There Will Be Blood; or Why The Hell Did White Europeans Settle In The Desert In The First Place?

There Will Be Blood is not here for you, and it does not need your fucking pity. It does exactly what it wants when it wants to. And it is probably the best film I have seen in the last couple of years. It is hardly a film for the faint of heart, but we never wanted those guys in here with us anyway.
From the beautifully brief and threadbare intro sequence to the jarring and booming soundtrack, it is rare in managing to be a both artistic and apparently successful.

It is, in a sense, the anti-Lost. Lost is convoluted, and uses its shallow one-note characterisation and cheap cliffhanger endings to keep the audience hooked as well as confused. Blood does exactly the opposite. It keeps the focus narrow and dense, and instead leaps about within scenes to keep you on your toes. The editing is first rate, and introduces the dislocating scene changes, slow pans and unsteady rhythm that I usually associate with more esoteric offerings. In fact the early part reminded me aesthetically of the weirder moments in The Wicker Man. The dialogue is kept minimal and to the point. There is no dialogue for the first 20 minutes. yet when the speaking starts, it is so well measured that you don't notice the acting. Oh, the acting.

The fact is ththat there are no particularly great performances. Sure Daniel Day-Lewis is convincing and mad as a big bag of crazy, but as usual he still speaks in a maddeningly untraceable accent and still insists on chomping away on nothing, rather like an old man eating a cheesestring. The preacher-child (for it is he.) looks every inch the giggling buffoon serviceable but hardly stunning. The lines are delivered in a perfectly workable way, but it is not the acting or actors that you are looking at. It seems to be a film almost completely without subtle body language, usually the sign of first rate acting performances. If Plainview is angry, or plotting, he has to show it very obviously on his face. :-(
To put it simply, none of this matters. Themes include everything (I dont mean literally everything but its damn close) except notably love and death issues, both being as common as muck in modern media, and as such having no place in this film.

There are some downpoints though. It does severely lull at certain bits, although this may simply be exhaustion resulting from the density of the preceding scenes. As I mentioned, the acting isn't great, despite what you may have heard, but the script more than shines through.

An obvious comparison is Citizen Kane, and this is not unfair. The story of a tycoon, the lust for power and wealth (or something like it) is all too familiar. But there are no morals at the end of Blood, only lessons on consequences. This sets it apart from Citizen Kane, which is couched (though very loosely) in 30's moralising about comeuppances. This is present in Blood, but far more visceral, immediate and equitable. The differences between Kane and Blood are of distance. Despite the closer urban conditions of Citizen Kane, the viewer is often far removed from the protagonist. In Blood, you are so close to the protagonist it's hard to breathe.

Duo-quotes of the week.

'It should be noted that the female RPG-er is a theoretical construct'

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=03062008

'People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, to keep out the scum.' Alan Moore

Quote of the Week

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.
Vladimir Putin

Salt of the Earth

Last Monday I thought I was going to watch a BBC3 pilot, so you can imagine my shock when I was subjected to a Shameless episode. Mrs Inbetweeny was written by one of Paul Abbots Abbotettes and it really shows. If Caleb Ranson is trying to emulate his mentor it's kind of cute, pathetic but cute. I think it's far more likely that Paul Abbot beat what little originality there was in the script and added all the phnah phnah, carry on, lowesest common denominator bullshit that dominates Shameless. The music sounds exactly the same as Clocking Off and Shameless which is a huge mistake as it sounded dated in Clocking Off. It's shot in the same way as Shameless and is full of that "people in the north are salt of the earth, poor but happy blah blah fucking blah" bollocks a that makes all northern dramas really shit and unrealistic. If Paul Abbot had any interest in helping new writers he'd let them write their own thing, not push them into writing a crap version of Shameless (which is also dire).
So three pilots in and two were shit and one was good. Being Human was original and showed a lot of promise, it also lacked the tedious sexual slapstick prevalent in mainstream british telly. Phoo Action, in an attempt to be "down with the kids", succeeded only in making a CBBC program with worse writing and the occasional swear word.The colours clashed in such a sickening way I'm sure I've developed some sort of retinal cancer. It's disgusting that Danny Cohen greenlit this awful program before it even aired, showing his disregard for what the viewers want and I'm sure pissing off the production companies responsible for the other five pilots. I'm convinced the only reason he greenlit Phoo Action is because it looks suitably "yoof" when it's plain to see it's just childish.

Quote of the Week

A militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of everyone of their flock, forever.
Iain Banks

Rules of the Wire

1. Play or be played
2.As such, life be divided into two camps; playas and playdas. Playdough may be shared between the two.
3. Everybody who aspires for any kind of power over their fellow man must be prepared to become really, really wealthy.Anyone who aspires to do good for their fellow man must settle with just really wealthy.
4. If you're going to be corrupt, be really corrupt. Swap bin liners full of cash for bin liners full of heroin. In broad daylight.
5. If you're police, drink a lot of alcohol. The more you're drinking, the better you can assess crime scenes or some shit like that.
6. The male/female role dichotomy cannot be broken, though there is considerable moral flexibility. Ditto police brutality.
7. Sheeeeit.
8. White men make very bad drug dealers. They try to hide this fact by doing bad impressions of black people.
9. If you're going into an interrogation thinking that you won't have to mentally or physically torture a suspect, you probably will.
10. If know how to pronounce someone's name, you will then have to learn how to un-pronounce it, bastardise it, or screw with it in some other way. THIS IS MANDATORY.
11. You fuck with me, I'll kill your whole family.
12. While drinking alcohol has the predictable effect of making the police drunk, violent and fucked up, drinking coffee and tea appear to have absolutely no effect on the smart, capable yet refreshingly laid back drug kingpins
13. If you are going to run a city, make sure it has a murder rate equivalent to a quiet mid after noon Baghdad. Or two Groznys.
14. The best, the absolute pinnacle of what you can hope to accomplish is to be a murdering, robbing, chain-smoking sodomite. Man up.
15. All accents are suspect. The thesps are clean, you can trust them.
16. S'all in the game, yo. Outside the game there will be refreshments served. (no vegans)

Fun and Jeopardy

Well this week saw the return of Lost, one of the most infuriatingly overrated programs ever to be made. It didn't start out bad, in fact I really liked it at first and then it started to dawn on me, none of the writing staff knows what’s going on. They have no better idea about this island than anyone else, that’s why they answer every question in the series with about three more. It's like playing a game and just when you think you're winning someone changes all the rules. Also if you take away the mystery you're left with a lot of clunky dialogue, a list of poorly constructed characters and acting that’s sub-par at best. Solving mysteries in programs is entertaining, but when all the characters are so dull and unlikable (with the exception of Hurley) it feels like instead of watching TV I'm reading a series of long essay questions. It also reeks of the worst kind of pretension, at a quick glance it's a smart program full of mystery and intrigue but on closer inspection it's a poorly written soap opera hidden beneath a cloud of absurdity. It's dull and utterly lacking in any kind of heart, I have no attachment to these one dimensional caricatures and so I don't give a toss about what happens to them on their sodding island.

Modern British telly at the moment seems to be governed by two words, fun and jeopardy, this seemed absurd when I first heard it (Boys from the Blackstuff was without fun and so was Threads but Funhouse was full of it) but with BBC’s Ashes to Ashes it all makes sense. Thank god for this, it's everything it needed to be and more, the writing is crisp, there's mystery and bucket loads of nostalgia. The acting is great, Keeley Hawes is brilliant and Phillip Glenister is a dream to watch playing the role he was born to play. I love the way they've taken the fun to a new level (the music swells as the camera pans to a statuesque Gene Hunt) and actually managed to up the jeopardy with DI Drake having to get back to her life because of her daughter. Hawes performance with her onscreen daughter brings real heart to the new lead that was always lacking in Life on Mars. It's also really scary; the David Bowie clown will now haunt my dreams along with Zippy and fucking George. Ashes to Ashes has managed to perfectly capture both fun and jeopardy (Gene Hunt on a speedboat under Tower Bridge clutching an Uzi), the only problem with it is that it raises the question of why is nothing else on British telly able to do it right?