There Will Be Blood (2007)

I watched There will be Blood when it came out and I was enthralled by its general vibe. I mean: I really liked it and thinking back on the movie, I remembered certain things about it: the scenes portraying oil drilling mostly, the music, the cinematography. The second time around, I wasn't as convinced that this is a good movie at all - as a matter of fact, I felt a bit embarrassed that I was tricked, fooled by Paul Thomas Anderson's grasp of style. I was struck by how unclear the film is, how it is hard to pin down what it tries to say. We have this elusive main character, Plainview the oil man and his maybe-son. What drives them? How is his cruelty to be understood? I was confused, rather than overwhelmed.

Watching it for the first time, I thought this is one of the best images of the Entrepreneur ever produced: that, ultimately, it is impossible to say anything about the idolized entrepreneur other than that he is Driven by some strange force, that he embodies Will power and that he will never ever give up, no matter what obstacle he comes across. When the entrepreneur is elevated, it is ruthlessness and violence that is elevated - it doesn't mater what the aim is, what the goal is - the entrepreneur never stops working and when he does, there is nothing in his work that fills him with joy (when work is over, life is over, but work itself is nothing but an obsession). The only thing that the entrepreneur ends up with is a sense of loneliness and isolation: this is the world he has built for himself, a world 'of his own hands', but this is just a form of self-deception about having created something. I still think there is something to Paul Thomas Anderson's approach here, that we know so little about what motivates Plainview - we just see him work, bargain, force his way ahead - is a merit, rather than a weakness. Or, at least, half of me thinks like this and that therefore the end of the film, where we see Plainview's success as misery, is intelligible. Plainview's demonic strivings is a good representation to keep in mind when one reads the business pages of a newspaper and comes across 257356889 attempts to defend the charity-loving, prudent entrepreneur who from early childhood on knew that he would become something important. In this film, the entrepreneurial ideal is madness.

OK - so Plainview is and remains a cipher. But Paul Thomas Anderson does not manage to create a Lawrence of Arabia. Plainview's elusiveness never haunts me, it just mystifies.

One interesting disagreement about this film that was evident when I discussed it with friends concerns how the progression of the story is be understood. Should one say that the film evokes 'good capitalism', which would be the work of ones own hands, the self-made man's gruelling toil, and then 'bad capitalism' no longer connected with work in a fundamental sense. For my own part, I think the tendency from the get-go is that even hard labor has something sinister to it (one of the brilliant moves of the film is the first 15 minutes - no dialogue at all). In one of the very first few scenes, Plainview gets hurt. A few moments afterwards, he is holding a glimmering stone and something about the scenes makes me think about Greed. We see Plainview go from silver mining to the oil business. He works hard, and the kid that he raises as his son accompanies him everywhere he goes, as a 'business partner'. They travel around, making villagers sell land leases to them, taking advantage of their ignorance. Derricks are set up, the oil wells pour out the the good stuff and business begins to pay off. Accidents happen, but work is unceasing: Plainview sits in a shed, watching the men work while drinking whisky.

In a way, Anderson's depiction of capitalism is fairly typical: the tone of the film is that of elation and violence. Capitalism is presented as an unstoppable force were human beings have a minor role, their own shady psychology rendered a question of minor importance. I mean, this type of description is very common: capitalism is presented as a mix of enthusiasm and destruction (cf Marshall Berman and others). The problem with this image is that it makes too much of the idea that capitalism is a form of force of nature - its aspect of unceasing activity is here muddled so that one starts to think about many things at the same time: modernization, labor processes, that capitalism has no other end than making profits, that capitalism turns everything into instruments etc etc. From this it is too tempting to evoke the superforce that one does not quite know how to approach: shouldn't one also say that ruthlessness and capitalistic enthusiasm is admirable because how it has the power to change the world? Isn't that exhilarating? I mean, this as a temptation, and my suggestion is that There will be Blood is not so far from this sort of ambiguous image of unstoppable capitalism. One could say that the problem is that the film contains a form of pessimism in which capitalism and figures like Plainview are seen as figures that mould history, the outcome being necessarily tragic (so the argument turns into this: capitalism and evangelic Christianity shape American history and the result is a big, fat fraud - hm, that is ---- really deep.).

Then there are plenty of stuff that just don't work very well. The second time I watched the film, I was embarrassed about the plot about the 'religious' guy, and the points the film made about his similarity with Plainview. (In one of the worst scenes of the film, Eli the preacher makes Plainview 'confess his sins' - the scene says nothing it all, it just evokes, something something.) They are both relentless men, but we understand no more about their connection that they are both men of strong wills, men who are prepared to use power and humiliation, men who will not be stopped. But in this, they both become caricatures. What confrontations like these leave me with is no more than a contrived and overwrought bit of cinema, too conscious of itself and less conscious of where it is going.

Colossal Youth (2006)

You hear about a director and feel a strong urge to watch one of their movie. At the same time: reading about a film beforehand is something I try to avoid; I like a film to overwhelm me (or underwhelm me) without being disturbed by thoughts about how the film has been received and understood among critics. Colossal Youth is a film like that - I am happy that I did not read many words about it, and that while watching it, I had no ready interpretation or description to fall back on, no "this is that kind of movie"-type of judgement. I am also happy about the fact that I had people to discuss the film with afterwards: to watch movies is just as much digesting what one has just seen.

I must confess that Colossal Youth is unlike anything I've seen before. But this is interesting: it is a film that reveals quite little about the characters. We get no tidy image of who these people are. The places we see are presented in very specific frames, rather than through grand and conspicuous panoramas. Even the temporal order of events is quite hazy. And having said this, I'd still want to say that Colossal Youth striked me as a very personal film. The film remains mysterious and the people remain quite enigmatic throughout, but I feel engaged by what Costa presents to me, he encourages to stay in my seat, keep calm, and really, really, look and listen. It's a film that requires patience but I never felt that Costa is the kind of director chosing the snail's pace just for the sake of style. I have a hard time imagining colossal youth could have been made in any other way. The static long takes of the film do not aesthetize - we see what we see, and everything is important (just look at the sparse use of color!). (Sounds are equally important: even though we never see anybody working, we hear work, we hear activity, but what we see is people talking, idling away time, longing for another life).

Colossal Youth comprises a series of encounters. A man, Ventura, goes to meet people, some of which he calls his children. It remains unclear whether they are his children. They talk to him. They watch telly. They eat. They smoke. They drink beer. They sit in parks. They tell stories about life. Ventura tries to make his friend write a letter to his wife, a love poem, a wish for a better life. We learn that many of these people are immigrants from Cap Verde. They live in bad housing. Some houses are about to be torn down, or have been demolished. Ventura goes to look at an apartment where all his children could live. These scenes have an almost dream-like character: the sterile whiteness of the uninhabited spaces, the many rooms and the placid real estate agent. It is things like this that matter: where you live, how you live, how you survive. And scenes like these ones also remind us of Costa's singular technique that has very little to do with social realism in the traditional sense.

Costa does not trade in cheap contrasts between the society of the middle class and the society of the outsiders, of the invisible. We see the reality of these people, and that's enough. Their sense of isolation does not need to be emphasized through images of people who live in lavish luxury. The question the film poses is harder than that, we really have to think and judge: in what ways are these people disconnected, how did it happen, how is this state sustained? Costa's use of space to make us understand the character's world is economical, but it works: we look at how people move, how they sit, slope, and we notice the surroundings in a way that is never relegated to a mere backdrop. This is just as much a film about place and space as it is a film the entire cinematography of which is an exploration of space. The film makes us attend to glaringly white walls, derelic staircases, a naked table, the numb light from a lamp, the strange atmosphere of a museum, the vivid colors of nature, even urban nature. But most of all - these locations are not mere geographical points, they are attached emotionally, as spaces of desolation, eviction and suspension, spaces where nothing happens, or when a memory starts to unfold, or space as a space for dreaming, hoping - but also where hope is muted into something else.

Zabriskie point (1970)

Antonioni is generally a director that I like. One might say that he trades in the europa-chic - that he makes alienation look quite appealing in films such as The Night, The Eclipse and Avventura. Not to mention Blow-Up. Red desert is a very typical film about the world falling apart in hollow human beings and dead surroundings, but it seemed like a less fashion-sensitive film than the others. I expected Zabriskie Point to be a similiarly alienation-chic movie as most of the other Antonioni movies. And it was, but in an even worse way, and in a way that really is a grotesquely familiar image of the disgruntled European director going to the US and A to make a cynical movie. Here we have American kids in the late sixties, enamored with counterculture politics and alternative lifestyles in a country of advertisement, business and repulsive urban architecture. From the get-go, we know that this is Hell. We are thrown into a student organization meeting. The sound is jarring. People are shouting slogans, others are smoking, or looking bored, or doing something else - just a bunch of diverse people ending up in the same 'movement'. It's hard to hear what they say, and it's easy to guess that it doesn't really matter anyways. There is a riot of some sort, and we see a man who seems to shoot a cop, but it isn't really him. He steals an airplane and in the desert he meets a girl with a buick and they fall in love (add quotatin marks) and they hang out in the desert and then the guy paints the airplane in bright colors and the girl goes to her business meeting but she's not interested in that so she leaves the building and then she stands outside, imagining that the building explodes. THE END. Some of my friends interpreted the film as providing an image of back-to-nature-bliss, exodus from civilization, the Nomadic transformatory non-people turning into animals. Well, I can see the sense in that, but for my own part I saw the film as an attempt to depict a deadlock. There is nowhere to go. The city is hell. It's hell up in the air. And the desert is boring (this is sex as immense joyless tedium) and business is hell. Everything is hollow and desolate, shallow and narcissistic. People talk and look like robots. There were things I liked about Zabriskie point, aspects that were not too self-occupied and self-important. Antonioni has always had a brilliant way of treating architecture and design as an important dimension of the characters' life. As one reviewer put it: Antonioni transforms his own time into sci-fi. And that always works. This also goes for Zabriskie point which renders American urban streets, cluttered with ugly buildings and signs, more hellish than I've seen anywhere else. I find Antonioni's message quite sympathetic: the rebel is just the shadow form of the commercial idiot, but that message is drummed into my mind in a too cynical way, leaving me with no greater understanding of anything, just a vague feeling: this whole lot sucks, it really does. - - - Ending verdict: good visuals, depressing story - good use of sounds & music at times.

The Tiger's Tail (2006)

I am quite surprised that I watched The Tiger's Tail (dir. J Boorman) to the end. It's not a very good movie, the acting was embarrassing at times, and the plot was contrived to say the least. A businessman in Dublin is stalked by his twin brother who just looks like him and snatches his successful life from him. Existential drama? No. Comedy? No. Crime story? Not really. Satire about the rich and wealthy whose inner demons turn into real doppelgänger, the underclass coming to haunt the capitalist? Well, maybe, but well, that would be quite a far-fetched reading of the film even though this is a film trying to explain how success is not really the road to happiness (the businessman's son reads Marx and his wife is bored with him and his business goes to hell anyways). - -- - Even some attempts at Irish accents fail.

On the Beach (1959)

Inadvertently, Stanley Kramer's On the Beach is marred with the same type of problems that most apocalyptic movies are plagued by: they tend to be characterized by the specific fears of the time that a viewer who watches the movie when some years have passed by will look at it with a bemused grin: oh yeah, how paranoid people were! The problem is, then, that this type of movie does not conjure up a specific fear in a way that is intelligible if you are not immersed in a specific historical situation. I've seen worse examples than On the Beach, but I must admit that there were moments when I adopted a sociological perspective (how did people think about a looming catastrophy during the first years of the cold war?), unable to watch the movie from a more open-minded point of view. But then again, the film has some merits in its attempts to show people trying to grasp what it means to live in a world about to end. It's the grief-stricken moments that I remember best, even though there were some unnecessarily sentimental scenes. Quite beautifully, the film showed people holding on to each other, grieving the lack of a common future: the film presents life as shared, rather than individual, which is quite interesting when considering how human existence is presented in other movies about the apocalypse (an exception: Last Night). This is not a film about life as mere life. The story of On the Beach is simple and grim: radioactive dust is about to put an end to life on earth. The war is over, and people live in the one place (Australia) not yet affected by this world-wide catastrophy. But everyone knows it's only a matter of time, and the story of the film is not at all an Independence Day-type of film in which heroic squadrons are Saving the Planet. This is a film where we know that there is no hope, and the story tells us about the differences in reactions to this fact. The thing that made me hesitant about the entire project was how it oscillated between a story that we were encouraged to read concretely, as a story about the apocalypse, and a level of the story in which we were to adopt a more metaphorical perspective, in which the film revolved around life being what it is: finite, fragile, but beautiful nonetheless. - - - - My major worry: do we really need the apocalypse to understand that we do not live forever and that human possibilities are not to be wasted? One may of course suggest that this reaction appears to me due to a lack of understanding or sensibility for the kind of fear that the atomic bomb actually gave rise to. Problem #2: the music. Hearing "Waltzing Mathilda" in a thousand different variations drove me almost to the brink of madness.

The Master (2012)

Regarding Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood as one of my favorite films, I was eager to watch The Master. I tried not to read about the film beforehand, which was good (it kept me from thinking about scientologists all the time). It's a peculiar film, I must say, uneven, but interesting - difficult not because of how the film is structured, or because of the events it portrays, but difficult, I thought, because it is quite challenging to discern what themes propel the story. But, in the end, it's a good film, though it might not hold up against There Will be Blood.

Post-war USA. The war has ended. Freddie (brilliant Joaquin Phoenix), a GI serving in the army, makes booze out of torpedos, coconut water and other tasty fluids. We know almost nothing about what happened to him during the war, except that there is something haunting him, maybe. Anderson dodges the story about war trauma we've seen in many films. The trauma, whatever it is, is in Freddie's entire body language, his face, his smile, his eyes, but it remains entirely engimatic. He is a drifter, 'booze'-maker, trouble-maker. He lands a job, loses it, lands a new one, gets into trouble. Then he ends up on a boat, gets drunk, and gets to meet the strange 'captain'. The captain, the master, likes Freddie's booze-blends and invites him to be a part of his 'experiments'. It turns out that this man is a leader of a sect selling a hodgepodge of spiritual and biological 'philosophies'. Freddie submits to the master, following the group, believing, not quite believing, rebelling sometimes, submitting again. The master and Freddie - Paul Thomas Anderson brilliantly evokes a form of erotic, violent and repressive closeness.

So what is this film about? Quasi-spirituality? A society gone made, keeping up an appearance of sanity? Traumas? Collective traumas? Submission? All of this, I think, and perhaps most of all we see a story about losing oneself, losing oneself in appearances, rituals, grand-sounding ideas and collective cheering -- the void. Anderson opts for a solution much more complicated than the conventional narrative about how a movements starts off, how it wins some followers and then, its bitter downfall. This is a knotty story that is as much about the relationship between the two men as it is about the movement. Some reviewers complain about lack of character development. For my own part, that was what I found brave about The Master - it doesn't try to fool us into rosy tales about moral growth; instead, the film trudges on in its uncompromising exploration of what it means to be truly lost. 

(One stylistic aspect of The Master I particularly enjoyed was the way it went from one frame to the next in ways that sometimes were very drastic: you were taken to an altogether new place and time, without further explanation of the new situation.)

All over me (1997)

I think of Hal Hartley a few times while watching All over me (dir. Alex Sichel) even though the everyday never becomes as outlandish as it does in a Hartley movie. But yeah, the lines are understated, and the film keeps a languid pace (which I like). The soundtrack hints at what kind of movie this is: Babes in toyland, Sleater-Kinney and Ani DiFranco. Good music. In one of the best scenes, Patti Smith's Pissing in the River has a prominent role. As a film about young adults and their angst this is a quite decent film, a decent film about repressed desire and homophobia as well. And Hell's kitchen looked gritty, I liked how the locations became a very important part of the film's very core. The downside of the film is the story about a crime and how the characters all had to deal with it in their own way (one of the main character's boyfriend was involved). To me, this twist of the story felt quit unnecessary.

The Poll Diaries (2010)

WWI is about to break out. Oda is a youngster goes to live with her father in Estonia. The father is a doctor who conducts suspicous  experiments (Oda's sweet gift to daddy: a two-headed foetus). The doctor represents the class of upper-class Germans living in Estonia, which was still a part of the Russian empire. We also sense a political movement growing stronger, pushing for independence. Oda wants to be a writer (but she also has scientific skills) and she feels alienated from the family's shielded-off life with many secrets boiling under the surface. In a barn, she encounters an anarchist hiding from the authorities. She decides not to tell anyone about him being there, instead set on helping him.

The problem with The Poll Diaries (dir. Chris Krause) is that it tries to be too many things at the same time in a way that we've seen - and suffered - so many times before. The director tries to manufacture a historical drama, but being very eager not to forget about the Human Part. So here we are, with a big story about a nation and change - and also a story about an adolescent living in a country she does not know, trying to find herself through helping an outsider. It gets too emotional, too tense, too elegiac. Too much everything. Still: a few good scenes, decent cinematography and yes, this film actually made me interested in learning more about the history of Estonia.

Venus (2005)

Some films are creepy and beautiful and funny. Venus (dir. Roger Michell) is an example. Peter O'toole is the actor who can't get women out of his mind. His craving for women is obsessive and self-indulgent: he'd do anything for a moment of attention by a good-looking female. His gay actor friend has sent for a relative to take care of some chores in the household. He imagines that the young lady will prepare grand food for him and discuss Edith Wharton when she is not making him dinner. When she arrives, this fancy evaporates. She is more interested in eating crisps and going out for parties. Peter O'Toole's womanizer of course makes advances, and she goes along with it, as a sort of play-act, a game in which they both win.

This film could be truly horrible. All characters are self-obsessed but at the same time, they are interpreted with a sort of tenderness that focuses on the way life bends in unexpected directions. What I liked about the film was perhaps that it examines old age with little sentimentality, but it is not cynical either. It shows how people change all the time, also after they turn 70, but that no person will change from an asshole into an angel, that self-indulgence does not go away magically only to be exchanged for a clear vision of life.

Peter O'Toole is marvellous and so are the other actors, especially Leslie Phillips who plays O'Tool's pal. In one touching scene, we see the two men dancing togehter in, I think, a quite desolate-looking church. Even though both men are rather unsympathetic, we immediately understand that their friendship and love is deep. One aspect of Venus that caught my attention was how embodied these elderly men were, and how rare it is in films that men have a multi-dimensional bodily presence (action heroes with their bulging muscles - no). The weakest part of the film is how the girl is presented. We learn that she relates to Maurice in a way that oscillates between pity, manipulation and tenderness. But still, she is trapped in the way Maurice sees her and she doesn't really get an independent position - she remains the woman who struggles against the man, sometime humoring him, sometimes playing with him. At the same time that gender kept being blurry here (the film does not go along with the image that womanizers 'love women - a lot') there was still something fishy here.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

I re-watched Bicycle Thieves (dir. de Sica) and the second time around it was even better than the first time. A gritty social realist movie about a society driven by dog-eat-dog. Post-war Rome. A man looks for a job, but the job he finds requires that he has a bike. A bike is expensive, but he acquires one and starts to work. His bike is stolen after a little while, and together with his young son, he tries to catch the thief. No luck. The man's miserable state worsens as he tries to steal a bike himself, and has to deal with being pointed out as a thief. The man's odyssey takes him to a crowded marked, a church and a restaurant. de Sica focuses as much on the life of the streets as the story, which makes this film a thrillingly bustling affair. In one of the best scenes, the father decides that they should sit down in a restaurant and celebrate for a bit. In the table next to them, a rich bunch of people gobbles food and the small kid longingly gazes at their abundance of tasty food. Bicycles thieves is a restrained film. There is little sentimentality or attempts at humor. The dramatic events are not dramatic in the ordinary sense, where we are eager to see whether the looming catastrophy will actualize. In this film, there are plenty of situations that have a particular open-endedness to them, the kind of open-endedness that characterize human encounters. We never quite know what will happen next; it's not the kind of film that builds on straight narrative moves. Bicycle Thieves is about humiliation, but also about defiance and single-mindedness, perhaps. The man won't give up: he runs through the street, and it is hard not to care about his quest, or about the boy who witnesses his father's humiliation, and how is dragged along in the city on this impossible mission. - - - Lots of times, I thought about how this film is such a great inspiration for other good directors, the Dardenne brothers in particular, just think about Rosetta's anxious battle against unemployment and how the Dardenne brothers conjure up her stubborn defiance. Both films never adopt the quasi-neutral, almost disdainful gaze some forms of documentary-like cinema is plagued by: every second of both films is characterized by moral engagements. Moral engagement never preaches, it shows, evokes, brings forth.