches.
There Will Be Blood is the story about one such man, who through hard work and cunning, makes his millions digging for oil in the American west at the turn of the 20th century.
Directed by P.T. Anderson, the film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the cut-throat Daniel Plainview, an oilman who prides himself on working hard and not letting anything, be it loss of life or family, get in the way profit.
After starting his own successful oil well and adopting the son of a colleague who died in a drilling accident, Longview goes forth to find new oil and erect new derricks. One night he is approached Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) with the opportunity to drill for oil on the Sunday family land. Through some financial finagling, Longview’s company manages to get the oil rights to the whole town, the whole while butting heads with Eli Sunday, twin brother of Paul and up-and-coming reverend.
All seems well (no pun intended… wait, pun intended) until there is another accident on the site, the only victim this time is Longview’s adopted son’s hearing. Then Longview’s true colours start to show through. Slowly his calculating and hard exterior starts to erode and the misanthropic evil side of his person begins to take over. The arrival of his unbeknownst half-brother seems to calm the demons inside Longview, but only after a startling revelation do we see the truth. (My apologies if the synopsis seems to be a bit cryptic, but there is far too much good stuff that I don’t want to give away.)
Day-Lewis performance is nothing short of earth-shaking. His portrayal of the hellfire-driven and iron-willed Longview is spot on and at points absolutely terrifying. It’s a shame that he doesn’t do more films, but when you’re an actor of this caliber, you have to right to pick and choose only the projects the interest you. It makes sense that he won the golden globe for this.
Paul Dano did a tremendous job playing double duty as the twin brothers, and was a prefect casting choice particularly in the role of Eli the preacher (although at times the story was somewhat ambiguous to whether or not there were in fact two brothers). If there is any justice, he can now step out of the Little Miss Sunshine shadow and start pulling in the good roles.
And once again P.T. Anderson validates his praise as a phenomenal director. The visuals were stunning, the pace was pitch-perfect and the choice of music accentuates the ominous overtones of the story. (It’s kind of interesting how he’s gone from making movies about porns stars to now movies about massive erections spewing forth their precious contents for profit. Bah-dum-dum)
(Funny story: Right before climax, the bulb burnt out and there was a 15 minute intermission while the staff fixed the projector. We all got free passes as compensation for killing the narrative momentum! I guess that wasn’t really funny so much as it was bothersome.)
While this story of greed, religion, family and business may not be for the faint of heart, it’s definitely on the bloody best films of the year.
Filed under: Movies, movie review | Tags: Bill Murray, Bojangles, Ikea, Jim Jarmusch, movie review
So it turns out some comedian in New York moved into Ikea for a week while his apartment was being fumigated. A friend brought this to my attention because she said the thought it was me at first. First Dan Levy and now this guy. I’m never going to end up on TV at this rate.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/FunMoney/story?id=4102664&page=1
My main squeeze and I finally watched Broken Flowers last night. We’ve had the movie for a dew months now and, much like Coffee and Cigarettes (which we also own and co-incidentally by the same director), we haven’t gotten around to watching it. So in lieu of checking out a coffee shop called “Bojangles,” we gave this Jim Jarmusch film a whirl.
Although I’ve only seen a couple of his movies (Dead Man and Ghost Dog) I’m pretty smitten with his work. That fact he takes his time telling the story and let’s the pace of his films wander into seldom visited realms of lingering visual, sets him apart.
The film, for those of you who don’t know, is about an aging professional bachelor who, after receiving a mysterious letter, goes on something of a quest to find out the truth of his, until then, unknown son. After a series of strange visits to old flames, Don (Murray) finds himself back where he started, but now with a newly gained sense of longing for the familial connection that he had vehemently rejected his whole life.
I’ve read mixed reviews about Broken Flowers. Some people chided it for being a Bill Murray vanity project, who at the time was still riding high of a wave of critical affection from Lost in Translation and the Life Aquatic. A lot of scenes in the movie focus in Murray’s weathered face, revealing little emotion as he tries to deal with the set of events that have presented themselves to him. To some this may have seemed an arduous ordeal, hoping for more from the pace of the film.
But I think it was all masterfully done. The fact the pace was done is such a deliberately slow rate that Murray showed so little, spoke volumes of the character. Don is an emotionally detached man, who for a long time, has not had to deal with any serious personal connection. So finding out that he may have a son shakes his world to it’s core. How can a man who has tried to hard to make himself an island deal with the fact he has ties can’t deny to someone he doesn’t even know?
Jarmusch explores these possibilities in an aesthetically stunning way, all the while marrying his visuals to a choice sound-bed of Cuban Jazz. The very nature of jazz music lends itself well to the story, because it, like the journey, may seem to have an overlying structure, it ultimately is an organic experience with unpredictable movements and changes.
I also really like the character of Winston, Don’s foil, neighbor and sidekick, something of a Sancho Panza who nudges him along his journey. It was interesting how Winston, a man with three jobs, a wife and five kids, could be so close to Don, a wealthy man who has next to no one in his life. The juxtaposition of characters was fun to see.
While Broken Flowers may not have you on the edge of your seat the whole time, it is still a captivating soulful expedition into the nature of relationships worthy of contemplation.
