There Will Be Blood

I caught Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, There Will Be Blood at a press screening a few days ago. Anderson is without a doubt one of the best directors working today, Magnolia is my favorite film ever made, and his other three films are varying degrees of brilliant. Coming off Magnolia, he said “I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings, that I'll make pretty good movies the rest of my life. And maybe I'll make some clunkers, maybe I'll make some winners, but I guess the way that I really feel is that Magnolia is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make.”

His follow up to Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love further develops the magical realist strain present in the former, and does some really interesting things with film form. So, I was excited to see where he’d go next. Unfortunately, There Will Be Blood is easily Anderson’s worst films, a move towards conventional filmmaking at the expense of the unique voice that shone through in his first four films. It’s not a bad movie, but it doesn’t ignite a fire in me the way his other films do. Watching those other movies, I’m awed at the power of what cinema can do, here, there’s some great moments, but the film never quite gets it together, primarily due to the lead performance by Daniel Day Lewis, which ultimately sinks the film.

One of the film’s greatest strength is its physicality. In the opening sequence, we see Lewis’s Daniel Plainview fall down a mineshaft, and the sound and impact of the scene is painful. We’re right there with him as he hits the ground, and the death of a derrick worker later in the film is similarly effective. In those moments, you really get the sense of the danger of this work, but also the sense of discovery. Plainview begins the film as one man in a hole, trying to find wealth, and that pain he feels will be vindicated later in the film.

The film’s strongest material in its first half. We quickly get a sense of who Plainview is, and are able to segue into the film’s central set piece, his creation of a new Little Boston, a town so rich with oil that it’s literally seeping out of the ground. I love watching works like Deadwood or The Wire’s third season that detail the creation of a new civilization. In those works, we understand how a singular vision can lead to vast changes in the lives of all involved. I was feeling a McCabe and Mrs. Miller vibe, with the wealthy industrialist coming to build a town that would make him money.

The film’s most successful bits center around Plainview recreating the town in his image. There’s an interesting moral position here, on the one hand he is exploiting them for their oil. But, if he builds a school and makes them all wealthy, where’s the harm in that? The opening of the derrick is a moment for celebration, and watching the town gathered, we understand the impact this will have. The quiet moments where Daniel and his son, HW, hang out with the locals are some of the film’s most successful, capturing a kind of Days of Heaven utopian feel.

And, this is where the film’s central conflict works best. Daniel and Eli Sunday are rivals throughout the film. In the beginning of the movie, that rivalry sears the screen with its intensity. When Daniel passes over Eli to bless the well, you just know shit is going down. Eli is steaming, but can’t say anything, and Plainview is laughing beneath his genial mask.

Things build to the film’s strongest visual setpiece, the fire at the well. This is another visceral moment, with H.W. nearly getting blown off the derrick by the force of the oil. There’s some beautiful shots of men running to put the fire out as burning oil gushes into the air. The sequence is intense and a wonderful piece of visual spectacle. There are few sights more dazzling than that fiery oil erupting into the sky as the derrick burns. When Daniel abandons his son to go back to the derrick, we know everything we need to know about him. His great accomplishment in the town is burning, everything seems to be falling apart.

At this point, I was liking the film, but not loving it. It was in a position where a strong ending could make it into a masterpiece. Unfortunately, nothing late in the film comes close to matching the intensity or visual spectacle of the burning derrick sequence. That should have been the end of the film, as a visual symbol of Plainview’s destruction, it’s perfect, we don’t need to see any more, that should have been the ending.

The rest of the film is a series of events that don’t really build to anything. Stuff happens, but I never got the strong sense of forward momentum that the film had at the beginning. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the characters were interesting in and of themselves, but they’re just not. The biggest danger when making a period film is to treat the characters like an alien, unknowable people. These characters are bound by artifice and I have no sense of them as people like you or me. They exist in a kind of mythic world that doesn’t feel emotionally real.

The best period films, like The New World or Marie Antoinette, manage to make the characters emotionally relatable. In The New World, the filmmaking itself conveys the universality of the emotions. The shots cut through the artifice of period speech and bring emotion to the fore. Here, Anderson’s style is less overt than what he used in his previous films. I love the breaks from realism of his previous films, the singing sequence in Magnolia, or the lens flares in Punch Drunk Love. They are not real in the sense of something that would happen in our world, but they let us engage with the characters in a way that just showing events cannot.

This film is well shot, but it doesn’t do a good job of making great cinematic moments. Much like No Country for Old Men, I can’t really fault any of the cinematography, but it didn’t hit me like a good movie should. The film flirted with Malick’s style a lot, even using Jack Fisk as production designer, but comparing the movie to Malick makes its failures clear. Malick creates an intensely subjective cinema, one where you’re absolutely drowning in feeling and beauty. Here, you’re always at a distance from the emotion, the filmmaking doesn’t draw you in.

The score is at fault here too. I heard a lot of hype about how unconventional and effective it is, but it sounds fairly straightforward to me. There’s no anachronistic elements, nothing that jumps out at you, it’s just dissonant, buzzing strings and other similar sounds. It’s nothing like Jon Brion’s Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love scores, which provide momentum and additional aesthetic beauty to those films.

I’d suspect Anderson wanted to go minimalistic for this film, to prove that he could make films without “gimmicks.” But, is Malick a gimmicky filmmaker? Is Wong Kar-Wai a gimmicky filmmaker? Those are the guys that Anderson matched up to in his past two films, creating these emotionally immersive, wonder filled epics. Here, he’s making a much more straight ahead film, and it really bothers me that people are calling it more “mature” or a major leap forward. This is exemplary of a bias in film criticism which holds that movies set in the past are somehow inherently more worthy than present day stuff. This movie doesn’t feel alive in the way that his others do, unfortunately, mature is frequently a euphemism for more conventional. But, as Alan Moore said, reality is much less interesting than fantasy, and the lack of stylistic flourishes hurts the film for me.

My guess is that Anderson felt Day Lewis would provide the film with all it needed, and his goal as a filmmaker was to just stay out of the way and let Lewis do his thing. Unfortunately, Day Lewis, in my opinion, is not a very good actor. Now, that may be blasphemy to some, so let me explain. For me, acting should be about becoming a character. The best performances are the ones that don’t feel like performances at all, where you assume they just found this guy on the street and put him in the film. However, critics and awards organizations don’t usually award those performances because they’re not showy, if a person seems just like the character they’re playing, it means they’re not acting right? That’s probably why The Wire hasn’t got any acting awards.

Anyway, Lewis is a frequently awarded actor, and has this mythology about his total commitment to every role. This is the guy who sat in a wheelchair for three months for My Left Foot, lived in the forest for a year killing deer for Last of the Mohicans, and apparently he actually took a time machine and lived in 1911 for this role. That’s devotion, right? But, it’s this very devotion to the role that distances me from his work. He always seems to be so intensely into the role, I think more this guy is acting up a storm than just looking at Plainview and thinking, huh, this is a troubled, nasty guy. The performance itself becomes a kind of spectacle, the intensity is so powerful that critics mistake that for good acting. But, to me, the intensity is such that I’m taken out of the film, it’s an extratextual intensity, not motivated by what’s in the film. I never get the sense of Plainview as a human being, Lewis may stay in character all the time on set, but no one in real life stays in character all the time. We shift and change depending on the situation, and I didn’t feel that capacity for varied emotion from the character.

This didn’t really become apparent until the film’s final scene, when Lewis goes so far over the top, I got completely taken out of the film and started watching a guy yelling and going nuts. Should Lewis not prepare so thoroughly, should he be less intense? Not necessarily, obviously the performance works for a lot of people, but this just isn’t a kind of acting that works for me. Anderson’s gotten some phenomenal performances in his previous work, from all kinds of people, and I feel like he lost control of Lewis here. Compare Lewis’s performance to Adam Sandler’s in Punch Drunk. I felt more genuinely scared by Sandler’s intensity because it boils beneath the surface the whole film, only coming out in occasional spurts. There’s no room to be over the top, but we’re always worried he’s just going to lose it. Because Plainview has essentially no foils and no limits, there’s no danger in him completely losing it.

In the case of the last scene, I guess we’re supposed to be worried about Eli Sunday, but Paul Dano is such a non presence in the film, I don’t really care. The problem with his character is that the moment where he sells his soul doesn’t feel weighty enough. It’s a sadistic act by Daniel, but I never emotionally engaged with Eli, so I’m distanced from the whole scene. Daniel has changed a lot over the last sixteen years, Eli not so much, or at least not that I can tell. He has become more like Daniel, but only in one scene do we see that in action.

I think what Anderson was going for was to show us the pain Daniel feels at HW betraying him taken out on Eli, but knowing what he was going for doesn’t excuse the failure of that scene. I think he was going for a Kubrick style almost comedic ending, but it just doesn’t work. Lewis’s performance in that moment kills it for me. It’s already an underwritten finale, and I feel like he’s trying to bring this film to a close by himself if it kills him. There’s an intriguing bizarreness about the scene, and who knows, maybe on another day the ridiculous over the topness would have worked me. But, on this viewing, it didn’t. I wanted something stronger for the ending, I wanted a moment that matched the burning derrick, but nothing ever came close to that. There’s a few good scenes in the second half, but on the whole, we get no sense of what Daniel did to the town, no sense of how the lives were changed, and no real sense of the man himself. For all Lewis’s bravado, Daniel remains essentially unknowable. Perhaps it’s a bold choice not to let him open up, not to show us his feelings, but it leaves me distanced.

I wouldn’t call the film a failure, it’s a solid three of four stars, but from Anderson, it’s a major disappointment. It’s not a step backwards so much as it’s a step away from emotionally real, cinematically dazzling storytelling, towards a more traditional period epic. People have hailed the film for recalling classic Hollywood epics, but most of those movies weren’t good ones. They weren’t as strong as the intensely personal epics that Anderson crafted with his previous three films. There’s no moments in this film that come close to the manic “Jesse’s Girl” scene in Boogie Nights, pretty much any scene in Magnolia, or the gorgeous color flood kisses of Punch Drunk.

Now, you may say I’m criticizing the film simply because it’s different from those other films, doesn’t live up to what I want PTA to be. To that, I say, if this movie wasn’t by Paul, I probably wouldn’t have written half as much. I want to understand how such a great director could misstep in this way. In some ways, it reminds me of Tim Burton’s Big Fish. That was a good, solid movie, but it lacked the personal spirit that infused his best work. People really responded to it, but I don’t know that anyone loved it in the way they loved Edward Scissorhands. Who knows how things will go? Perhaps this will mark the ascent of Paul Thomas Anderson, beloved Oscar winning epic filmmaker, or maybe it’s just a palette clearing exercise before he returns to more personal work. Ultimately, I can only say how I responded to the film, how I responded to the Day Lewis performance and where the film succeeded and failed.

Film in 2007: A Medium in Flux

The past few years, I’ve made a bunch of posts about the changing relationship between cinema and television, and with each passing year, the visual works that have really amazed me have been more and more on TV. This year is being called a great year for movies, but I haven’t seen one movie that I really loved, a movie that I could wholeheartedly recommend to people as a great cinematic experience. We’re approaching the end of the year, and I haven’t seen one truly great movie, and only a few really good ones.

Last week, I saw No Country for Old Men, a movie that’s being called the best film of the year by a wide range of critics. Personally, I liked the film better the first time the Coens made it when it was a pop, scrappy B movie called Blood Simple. No Country isn’t a bad movie, but it never gave me a charge. The plot wasn’t predictable, but the film style was. Once I figured out there was no music, and they were shooting from a restrained, objective style, I just sort of settled in, and was never really wowed again. Was I surprised by developments late in the film? Yes, but the problem is, as a two hour film, it’s hard to make me engage with the characters in a way that makes me really care about that surprise.

It’s a loose connection, drugs mainly, but watching the film, none of the characters had half the pizzazz of even minor players on The Wire. The thing that long form TV shows can do that features can’t is let the characters just exist. In screenwriting, tightness is admired. If you put a gun on the wall in the first act, it’s got to go off in the third act. The mother in this film has to factor in later because she’s talked about early on. At this point, it takes a truly fucking amazing story to make me care about the characters in a film.

The thing that changed that was watching long form TV series. The best TV shows create fully realized world. In The Wire, a character can just be there, not serving a narrative purpose, rather existing until he’s needed again. Someone like Bodie doesn’t need to be in the show after the first season, but he’s an interesting character, and it’s nice to spend time with him. The gun on the wall doesn’t have to fire in the third act, maybe it just looks nice on the wall.

I think Bodie, to choose a random example, is a more interesting character than Welyn because Welyn is always subject to the needs of the narrative. Because the film is only two hours, shortcuts are used to show us who he is. We see the truck, we see his home life, we know the guy. But, we don’t really. We’re dropped in at a point in his life when something interesting happens. The longform nature of The Wire means that we can really become a part of the characters’ lives, and understand their entire world. There’s story that happens, but the real point of the work is to create a world.

Those shows have been so successful that they’ve turned narrative cinema as we knew it in the past into a second rate medium. It baffles me that a film like No Country could get so much enthusiasm, is a competently executed film enough to make people go nuts, to be ranked the sixteenth greatest film ever made on IMDB?! The filmmaking is solid, but solid isn’t exciting. I don’t get a charge out of watching a “well made” film because I can watch a well made epic in The Wire. On TV, there’s less of a need for showy craft because they can create truly interesting and fully developed characters and worlds. In a movie, just telling a story in well done way doesn’t do it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love movies, I just think they have to operate in a different way. TV has taken over stories, that’s gone as we knew it. What movies can do is tell stories in a way that TV can’t. That’s where style comes in. Wong Kar-Wai is the template for me, his films are not narrative based, instead they are about using film style to represent character emotion and create a really visual filmic experience. His movies could not be done on TV because they are about perfectly executed dazzling setpieces that immerse you deeply in platonic concepts of emotion. Looking at 2046, there is a narrative in there, but the specifics are stripped back to instead leave you with this overwhelming emotional force. It’s a perfect use of what only cinema can do.

Miami Vice is another great example of this, a film that also falls in the territory of The Wire. However, unlike The Wire, it chooses to dwell in an emotional place. The camerawork draws you into the characters’ lives and provides a constant string of visual spectacle. The visuals and music are entertaining, without any narrative attached to them, but the real purpose is to use these enveloping visuals to make us feel the relationship between Isabella and Sonny.

Looking at this year, the best movie so far has been Death Proof. What Death Proof did was decentralize the narrative and instead let us just hang out with the girls in the first half. The specifics conflict is not really spelled out, instead we just get the emotion of moments like Julia texting her boyfriend. And, throughout Tarantino is wowing us with the spectacle of his dialogue and the pitch perfect cinematography and musical choices. He is showing us a place and letting us hang out there. Narrative occasionally enters the film, but the real focus is the hanging out.

Planet Terror, its grindhouse counterpart, is another fantastic film. This was a movie that went so far over the top, the joy is in watching Rodriguez push his film to comical, grotesque heights. In both Terror and Death Proof, there’s so much joy in the filmmaking itself, such a love of the material, it’s infectious. It’s this pop fantasia that separates those films from most horror films.

Other than that, there’s not much to speak about for this year. I saw There Will Be Blood the other day, which I can’t fully review for a couple of weeks thanks to a press blackout, but I’ll just say that it lacks the pop dynamism of Anderson’s other films, and is marred by an awfully hammy Daniel Day Lewis performance. Rather than use film technique to let us feel character emotion, as in Magnolia, Anderson just lets Lewis go nuts, to the point that he completely loses touch with reality. I never at one point got the sense that this was not a performance, that it was a real person. It baffles me that he’s in consideration for a best actor award, the guy should get some cheese to go with that ham.

It disappointed me because there were some great moments in there, but again, critics are hailing Anderson for the film’s “maturity,” which is a code word for boring, unobtrusive filmmaking. When you can do much with the medium, just sitting back and letting things happen is pointless. I don’t want minimalism, I want filmmaking that creates stirring emotional moments, the sort of filmic crescendos you can only get in movies. Look at a moment like Pocohontas’s arrival in England in The New World, that is a just awe inspiring moment because of the full combination of screenwriting, shot choice, music choice and performance. You couldn’t get that awe if you used a more minimalist style.

To use Anderson’s own work, what makes Magnolia so special is the way cinematic technique is used to make us emotionally engage with these characters. Look at the audacious “Wise Up” sequence, that sequence gets to me so much, and just those elegant, silent push in shots of the characters do so much. Blood lacks that grandeur, it’s like Anderson saw his sets and decided he didn’t have to do anything more, just sit back and film it. Coming off the formal experimentation and virtuosity of his past three films, it’s distressing to watch him retreat to a more hands off style.

It’s not mature to make movies like that, it’s that adolescent notion that ‘realism’ is somehow more valid than fantasy. Wong Kar-Wai movies may not look like the real world, but they feel like my subjective experience of reality. There are moments in Miami Vice that feel like what I’ve done in my own life, and that’s what cinema can do, that TV cannot, capture our internal feelings. But, it can only be done through the use of film technique that can be considered “showy” or “intrusive.” But, believe me, the unreality of the “Wise Up” sequence pales in comparison to the unreality of Lewis’s film closing histrionics. It’s particularly disappointing coming off the lighter, but still magical Punch Drunk Love, a decidedly underrated film.

So, if this is a great movie year, what are the great movies? What do I need to see that I missed? People who’ve read the blog know my taste, so perhaps they could recommend this year’s Domino, the kind of crazy, but great film that can slip through the cracks.

2007 Movie Preview

2006 was a pretty good year for cinema, a lot of my favorite directors had projects coming out, and most of them turned out quite good. And next year looks like it should have an equally exciting plethora of new films to delight and enthrall.

10. Electroma - This is Daft Punk's film about a robot's quest to be human. It's supposedly very experimental, and seems like the kind of thing that could be either great or tedious depending on your mood. But, I love the trailer and I'm very curious to see what they do as film directors. I'm not sure what the status of this is, it showed at Cannes back in May, but I havent' seen much since. Hopefully it will re-emerge and get a 2007 release.

9. Smiley Face - This year, Gregg Arkai became one of my favorite directors, and I'm eager to see some new work from him. that said, this one sounds like a much more straight ahead mainstream comedy than he's done in the past. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as long as he maintains his own voice in there. The plot, surrounding a woman who eats some pot brownies and has a crazy day offers the potential for some Doom Generation or Nowhere style craziness. After the intense drama of Mysterious Skin, he's earned a lighter film.

8. Be Kind Rewind - Another director's lightening up for a more accessible mainstream comedy. However, with Gondry at the helm, it's sure to be idiosyncratic and full of weird, wonderful images. The premise, that a guy who work sat a video store gets zapped with a magnet, erases all the tapes, and has to remake them himself, is absolutely ridiculous, but full of comic potential. Jack Black is great in the right role, and this sounds like it has the potential to harness that School of Rock go getterness. The combination of him and Gondry should be brilliant.

7. Grindhouse - Tarantino has never made a film that's less than great, and he's only gotten better as time passed. So, I'm going to check out anything he does. That said, I feel like this film will allow him to indulge all his worst instincts, and the premise, a slasher film with a car as the killer, is pretty inane. Without considering the director, the Robert Rodriguez side of the project looks a lot more interesting, Rose McGowan with the machine gun leg is genius and we've even got Freddy Rodriguez, Six Feet Under's Rico, in the film. Ultimately, I think this will be a joycore film, full of so much love from the creators, you can't help but get caught up in it.

6. Sweeney Todd - Burton made a virtually unmatched run of quality films from 1988-1994, but since then he's been a bit underwhelming. After the good, but not great Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I said that he should do a musical, so I was excited to hear he'll be adapting Sweeney Todd. I haven't seen the show, but the subject matter fits perfectly into his visual world. Rarely do you see a musical that fully uses the possibilities of cinema, I'm really excited to see what Tim brings to it. On top of that, there's a fantastic cast, Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen and even Anthony Head. This has the potential to be Burton's best film in a long time.

5. I'm Not There - Normally, I would be disgruntled that we're seeing yet another musician biopic. These films are usually boring reenactments of culturally iconic moments that give no real insight into the person they're interrogating. The only two musician biopics that really worked were Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, both directed by Todd Haynes, and what do you know, he's directing this film as well. Haynes is a conniseur of pop culture, using cultural trends to examine the direction of society as a whole. Superstar and Velvet Goldmine are more about a time and place than specific people and I'd imagine this film will be the same. The fact that there's seven actors playing Dylan could potentially be gimmicky, but it makes me think this'll be a crazy, surreal film and that's a good sign. He's never made a bad film and I doubt he'll go wrong here. Plus, the cast is just fantastic: Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Heath Ledger to name just a few.

4. There Will Be Blood - Finally we're getting a new Paul Thomas Anderson film. Magnolia is the best film of the past twenty-five years, PTA the rare person who's equally adept at writing and directing. Paul himself said he didn't think he'd ever top Magnolia, and I'd agree, but I'm still eager to see new work. There's not too many details out on the project, but I've got to say, a period piece of this nature is not what I'd really want to see from him. Still, all his films are amazing in their own way, and someone with his talent is going to make films that are full of compelling details even if the whole doesn't work. I'm eager to see some stills or a trailer because right now I really have no idea that this movie will be like. It's just PTA's name that earned it this place on the list.

3. I'm a Cyborg (But That's OK) - After wrapping up the Vengeance Trilogy in spectacular fashion, Park Chanwook moves on to a lighter, but still odd, comedy. The premise of this one is great and I think it has the potential to be that rare kind of movie that is simultaneously very funny and very touching. It's difficult territory, but the hard edged sensibility of Park means we won't drift too far into melodrama. And, as the trailer shows, virtually no one working today can make images as striking as Park's.

2. Southland Tales - Many of my favorite films have been described as self-indulgent messes, so I wasn't too wary when Southland Tales got savaged at Cannes. I'm increasingly less concerned with narrative coherence, instead interested in seeing moments of cinematic transcendence, and even the bad reviews concede this film offers those. Kelly's Donnie Darko is one of the best films ever, even though every re-edit and comment he makes about the film makes it sound like he has no idea why it worked in the first place. But, I still believe in him, this one sounds so over the top weird, I can't wait to see it. If Inland Empire showed us anything, it's that a three hour, barely narrative piece of directorial self indulgence can be utterly satisfying. Of course, Kelly isn't Lynch, so this one could really just be bad, but there's only one way to find out.

1. My Blueberry Nights - Wong Kar-Wai is the best film director of all time, he has redefined the way the medium can be used, inventing a totally different, more emotional, language for cinema. No one works like he does, and no one makes films like his. So, a new Wong Kar-Wai movie is an event. 2046 was a great closer to one part of his career, and My Blueberry Nights offers a lot of changes. The major one is that he's shooting in America, in English, with an American cast. I love the Hong Kong cityscapes his characters usually inhabit, but Happy Together worked well in Argentina, pushing WKW to even more visual experimentation. Perhaps shooting in America will do the same. An article I read about the shooting made it sound like this will have plenty of classic Wong Kar-Wai moments, though they're taking place in a Midwestern diner instead of a Hong Kong fastfood stand. He's got a fantastic cast, and the way he works, he seems to push people to their best work. And, it'll be great to have my first viewing of this movie in a theater instead of on an import DVD.

In addition to films, there's a few other things I'm eagerly awaiting.

True Blood - Alan Ball's work on Six Feet Under is some of the best writing ever, and I was thrilled to hear he's doing another HBO series. This one involves vampires. A supernatural conceit like this should allow him to mix things up a bit from Six Feet Under. Rarely do you see a TV auteur like Ball do a second series, primarily because a series uses up so much story, how much can one man have left? Clearly, SFU was very personal, and I'll be curious to see how the way he reimagines his trademark themes to fit in this new genre context. I'm not sure if the show will actually premiere this year, but whenever it starts up, I'll be there.

The Sopranos - More HBO, we're going to finally see the end of The Sopranos in April. There are a select group of TV shows that I consider to be in the pantheon, the absolute best series, and The Sopranos is the only one is still on the air. I'm really curious to see what happens in the final season, will Chase continue the lethargic, introspective style of the second half of the sixth season or will things rev up and end in fire? I'd guess it'll be more of a fade away than a burn out, but we'll see. Even when it's frustrating, there's no current show that can match it.

New Babylon 5 - I've still got a lot of material to go through, but I'm happy that JMS is doing some new stuff in the Babylon 5 universe. The direct to DVD format has been much discussed as an option for continuing cult shows with a small, but devoted fanbase. I would love to see the movies become wildly successful, and possibly open the door for the Buffyverse direct to DVD movies Joss wanted to do. He claimed it came down to a budget issue, so maybe some success here would inspire Fox to do an about face and fund those movies. Maybe it's been too long, but if Babylon 5 can return after eight years, why can't Buffy after only three?

Buffy Season Eight Comics - Speaking of Buffy, if we can't get DVD movies, at least there's something coming in. I'll be picking up a monthly comic again for the first time in a while. It's been too long since I spent time with these characters and I'm eager to see what they're up to. The preview pages indicate we're still in a season seven millieu, which doesn't thrill me, but I'm sure there'll be some great stuff in there as well. I don't know that a project like this has ever been attempted, a canon continuation of a series in comic book form by the original creators. I'm excited to see how it works.

Morrison/JH Williams Vertigo series - This one is the most hypothetical. In a recent interview, Grant said he was working on an original series for Vertigo with JH Williams on art. The two of them did amazing work on the two Seven Soldiers bookends, in the first creating an entire universe of believable characters and then destroying it in only thirty pages. The second was a hypercompressed pop speed pill, one of the most dizzying, awe inspiring single issues I've ever read. Morrison's projects are frequently riddled with artist problems, the few times all has gone well on art, as with Flex Mentallo, We3 or Kill Your Boyfriend, he's made masterpieces. The thought of JH on a long term project with Morrison is almost too much to handle, I just hope that it happens.

Punch Drunk Love

As I mentioned before, I just watched the film Punch Drunk Love for the second time. PDL was Paul Thomas Anderson's follow up to Magnolia, one of my top five favorite films of all time, so when I watched this the first time, I was expecting something great, if the same level of transcendence that Magnolia reaches. On the first viewing, what's most striking is how minimalist the film is. After the excess, in terms of style and story scope, of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, PDL sees Anderson pull back and do something much smaller and intimate. There's only two developed characters, and there's almost none of the cutting between different plotlines that was used to such great effect in Magnolia. Instead, this film dives deep into the world of a man who's got some problems.

The first really bold choice that Anderson makes with this film is casting Adam Sandler. Unlike most of my generation, I'm a big Sandler hater, his semi-retarded man-child characters are not funny or entertaining to watch, and along with Chris Farley, his output represents a nadir in terms of films that people seem to genuinely love. But, what Anderson does with this film is take a variation on the traditional Sandler character and play the film as a drama instead of a comedy, or at least a dark comedy instead of a straight ahead comedy.

Though I'm no expert, looking at his other films, you can see Sandler's social ineptitudes played for laughs, and his tendency for manic rage provides some of the biggest comic payoffs. In this film, there's a number of scenes that would have been done as comic setpieces in his other films, notably the smashing of the glass and the bathroom scene, but here, rather than focusing on the act itself, Anderson dwells on the aftermath. The emotional crux of the bathroom scene isn't the fact that he has this rage, we've seen that before, it's observing how this rage has alienated him from society, beautifully done here in the awkward conversation between Barry and the restaurant owner. We sympathize with Barry, but it's completely understandable why this guy would want Barry to get out of his restaurant.

So, the entire film is in some ways designed to challenge the generic conventions of the 'Adam Sandler movie,' and essentially take him out of the cartoon world he usually lives in and show the real world consequences of his characters' actions. This is the Watchmen of Adam Sandler films, deconstructing the generic elements and repositioning them in a real world context.

But, someone with as strong an authorial voice as Anderson would not use a film merely to riff on what's come before, or at least what's come before in one specific genre. Instead, the film becomes an odd fusion of this completely naive, uncorrupted belief in the power of true love to conquer all and the gritty identity theft scheme, which leads to some moments of extreme violence, both physical and verbal. It's the same thing I was talking about in my review of 3 Iron, a fairy tale love story that is occasionally punctuated by the crushing weight of the real world.

There's two primary themes the film touches on. One is finding a way to use one's rage and indignation at past trauma to create a stronger self in the present. This is almost a superhero origin story, as Barry has to learn to use his power to fight evil instead of using it to destroy himself. As the film begins, Barry is totally alone, he has no outlet for his emotions, and any attempts to put on a false smile around his sisters are eventually undermined by their constant dwelling on the ways they used to embarrass him as a child. This drives him to once again break the glass, and his inability to have a real relationship with anyone drives him to the phone sex line.

The phone sex line seems designed to show the way that love has been commodified in modern society. The pure expression of love is gone, but you can buy fake love for $2.99 a minute. But, that's not even the extent of it, this group that claims to offer love actually uses loneliness as a means of stealing peoples' identities. They find people at their greatest moment of weakness and use their own shame as a way to exploit them. Barry's shame is what constrains him through the whole first half of the film. He's ashamed at what he did as a child, he's ashamed he called the phone sex line, he's so embarrased about what he did in the past that he's unable to open himself up and make connections with new people in the present.

The fear that Lena has heard bad things about him from his sister is what prevents him from first going out with her, Only when she opens up to him can he go out with her, this is something that's repeated after their first date, only when she calls him and says that she wanted to kiss him does he have the courage to fully express his emotions.

After his trip to Hawaii, Barry seems imbued with power, and as he says at the end of the film, "I have love and that makes me strong." He fights and defeats four men with no problem when he feels that they have threatened Lena, and when he goes to confront Dean, it is his utter confidence in himself and his power that allows him to win. Dean is someone who's able to push people around by calling them on their mistakes, through sheer force of will, but when Barry matches his strength, he cowers and lets Barry go.

And now free from the shackles of the past, Barry can embrace his love, and things look good for his future. The real emotional love has defeated the commodified shameful love .

From a technical point of view, Anderson again creates a challenging and always intriuging film that pushes a lot of boundaries in regards to what's acceptable in cinema. The most notable visual element is the brilliant use of color. By associating Barry with blue and Lena with red, he's able to play up the emotion of any scene just by well placed color. When Barry stands on a red rug at the hotel, we know that Lena will be along soon. When they're driving and the entire scene is bathed in blue light, we get the feeling that Barry is comfortable, at home. The use of lens flares and lines of light moving across the screen creates some really striking images.

And most importantly, Anderson is a master at framing a scene. The way he shoots is frequently unconventional, but almost always works to achieve the effect intended. There's some great tracking shots here, most notably the one in which Lena and Barry walk out of the restaurant and are followed by the huge truck. I also love the way he pushes the whites, in the opening scenes and in the grocery store. And the integration of music is top notch as well. The use of lush strings calls back to the classical Hollywood era, but it's percussive backing to scenes that's really interesting. Frequently the characters behave as if they are actually hearing the music and move accordingly.

All that said, I do have some issues with the film. I don't really like Barry in the first half of the film, and even in the second half, she still seems not quite grown up, though Lena also seems a bit childlike, so perhaps they belong together. Also, the change in tones works at times, but occasionally it's just too jarring, and prevents the film from achieving the full romantic feeling he was going for. I don't think it reaches the same perfect romantic height as Amelie, and it's that sort of pure feeling of love that I think Anderson was going for here. Also, as I said with Hard Eight, there's just not as much here as in Anderson's other films. I think Anderson's strength lies in showing us a lot of characters interacting, so having one main characters seems a bit restrictive. But that doesn't in any way mean that this isn' an engrossing and successful film.

The casting here is interesting. Only two of the 'Anderson Company Players' appear here, and in what are essentially glorified cameos. Sandler is great here, I think his performance is a complete success. Emily Watson is top notch as well, in a character not that far removed from her role in Breaking the Waves. It was also cool to see Mary Lynn Raskjub, who's great on 24, get some film work. Do I miss Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, etc.? Yes, but if Anderson felt the need to write parts for all of them in every one of his films, it would start to hurt the films, as in the case of Christopher Guest's most recent stuff, where there's all kinds of narrative digressions just so they can fit in all their actors.

Coming off Magnolia, nothing was going to be completely satisfying, but PDL works by going in a completely opposite direction and crafting a different, but still interesting story. Anderson's one of my favorite directors and I can't wait to see what he gives us next.

PTA Quote

I watched Punch Drunk Love today, and I'll have a review of that tomorrow, but in looking online, I came across a really interesting quote from PTA.

"I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings, that I'll make pretty good movies the rest of my life. And maybe I'll make some clunkers, maybe I'll make some winners, but I guess the way that I really feel is that Magnolia is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make."
- Paul Thomas Anderson

This is something I'd definitely agree with, but I find it interesting that PTA himself views Magnolia as sort of the pinnacle of his style, and despite being so young, he basically feels that he could never top it. Most directors do a bunch of movies and then do what I'd call their 'compilation movie,' a film that features all their stylistic tricks, the unique things that make a film theirs. For David Lynch, this was Mulholland Dr., with its 50s style heroine, red curtains, lip synching performers, blonde/brunette dichotomy, etc. For Tim Burton, it's The Nightmare Before Christmas, for Wong Kar-Wai it's 2046. These are the films that so immersed in the director's style, it basically means that they have to make a radical change with their next project.

Magnolia does this for PTA, it takes the style he'd developed in Boogie Nights and brings it to the extreme. In this one film he defines his style and makes any future explorations with it irrelevant. Magnolia is such a singular entity that to go back and make another big ensemble movie would be nearly impossible. It took Robert Altman 18 years to follow up Nashville with Short Cuts, and it could take just as long for PTA to go back to the style of film that defined him.

So, with Punch Drunk Love, I doubt he expected to top Magnolia, that's just too big a task. Magnolia is one of those transcendent films where everything comes together and works. I never expected PTA to top Magnolia, but I find it interesting that he agrees with me there. Is that a bit disheartening, yeah, but I think it's PTA being realistic and that I respect.

Hard Eight a.k.a Sydney

Yesterday I watched PT Anderson's film Hard Eight for the second time. He ran into a lot of studio trouble when making the film, most notably with the title, he wanted the film to be called Sydney, but the studio insisted on Hard Eight. But at this point, Anderson had only done some PA work, so he didn't have the clout to control his own film. Now, he had done some shorts before, but for someone who'd never done a feature, Hard Eight is a really well made, restrained debut, though watching it at the time, I seriously doubt most people would see the potential for something like Magnolia coming from this guy.

But, to the film itself. The most striking thing in Hard Eight is how slow paced the film is, I don't think it's boring at all. but it's a film that's much more about getting you into an emotional space than conveying a narrative. Befitting its lead character, the film is almost tired, and any action seems to require a lot of exertion. Most of the film consists of dialogue scenes, and there's not that much music, though what music there is, is great. The film's aspect ratio is 2.35:1 and Anderson uses the full frame, frequently playing dialogue scenes in single take long shots that distance you from the characters, and reduce the tension that could be present in some scenes.

The reason for this is because the film's main character is someone who almost never expresses his emotions. Sydney just appears at the beginning of the film, and for the vast majority of its run time, his motives are unclear. We see his relationship with John, but don't get a real sense of what the man himself is like. The only things we know about him are the way he treats people, specifically the respect he gives Clementine and the disdain he has for Jimmy. So, rather than try to tell us who this guy is and what he's really feeling through filmmaking techniques, Anderson maintains the ambiguity by playing things very low key and just allowing the events to play themselves out.

That's not to say this is a film where the technique is invisible. Anderson's eye for a great frame is evident right from the start, and I was frequently struck by how he uses framing to create suspense, as in the scene where Sydney drops his keys in the car, and is hunched down looking for him, but the camera stays looking out the window, making us think that Jimmy is going to attack him there. However, he subverts this expectation by cutting and having Jimmy smash through the other window. Anderson makes great use of the lights in Las Vegas and Reno, their garishness a contrast to the low key human characters. He also has some great tracking shots, foreshadowing the astonishing stuff he would do in later films.

Anderson is one of the very rare filmmakers who I would consider equally brilliant as a writer and a director. Most people are either directors who write, like Wong Kar-Wai or David Lynch, or writers who direct, like Kevin Smith. Anderson is so good at both aspects of the process that you can't imagine anyone else directing his script, or him directing a film he didn't write. Hard Eight is like this as well, the film consists of mostly dialogue scenes, with very little overt stylization or action, and yet through the filmmaking, he creates a mood that really defines the film, and makes it completely different from the countless other neo-noirs that emerged in the late 90s.

The film's greatest failing is ultimately its lack of scope, especially in comparison to Anderson's subsequent films. It's an expertly made film that does everything it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do isn't that unique or ambitious. That's why I wouldn't put the movie on the same par as a Magnolia or Boogie Nights.

Looking at the film in the context of Anderson's later work, there's a few things that stand out. One is the cast. Philip Baker Hall gets the spotlight here and gives a phenomenal performance. His acting is all in the way he carries himself, watching him you know he's been through so much. John C. Reilly also does his first work with Anderson here, and he's not quite as good as in his later roles. He's solid overall, but there's a few lines that just felt unrealistic to me, he really comes into his own with Magnolia. Philip Seymour Hoffman does a one scene cameo and he's pretty solid, though I seriously have to question the mullet. And Melora Walters turns up very briefly at the end, her performance with only a couple of lines was apparently good enough to inspire Anderson to bring her back for Boogie Nights, and subsequently to the best role in Magnolia.

Other than Anderson regulars, I loved Gwyneth Paltrow in this movie. This is the only movie I've seen her in that's set in the present, and it was nice to see her divorced from mannered styles of acting and instead do something more grounded in reality. She's great here, nicely conveying the false persona she puts on to attract clients, and then subtly letting her guard down around Sydney.

In that respect, this film touches on a core Anderson theme, and that's how lonely people can turn themselves into new families, families that are frequently more loving than their 'real' families.. Here, Sydney acts as a father to John and Clementine, helping these two struggling people become self sufficient. This family clearly means more to him than his biological family, who he hasn't seen in a long time. That same dynamic turns up in Boogie Nights, when Jack brings together a collection of loner misfits and turns them into an extended family that works on the films. When Dirk bottoms out at the end of the film, he doesn't go back to his mother and father, he goes back to Jack and Amber, and they take him in again.

Magnolia is the ultimate extension of this theme, as people struggle to form new bonds as a result of the awful families they had in the past. Claudia ultimately finds solace in a reconstructed family with her mother and Jim, and Frank and Linda become more family than they'd ever been, united by the loss of Earl.

And in Punch Drunk Love, we see Barry struggling to live with his family. Though, you'll notice I haven't referred to that film much. I only saw it once, about two years ago, so I bought it off Ebay, it should be here in a couple of days, and I'll review it once I see it, having become an expert on Anderson. Though both PDL and Hard Eight lack the outrageous ambition that made Boogie Nights and Magnolia landmarks in cinematic history, at least for me.

So, Hard Eight stands as a wonderful mood piece, that captures the lives of a few people passing through Sydney's world. And at the end, he finds himself back where he began, with blood on his hands, and the knowledge that no matter what he does, he can never completely atone for what he'd done.

Magnolia: PTA's Masterpiece

Magnolia is my favorite film made during my lifetime. If you look at my top 100 list, you've got Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner above this film, both obviously great films, but films that are triumphs mainly of world building and plot. Magnolia is a triumph of character development, if I could have made any film that's ever been made, I wish it was this one. I love the way PTA throws everything he's got onto the screen, creating a film that's a symphony of modern existence.

The thing that makes Magnolia so special is the way that it is simultaneously technically astonishing and thoroughly emotionally engaging. You watch this film and you're feeling everything that the characters feel, but if you step back, you can see how PT Anderson has shot the film in such a way as to completely draw you into the emotional lives of these characters.

That's what makes the film different than the work of Altman, who's a widely noted inspiration on Anderson. Altman tells these huge overlapping stories as a way to show the distance between human beings. They may meet and interact, but we stay on the side as observers, essentially getting a God's eye view of what's happening in Nashville, or in Short Cuts, California. Anderson doesn't want us to just be observers, he wants to feel everything that the characters feel, and he wants to show that we're all the same, and we only have to reach to one another, then we're not alone. This causes the film to be radically different, and I would say much better, than the Altman films that inspired it.

I think one of the things that garnered the film a lot of criticism is just how melodramatic it is. The events are massive and the emotions always ramped up to extremes. One of the most notable things about the film is the way that all the events feel like one story, building to a climax, not a bunch of disparate threads. All the characters go through a similar arc, starting out with their depressing mundane lives, then suffering some kind of crisis, reaching a low during the 'Wise Up' sequence.

The 'Wise Up' sequence was my favorite part of the film on the first viewing, the moment when I knew that this movie was something completely unique, a film I would treasure for the rest of my life. The sequence would seem totally ridiculous out of context, but when you get lost in the world of the film, it's exactly what's needed. It's crucial in terms of the narrative because it unites all these characters in a way that they hadn't been united before. They're all feeling the same thing, driving home the point that the film is basically one emotional arc, shared by nine people. The boldness to completely break with what makes sense in favor of presenting something that's emotionally involving is one of the best choices Anderson makes.

At the end of the film, all the characters find a kind of peace. Things may not be perfect, but a lot of the conflict is gone, and nearly all of them have either found someone they can share their emotions with, or at least are able to realize that they are not alone. And after all this darkness, the film's final moment, Claudia's smile tells us that better things are out there. That smile is so good, it inevitably makes me smile myself, it's the perfect emotional catharsis after the dark events of the film. The moment is so good that Joss Whedon 'borrowed' it to use as the final shot of Buffy's last episode. I love the way Anderson lets the music tell the story, we can faintly make out Jim's speech, but the real emotion of it is present in the music, both of them need to save each other, Jim's sealed off, boring life can only be saved by a relationship with the more exciting, but troubled Claudia. Together, they can find a way to help each other open up and become a successful unit. It's all present in the song, and when she smiles, we know she's going to at least give it a try with him.

The film, despite its massive running time, and huge scope, has a rather simple message, explained by two lines at the end of the film. One is when Stanley says, "You should be nicer to me," the other is Jim's question "What can we forgive?"

The two are tied together in the parent/child conflict that drives so much of the narrative. Many of the younger adults in the film, Frank, Donnie and particularly Claudia, have been scarred by parental abandonment or abuse, these old events still casting a huge shadow over the way they live now. For Claudia, it has lead to a life of noncommitment, the abuse cycle continuing in bad relationships with men she meets, and a coke habit. Donnie struggles to keep a job and relate emotionally to people, all the while blaming his problems on the fact that his parents stole his money from him as a child.

Frank is a bit more complex, on the surface he is together, but it seems like he has become a hyper-exaggerated version of his father, a philanderer who left Frank to take care of his mother as she was dying. This abandonment causes him to create a public persona of strength and total control, all built on a lie. He has no true emotional connections in his life, likely because the pain is still too strong.

So, all these characters build their lives out of the trauma they experienced as children. And as adults, they're left with the question of how long can they continue to function this way before they slip further into loneliness. In the course of the film, both Claudia and Frank are given the chance to forgive their parents. Frank receives a call saying that his father wants to speak with him before he dies. Earl never gets to say what he feels, but it is the act of reaching out that makes the difference, and coupled with the interview, forces Frank to confront his feelings. Earl may never know how his son felt, but for Frank, it is an emotional catharsis. His change is most evident in the fact that at the end of the film, he is able to go to the hospital and support Linda, no longer resenting this woman who 'replaced' his mother.

For Claudia, there is no real reachout from her father. Jimmy remains unable to admit what he did to Claudia as a child, claiming to honestly not know whether it happened, something that's clearly a lie when you consider his suicide attempt. Claudia may never be able to forgive her father, the things that he did to her are so painful that he may not deserve forgiveness, but what happens at the end of the film is that Claudia realizes, no matter what her father did to her, she is not a bad person, and she still has people who care about her. At first she runs from Jim, afraid that her bad history will inevitably lead to the destruction of their relationship, even if it also means losing a chance for true love. At the end of the film, it is Jim's kind words, coupled with her mother's support that allows Claudia to break the cycle and take a chance on a relationship that might be more than just a one night stand. When she smiles, the weight of years of pain is lifted and she embraces the change in her life.

Stanely is critical because he shows how a strong person can prevent abuse from happening. He could become Donnie, but rather than allowing his father to control his life, he asserts himself, and claims a unique identity. When he says "Be nicer to me," his father may not listen, but Stanley recognizes that he is not at fault, it's his father who has the problem, and that is a critical distinction. With that self confidence, he can avoid becoming like Donnie, someone who feels utterly defeated by a world 'out to get him.'

Where does Donnie wind up at the end of the film? I think he realizes that he's going down a bad path and is forced to assess his life. His crime is something that we can forgive, and perhaps because of the assistance Jim gives him, he will recognize how close he came to jail, and start to turn his life around. Either way, Donnie has bottomed out, and by now, at least he knows there's a problem, and perhaps more importantly, the kindness that Jim gives him shows him that he is not alone in the world, there are people who will view him as more than 'Quiz Kid Donnie Smith,' and instead see him as a person who has a lot of love to give.

From the point of view of the younger characters, the older generation are monsters, who have unwittingly destroyed their children's lives, with little regard for anything more than their own wants. However, the film also shows the way in which the guilt of their actions has destroyed a number of the characters. They have to question their own behavior and find out what they can forgive themselves for.

The two most explicitly parallel characters in the film are Earl and Jimmy Gator. Earl is the producer of Jimmy's TV show, and the two of them are essentially the same character, just in different stages of development. As Earl is dying of cancer, Jimmy is just finding out that he has it. Both feel incredibly guilty about the lives they led, and the infidelities they've had. Both characters also long to make amends to a child who they've hurt.

At the end of the film, Earl dies without ever being able to resolve things with Frank, however, Frank has found a catharsis. The frog rain stops Jimmy from killing himself, and leaves him the chance to finally admit his wrong and apologize to Claudia. I don't think they can ever have a strong relationship together, but if he actually admits to her he did something wrong, it will leave them both in a better place. So, the frog gives Jimmy the chance to express his remorse, a chance that Earl never got.

The character closest to these two is Linda, who expresses similar regret about her behavior, and longs to come clean with Earl, even though he's too far gone to really understand her. It's difficult to see Earl speaking only of Lily on his death bed, even as Linda is so anguished, because of the pain she felt from screwing around on him. She really loved him, even if he viewed her only as a trophy wife. She, like Jimmy, seeks to kill herself as an escape from the guilt, but is also saved by a random action, namely Dixon stealing her wallet and calling the police for her. This ties into one of the major theses of the film, that small acts of kindness can save lives, this kid is motivated by selfish means, but he isn't going to just let Linda die, and that sacrifice is what ultimately saves Linda, and allows her to resolve her issues with Frank. And by resolving things with Linda, Frank in some ways is able to come to terms with who his father was.

So, forgiveness is a major question. Many of the characters do horrible things, but the film is about the ways in which we can overcome the bad things done to us through acts of kindness, sometimes we have to let things go, and if there's something we can't let go, it's that person's fault, not the victim's.

The importance of human kindness is another critical theme in the film. A major motif is people who are treated like objects, used to further someone's agenda. In Frank's seminar, he approaches relationships as a form of sexual conquest, with no thought about making an actual connection. He reduces women to the status of objects, who can be fooled through his clever strategies.

In this respect, Frank is quite similar to Stanley's father, Rick. Rick views Stanley as an easy cash source, he doesn't take joy from what Stanley is doing, he just wants him to win so he can make more money. This is most likely a result of his frustration with his own failure as an actor. Through his son's media celebrity, he sees the chance to make up for his own lack of success, however that results in him hurting his son and putting the pressure on him that leads to his collapse on the game show set.

Donnie is the result of this sort of pressure, viewed as an object by his parents, he now finds that he has a lot of love to give, but no way to express this love. He has no template for a relationship in which he is viewed as a human being. This is made explicit in the scene where Solomon says that he hired him for his celebrity, not for his skill as a salesman.

So, the primary way to un-objectify someone is to treat them with kindess and understanding. The characters who most notably do this are Jim and Phil. Phil is interesting because he's the one character who doesn't have any personal trauma or desire. His role in the film is solely to help others, and in that capacity, he goes way beyond what is expected of him. As a nurse, his responsibility is solely to care for Earl's medical needs, but in this case, he goes on a strange quest to find Frank. There's the hilarious scene in which he orders porn magazines from a pharmacy, as well as his extended phone conversation with Frank's people. I love the scene where he's talking to the phone operator about his mother's cancer, it's one of the countless scenes in this movie where we see both how much people are connected, and how a small act of kindness can break down the walls that keep us alone.

In the end, Phil is a great example of what Jim is talking about at the end of the film when he describes police work, saying that it's not a job where you take a lunch hour, it's a 24 hour a day endeavor, something that consumes your entire life. Phil stays on, even when his shift is over, because he is emotionally connected to what is going on, what he does matters, and his special commitment to it is what defines him in the film.

But Phil remains rather removed from the action, whereas Jim's life becomes increasingly intertwined with his work, most notably when he asks Claudia out. In Claudia he sees someone who's clearly hurt, but also someone interesting, with the potential for a rich relationship. Even though I love Claudia's character, I'm not sure what Jim sees in her, if I had to guess, I would say that in a world where people wear masks of normalcy, always playing by the rules, she doesn't hide between a calm exterior. She's not the kind of person you're likely to meet from a dating service. The importance of honesty to the relationship is reasserted in the diner scene, when she cites being honest with each other as the best way to avoid the problems that other relationships run into.

However, in this relationship we see the way that an act of kindness really can save someone. Claudia is so committed to avoiding emotional attachment that she pushes away the one person who could actually be good for her. Her whole character is summed up in the quote, "Not that I've met you, would you object to never seeing me again?" She only wants one night stands, not real commitment, because the one man who was a major presence in her life, her father, abused her. She finds comfort in one night stands because it gives her the chance to be loved as an object without giving anything herself. She is so used to being treated like dirt, she can't function any other way. The line she says to Jim that I quoted above is from Aimee Mann's song, Deathly, and another line from that song encapsulates how she feels when she encounters Jim: "Don't pick on me 'cause one act of kindness could be deathly." So, when she encounters someone who actually likes her, she becomes incredibly aware of all her problems and retreats from him so as not to disappoint him down the line.

Jim, while certainly more together than Claudia, still has a lot of his own problems. He was married, but it apparently ended badly and he's remained emotionally isolated for three years. So, he and Claudia are in a similar situation, both of them running from commitment because of a previous emotional trauma. Jim is ultimately the one who reaches out to her and refuses to let her slip away from him, which we see in the brilliant final scene of the film.

So, that sums up the two main thematic issues in the film, what can we forgive and how important a random act of kindness. One of the major questions people have in the film is why are the frogs in it? On one hand, it's an astonishing image and provides for phenomenal moments where the characters observe this bizarre occurrence. The frogs connect them all in the same way that the song and the rain do earlier.

However, the frogs also function as a cathartic event, putting everything in the film in perspective. After seeing the frogs fall from the sky, and the chaos they cause, the problems in the character's lives seem much smaller. It's an example of natural cycles, Earl may die, but it was his time, everyone must die eventually. The frogs take all the characters away from their locked emotional lives and make them more receptive to others.

Even though one of the things I love about the film is the way it elevates individual emotional drama to the level of cosmic importance, for the characters, it's important to step back and see that their problems mean nothing against this bizarre biblical occurrence.

Ultimately, Magnolia works because you can view it simultaneously as a perfectly shot, technically innovative film masterpiece, as well as an emotionally wrenching melodrama. I've always said that I'd love to see a film in the 'epic' genre, but in the modern world, something where an entire world is at stake, like in Lord of the Rings, but set in our modern society. And in a lot of ways that's what this film is. For these characters, the emotional conflicts they face are just as menacing as anything Sauron could throw at us.

Getting back to a critical eye. I need to point out the brilliance of the 'One' sequence, which does an hour of exposition in three minutes, and establishes not only all the characters' personalities and conflicts, but also the film's atmosphere. This is the editing equivalent of the astonishing opening shot that introduces all the character in Boogie Nights. People crack on PT Anderson for making a film that's too big, that says too much, but the thing I love about him is that he makes huge films that are incredibly emotional. You could call it pretentious or overdone, but I don't think there's a false moment in this film.

The cinematography in the film really needs to be mentioned. Just some cool shots: Everyone falling to the side as the ambulance flips over, the silhouette frogs falling behind Claudia, the zoom in to Earl's lungs in the One montage, Jimmy lit in blue in front of a red curtain as he waits to go on stage, the frog falling through the skylight and knocking the gun from Jimmy's hand and of course the final shot tracking in on Claudia and her smile.

Aimee Mann and Jon Brion both deserve to be commended for their musical contributions to the film. 'Save Me' provides a perfect closing for the film, and Brion's driving score keeps all the action connected despite the many plot threads.

Then there's the actors. Everyone is great, but Melora Walters and John C. Reilly deserve special commendation. In Jim, Reilly creates one of the most appealing characters in cinema, someone I completely understood and sympathized with. Walters manages to make Claudia simultaneously totally guarded and completely vulnerable. You really want to help her because you can sense a good person under her bad habits. Philip Baker Hall is also great, showing us what happens when years of bad deeds finally catch up with someone. And it was really cool to see Jason Robards here, after seeing 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' His scenes where even more emotional, because this man who had just been vital and young was now lying in bed, dying. I felt a much deeper connection to the character.

But, everyone in the film really deserves props, it always annoys me to see someone from this film turn up in a bad movie, like Julianne Moore in The Forgotten or Philip Baker Hall in The Amityville Horror, because their work in this film is so good, such formula roles feel like a total waste of time.

If I had to choose one film as an example of what the medium can do in telling stories that no other can, it would be this one. It has the scope of a novel, the incredible dialogue and performances of theater, the visual pleasure of art and the rhythm of music. This is a film that completely changed my ways of constructing narrative. Whenever I would write something before seeing this, it would be limited, focusing on only a couple of characters and one main plot. But, after seeing Magnolia, most of the stories I've written are ensemble pieces, with characters who are connected more by themes than by narrative. Very few works have had such an influence on me, one day I hope to write something that has the narrative scope and emotional precision of this film.

I remember the first time I watched Magnolia, I had sat through three hours and as the camera tracked in on Claudia, I wished the film wouldn't end, not because I wasn't narratively fulfilled, but just because Anderson had built such an incredible world, It's like if you're sitting at a restaurant and you're completely full, but don't want to leave, because the atmosphere there is just so good. It's a three hour film that I wish was longer, I think that says it all about Magnolia.

Robert Altman's Short Cuts

A few years ago I saw the movie Magnolia and instantly loved it, repeat viewings only confirmed its genius, and it's found a place in my top 5 films of all time. In reading about the film, I frequently saw it called Altmanesque, particularly in reference to two of Robert Altman's films, Nashville and Short Cuts. So naturally, I was compelled to check out these films and see where Magnolia came from.

Last summer I saw Nashville, a 1975 film about a whole bunch of people who are in the title city for a country msuic event. Over the course of the film, we see a whole bunch of different stories, that are loosely connected, sometimes by shared characters and other times by just the appearance of one character in the background of another person's scene. So, it's a whole bunch of loosely connected events, which is similar to Magnolia.

After seeing this film, I sought out Short Cuts, which only came out on DVD recently, and saw that last night. Short Cuts was the culmination of Altman's resurgence iin the early 90s, a resurgence that began with The Player, a film I also watched this week. The Player was quite frankly a pretty bad movie. I think the novelty of an inside Hollywood comedy is gone following Larry Sanders, Curb Your Enthusiasm and countless other HBO series. And without that novelty, there just isn't much there. The score, despite being by Thomas Newman who wrote some great stuff for American Beauty, makes full use of dated synthesizer sounds, and the plot isn't particularly engaging. The only thing that still holds up is the film within a film, in which Bruce Willis rescues Julia Roberts from a gas chamber, followed by this dialogue.

Julia: What took you so long?
Bruce: Traffic was a bitch.

And then the credits, classic awful action movie line. But one good laugh does not a film make, and this film does not hold up.

However, Short Cuts does hold up, and doesn't seem particularly dated. Like Nashville and Magnolia, it chronicles a whole bunch of lives that occasionally overlap, but generally it's just people moving through the city, doing their own thing. There's a lot of characters, about twenty, and the film is 187 minutes, so you've got to be ready for a long sit.

The film has a great cast, to name just a few: Julianne Moore, Jack Lemmon, Tim Robbins, Peter Gallagher, Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor, Lily Tomlin and Robert Downey Jr. Most of them play fairly engaging characters, and it's a fun movie to watch for the level of acting alone.

I should preface what I'm about to say by saying that I really enjoyed the movie, I can respect the craft that went into it and would reccomend it to people. However, looking at this movie after seeing Magnolia, I can't help but see its flaws. PT Anderson drew a lot from Short Cuts, but he did so much more with the style than Altman did.

Altman sticks fairly strictly to the definitions of art cinema, the idea that you've got to avoid artificial conflict and strive for realism in the film, avoiding the excess emotion of classical Hollywood cinema. This technique was necessary in the 1950s when the New Wave came about because classical Hollywood cinema completely lacks any sort of emotion realism. However, in responding to those perceived excesses, many art films went to far in the opposite direction, to create films that just drift along, without any sort of emotional beats for the audience. That's my problem with Altman's work, he seems so committed to avoiding narrative artifice and over the top emotion that the film becomes sterile, you just watch the film as an observer, never becoming fully engaged in the characters' emotional existence.

This is quite different from Magnolia, which isn't particularly narrative driven, but still manages to engage you with the characters emotionally. That's largely because of the filmmaking. Altman's camera very rarely draws attention to itself, you're kept at a distance, strictly an observer. The only really emotional moments are those in which Annie Ross' singing is juxtaposed with other events. Those scenes are the highlight of the film, but even those can't reach the level of the "Wise Up" sequence in Magnolia, which is emotionally devestating.

PT Anderson fits in with a new group of art cinema people, who reembrace strong emotional involvement with the characters. Other people doing this are Gaspar Noe and Wong Kar-Wai, both of whom use all the film techniques at their disposal to make you feel. Altman, at least in what I've seen by him, has never created anything that touches the emotional intensity of those directors' films. I guess it's not his goal, but it makes it difficult to love his films. Sometimes it's good to embrace narrative mechanics if it allows the audience to get drawn into the film. Short Cuts leaves you at an almost awkward distance watching the emotional scenes, like you're spying on these people and shouldn't be there, whereas Magnolia makes you feel exactly what the characters are feeling.

Now, admittedly it's unfair to compare this film to one of my favorite films. Up against most films it's a masterpiece, but I demand more from my films than to just be above average. Obviously, Altman's films were essential to the creation of PT Anderson's stuff, so for that reason alone, he deserves respect, and the films themsevles are top notch too. It's just that he touches greatness and doesn't quite make it there, that's what's so frustrating. In his effort to avoid Hollywood cliches, he goes so far in the other direction that his films become a bit too sterile.

Crash

Yesterday, I went to see the movie Crash. The primary draw for me was the fact that this is a movie with a huge ensemble cast, and the characters sort of pass through each others' lives as time passes, much like in Magnolia, a film I loved so much it's made me partial to any of these big cast movies, such as PT Anderson's Boogie Nights, or Robert Altman's Nashville, both of which are also excellent films.

Crash isn't as good as either of those two films, but that doesn't mean it's not a really good film, it's certainly worth seeing. What makes this film different than those films is there is a stronger thematic connetion between the interactions in this film, all of them are built around race in some way. So, the film takes characters who are sort of racial archetypes and plays around with our perception of them. For example, we see a white woman who is suspicious of a Hispanic locksmith who she says looks like a gang member, then it turns out that he is in fact a devoted family man, trying to make a better life for his daughter.

The thing that holds the film back from greatness is in some respects its short running time. We don't really get to know that many of the characters, so it's difficult to get really emotionally involved with them. The amazing thing about Magnolia is the fact that all nine of the characters are so well developed, and none of them fall into archetypes. Almost all the characters here are in some way archetypal, but I think that might have been intentional. The goal is to show the conflict people have with other races and with their own racial status, but that turns the film into a more intellectual exercise than an emotional one. I think a critical thing to making these big cast movies work on an emotional level is to connect them through the score and, while the music here is good, it doesn't work like in The Hours or Magnolia to bring to mind the universal similarities of all the characters.

But, this film still has a ton of interesting stuff going on. I was really surprised to see that the best performance in this film was by Ludacris, who was really entertaining, and nicely in the character. He probably best exemplifies the difference between what someone says and how they act, which is the core of this film.

The crowd I was at with this film didn't really seem to like it, practically everyone was gone before the final shot even ended. This is one thing I don't get when people go to the movies, are you in so much of a hurry to get out of there that you can't even stay until the credits start? I like to give the film a minute or so after the credits start before I leave just to let it sink in. It shouldn't be a race out of the theater, the real world will still be there no matter how long you stay in the theater.

I dont' mean to sound critical of the film, since on the whole, it's a thought provoking, really well made piece of entertainment. Too many times when you go to a movie, you leave with a sort of empty feeling, like nothing of substance occurred. This film has a lot of substance and leaves you fulfilled. It's the sort of film 70s Hollywood was famous for, smart, complex entertainment.

Ten Works that Changed My Life: Part I: 10-6

Here, I'm going to write about the ten works of art that made the biggest impact on me, the works that changed the way I look at the world, and the way that I created fiction. If I hadn't encountered these works, I would be a very different person.

10. The Beatles 'Magical Mystery Tour' - When I was young, about eight or so, I was watching a documentary on The Beatles with my parents and I heard this song called 'I am the Walrus,' which was just the most bizarre song I'd ever heard. The lyrics were nonsensical, but reallly vivid, and the music was really off beat. I'd say this was the first song I really loved, and I have a really vivid memory of hearing it for the first time and just falling in love with that sound, so I listened to the whole 'Magical Mystery Tour' album, and that was the first album I really loved. It's still one of my favorite albums, and 'I am the Walrus' still stands out to me as one of the best songs ever made. This is the album that made me open to older stuff and made me explore a lot of different types of music.



9. Batman Returns - I first saw this film when in 1992, at the Mamaroneck theater. I remember getting a little poster for the film when I went to see it, and I also remember loving the movie. A few years later, I bought the movie on VHS and watched it a whole bunch of times. When I was younger, this film was #4 on my top films list, behind only the Star Wars trilogy. At the same time, I loved both the original Batman and Beetlejuice, and when the film Ed Wood came out, I realized they were all directed by the same director, Tim Burton. A few years later, when I was in eighth grade, I decided to rent Edward Scissorhands, because it too was directed by Tim Burton. I watched this and loved it, and it gave me a greater understanding of the thematic development of Batman Returns, something I applied when I watched it again. I also started to really investigate Danny Elfman's scores, and I bought the soundtrack to Batman Returns, my favorite score of his. So, what this film did was set off my first investigation of a filmmaker's whole body of work. Tim Burton was my favorite director for a long time, I sought out all his films and read a bunch of books on him. Even my Nightmare Before Christmas shirt, which I always wear, was a result of this.



So, I guess what makes the film so special to me was that it was really the lynchpin for my love of Burton's work. It was the thing that I loved enough to seek out his other work. I always loved the film in a way that went beyond just liking the action, there was something deeper there. Subsequent to viewing all Burton's work, I've gone through a number of other directors: Gilliam, Lynch, Wong, Linklater, Tarantino, etc. but I don't think I ever was so immersed in one director's work as I was in Burton's. A few weeks ago, I revisited Batman Returns and was struck by how amazing it still was. It's Burton's best film, visually magnificent, thematically rich, and still #8 on my all time best films list. I wrote a 23 page paper on the film, which I finished last week, and I felt like that wasn't even enough room to say what I wanted to about it. The film was crucial to making me view cinema as not just a bunch of random movies, but instead as the product of a director with a unique vision.

8. Chungking Express - Last year about this time, I saw the film Chungking Express in class, and I loved it. I bought the DVD soon after, and enjoyed it even more the second time. I love this film, but perhaps more important, it really changed the way I view the medium. I used to view cinema primarily from a storytelling context, and, while I appreciated technique, I saw that primairly as an additional cool element, but what this film, and Wong Kar-Wai's subsequent work did, was to make me see how every single frame of a movie could be an amazing experience in and of itself. His perfect synching of music and visual produces moments that don't need to be understood in the context of a story, but instead stand alone as just dazzling images. When I was shooting Ricky Frost over winter break, I just imitated a bunch of Wong Kar-Wai shots, particularly with the so called 'Chungking effect,' aka using a low shutter speed. This sent me off to Wong Kar-Wai's other movies, and watching them really changed the way I approach and create cinema. I would argue since seeing this film I have been in the Wong Kar-Wai stage, where his was the dominant type of story that dominated my views, and I viewed things in the context of his work. More than most of the works on here, he's made a huge impact on how I want to create cinema.



7. Blade Runner - Blade Runner is a film that reignited my love for science fiction, in a way that no film since has done, it's a film that really showed me how cinema has the potential to create entirely new worlds. And, watching this film sent me down a number of intersting paths. After seeing the film, I began to seek out the work of author Philip K. Dick, and reading his book VALIS exposed me to a ton of new ideas, paving the way for The Invisibles. In addition, it sent me to the internet, where I became a part of the alt.fan.blade-runner newsgroup, where I have been talking about the film for five years. I've never analyzed anything as long as I've talked about this film, and this paved the way for a lot more online participation in the film scene. Also, from reccomendations on the newsgroup, I found a number of my other favorite films, including Brazil and Leon: The Professional. Also, the work's primary theme, what is human, as well as its noir influences, has influenced a lot of what I've done. I guess what this film does is show me how well cinema can transport you to another world.



6. Magnolia - I think the moment Magnolia really clicked for me was when we see Claudia put an Aimee Mann song on, and quietly sing with it, then we cut to another character, and he's singing it too, and we cut to every character singing along to the song, a moment that could seem so goofy, but in the context of the work, is the most unbelievably heartbreaking moment, and that's when I knew that this wasn't just any movie, it was something so special. And, as the film was ending, I was wishing that it would go on just a bit longer, because I didn't want to leave its world, quite a feat considering it's a three hour film. As I said about Blade Runner, this is a work that creates a world, but this one is much more in our everyday world, what it does is take a bunch of individual dramas, and by weaving them together, makes it into a film that contains virtually the entirety of human emotion. I think that's what makes the work so special to me, the fact that by creating all these parallels, it makes simple stories into something so much larger.

I feel like more than any other work, I wish I could make something like Magnolia, something that's at once incredibly intimate and also epic. It instantly made me love multi-character films, with narrative weaves between the lives of many people. It made me want to make films like this, where we see many perspectives, and are able to compare them. The film I want to do over the summer is three different narrative strands that cross over, clearly influenced by Magnolia. In addition to this, the filmmaking technique completely changed my belief in what cinema could do. PT Anderson so perfectly used really showy technique to support characters' emotional development, and build an atmosphere around the film, so that even as we go through the lives of many characters, we feel like it's one unified story. This is largely due to the use of music, both Jon Brion's score and the Aimee Mann songs, which unite the characters. No matter how many times I see the film, I can't help but smile as Claudia does at the end of the film, because I feel like I've been through everything she's been through over the course of this day. One day I hope to make a film that is on the scale of Magnolia, and will have the emotional impact on other people that this film had one me.



Alright, that's it for the first five, tomorrow see what could possibly eclipse these absolutely brilliant works, and influenced me even more.

Irony and Filmgoing

As someone who absolutely loves movies, I think there's nothing better than going to a film with an audience that loves it and is completely engrossed in it. Watching Star Wars: Attack of the Clones at a midnight screening was probably the best filmgoing experience I ever had, it wasn't the best film, but I never had more fun, or was so connected to a collective feeling during a screening. Before the film started, I over heard the people behind me talking coolly about the film, clearly not expecting too much. Anyway, the Yoda lightsaber scene hits, and the guy was practically hyperventilating just repeating "Oh shit" over and over again, the film had completely broken his ironic shell and hit him on some pure level and I was right there with him, just unquestioningly loving the film. Watching the film on your own, the flaws are more magnified, but in the context of a group that was there to love the film, it was just a sublime experience, everyone bought into the film and loved it.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum was when I went to see Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. All throughout the movie this guy a couple of seats over was making sarcastic comments about the film, and towards the end, I had to tell him to shut up because it was just taking me out of the world of the film, and the guy questioned me, and I did not back down, and him and his girlfriend left. But still, to some degree it was difficult to get back into the film. Getting truly lost in a great film is a delicate process, and even one dumb comment can completely ruin a moment. I know whenever I watch Mulholland Drive, people always try to translate the Spanish lyrics in the Club Silencio sequence, completely missing the fact that the reason Lynch put the lyrics in Spanish was so that you would just feel the song rather than try to apply it to the narrative. It's probably the most powerful moment in the film, a superb confluence of audio and visual, but it's ruined if someone is talking. If you truly get lost in that scene, it's emotionally overwhelming, and I don't care what she's singing about.

I think we all hate the clueless filmgoer who is always asking questions about the plot, but there is a type of filmgoer I hate even more, and it's one I encounter a lot here at Wesleyan: the ironic filmgoer, who, no matter what film he/she goes to, he thinks of himself as above the material, looking down to occasionally chuckle at something that someone has put years of life and care into. Watching a film is like going into a cave, when you first enter, you can see everything pretty clearly, but as you go further into the cave, you don't see like you do in the outside world, you just see things in the light of the cave. This is what you do when you see a film, you move out of your world, and into the world of the film, where your vision and understanding of things is different. And thus, things that would seem ridiculous if you watched them out of context can be incredibly profound.

I think the best example of this is the singing sequence in Magnolia. Two hours into this film, Paul Thomas Anderson has all the characters start singing along to Aimee Mann's 'Wise Up,' which we first hear on the stereo of Claudia, but gradually moves out to all nine main characters. It's a moment that would be absoultely preposterous if you just watched it on its own, but in context, it's the most powerful moment in the film, and just kills me every time, because I love getting lost in the world of the film.

But, what about the 'ironic viewer'? This is someone who refuses to surrender himself to the power of the film, and instead keeps a critical distance, laughing at any sign of sincere emotion. So, this incredibly emotional scene would be treated with some laughs, and it would kill the moment. On his commentary for Amelie, Jean Pierre Jeunet talks about the scene at the end of the film where Amelie and Nino stare at each other in silence, and he says if someone laughed at this point, it would absoultely kill the film. This is what the ironic viewer does, laugh at sincere displays of emotion, or anything that could possibly be construed as funny.

Maybe these people enjoy the films, but I don't think they can enjoy it in the same way that someone who surrenders to the film does. See, I feel like these people are best suited to watching high brow comedies, where everything can be laughed at, even scenes with sincere emotional content.

See, I love movies that go over the top emotionally, and even if I don't love the film, I'm always going to give it the respect of not laughing at it. Now, you may say, how could this same person enjoy Mystery Science Theater 3000? The difference is there you're looking to laugh at the film, when you go to the theater, and pay $10 to see the film, you want to enjoy it, not poke fun at it. Yes, some films are awful, but I try not to go to those, and even if I do, I try to focus on the positive.

I guess I differ from most people in the sense that the films I hate most are stupid comedies. I'd take any sort of sincere attempt to make a good film over something that is meant to just poke fun at stuff. I can love comedies, but usually they have some sort of dramatic character base for their riffing. Ghost World is a hilarious film, and is largely about viewing life ironically, but it examines this sort of worldview and engages the difficulties with it.

What really bothers me about the ironic viewer is that they make it difficult to really enjoy the film because for one, they take you out of the film with annoying laughter, and second, by taking you out of the film, make it impossible to reengage on an emotional level with the characters, and thus, you see things the way they do, distanced and looking for irony rather than sincerity. When watching films this is not the way to do things. Every film I watch I hope to love, and I'm going to try to give it the respect of not laughing at it.

What brought on this rant? It was watching Todd Solondz' Happiness, a film that refuses to break the critical distance between filmmaker and character, and instead views the characters as almost a freakshow, so that at any moment, you could be either engaging with the characters or laughing at them, and in a theater environment, I'd imagine there'd be a lot of laughter. Another film that does this, a film that is apalling and awful, and makes me question society's values yet again, is Napoleon Dynamite, a film that is basically there to let you laugh at these people for an hour and a half. Why would you want to do this, freakshows went out of style in the 1900s, and there's no reason to adapt this awful exploitation to film. I don't want a film I can laugh at and not care about, I want something that will stick with me long after, and take me on an emotional journey.

You know a film is successful when you accept more and more ridiculous things within it, such as in Magnolia, when the frogs appear. By this time, you're so far into the film, you just accept it as something that fits, and it's a sublime, powerful moment, one that you could either laugh at or be in awe of, and I choose to be in awe of it.

Boogie Nights

So, counting down my top 50 movies all time we come to 49, Boogie Nights. Now, this movie has an interesting reputation, due to its subject matter, the porn industry. This is a movie about the porn industry, but it's definitely not a porn itself, it's not even really about the porn industry, it's about a group of people who become a family for each other, and what happens to them. This movie is about porn in the same way that The Sopranos is about the mafia, yes, it's set in that world, but what makes it interesting is how their unique circumstances affect the characters. You're not watching to see Tony kill people, or to see Dirk filming, you're watching for the interactions between characters.

Boogie Nights has been compared to Goodfellas a lot, and I can see some similarities, but what Boogie Nights does that Goodfellas doesn't is create very strong characters. Paul Thomas Anderson is clearly interested in the porn industry itself, but he's more interested in creating characters. As he did in the brilliant Magnolia, this is a film that seems to be structured around character decisions rather than an artificially imposed plot. The best movies move along organically, with events occurring because of logical choices that the characters make. That's how this movie works. It's about a bunch of people, and they're all pretty interesting.

The movie feels very epic. It spans six years or so, and a ton of stuff happens. In some ways, it's the archetypal rise and fall story, but there's enough character stuff happening on the peripherary that it never feels cliche. I love movies with a lot of characters, and this movie has roughly twelve major characters. PTA's greatest talent is his ability to manage massive casts, and while this movie has a clear main character, it's still an ensemble piece, and everyone gets some interesting material to work with.

What makes the movie special is really in the way PTA makes it. The long shot that opens the movie is absolutely phenomenal, echoing and even surpassing A Touch of Evil in its scope. Another amazing shot is in the pool scene, when the camera does a five minute or so tracking shot, then follows a diver into the pool without a cut, goes underwater, then comes back up. Awe inspiring.

Anderson's use of music is similarly impressive. He breaks out a lot of the best songs of the 70s and fits them organically into the film. He does a bunch of montages, but they actually move the story forward, and are hugely entertaining. The "Jesse's Girl" scene with Alfred Molina is just one amazing use of music.

Pretty much everything clicks here, and this movie serves as a good warm up for PTA's Magnolia. It's the film that gave us Chest Rockwell, that should count for something.

Related Posts
Magnolia: PTA's Masterpiece (7/22/2005)
Hard Eight (9/7/2005)
Punch Drunk Love (9/13/2005)
Paul Thomas Anderson Quote (9/13/2005)