There Will Be Reviews

I have seen the last great epic, and it is There Will be Blood. In this, it seems, Ebert and I disagree, and so be it. After all, this is a guy who gave four stars to a teen fantasy movie (which in some ironic sense was actually based on reality) called Almost Famous. Whatever. I guess I never realized what fucking seminal piece of work THAT was.

There Will Be Blood is that rarest of pieces (be they books, plays or films) which bares all, in terms of visuals, plot, and character makeup, yet does not tell you what to think of any of it and you come out not knowing what to think of it, just knowing that you are better off by the experience. It will be a film I will again enjoy watching in 50 years and many times in between.

Ultimately what There Will be Blood is about is about a man, and what we know about this man is terminally truncated... What family does he come from? There is no answer to that, and similar to that other self-made, and un-made, despot, Charles Foster Kane, the answer is specific in its absence (and "what family does he leave?" is equally done and un-done in a self-terminal way as we see in this movie's last scenes). But, unlike Kane (the man and the movie) who is visibly imposing as an African Elephant from the start of his telling, Daniel Plainview is a greaceful and deadly Blue Whale, sliding into view out of the water partially, just long enough to swat us flat with his tail, not out of spite, but simply for being close enough for him to mind. And like the scorpion of that river-crossing fable, we know that that is his nature, and that is all we are allowed to know.

The economics of cinema production will not bear out (with unusually unobtrusive, extremely minimal use of CGI, as this production has achieved) any large, set-piece oriented, location-based plot productions going forward; not without obtrusive corporate or governmental sponsorship. Just as the economics of movie promotion in the early sixties, competing against television, positively demanded that Omar Sharif's introductory shot in Lawrence of Arabia take minutes, not seconds, to ride into plain camera view from a dot in an otherwise blue-on-top-with-sand-beige-on-bottom infinity in order to impress on the movie-goers' experience that "this is something you cannot get from your puny living room screen", director P.T. Anderson, like another P.T. who came before him, is a right lean crowd wrangler, but the times have moved on from this sort of presentation for better and worse.

Going forward, afore and otherwise the screen, the challenge and the promise is to continue to present and appreciate, as Orson Welles and Paul Thomas Anderson have done, equally complex and self-contradictory characters -- identity presentations which challenge the audience in their own self-conceptions, in whatever setting, context and presentation medium; the trick is to do it all budget levels. This endeavor has both succeeded and failed in all settings, contexts and presentation mediums, and at all budget levels, but I look forward to future attempts. Art as dialectic, for lack of a better term (and to paraphrase Gordon Gecko), is good.

My thanks to Paul and Daniel for their work.