zondag 17 oktober 2010

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is a great movie that perfectly combines style and substance. Every scene in the movie is really great, yet every scene is also crucial for the story.

The movie audaciously starts in 1898 with 15 minutes of no dialogue. We just see the main character, Daniel Plainview, working in the oil rigs. It's established right away that this Plainview is a tough man. After he falls down and breaks a leg he crawls to the seemingly very far city on his only healthy leg. Unfortunately he is not the only one to have an accident. One of his colleagues is less fortunate and dies. He has a baby son which Plainview now adopts. Cut to 5 years later and Plainview is now a relatively successful oilman. Together with his 'son' he goes around cities and does all kinds of business with oil. We don't now how he got to do this, but we get the hint that he uses his son to establish trust between him and the people he does business with. One day Eli Sunday comes to him and tells him that there is oil where he comes from and that he'll give him information about where it exactly is if Plainview gives him 500 dollars. Plainview thinks the risk is worth taking and offers him the money. Now Plainview goes to the farm of the Sunday's and it is now that the story truly begins.

When Plainview (together with his son) arrives at the farm he is greeted heartily by the father,Abel, but a little less so by his son Eli, who is Paul's twin brother. Paul assumes they live above oil and gives a very high price for the farm, saying he will use it for his church. Plainview in the end comes to an agreement with Eli and so the work can begin. Plainview has big plans. He wants to build a pipeline, so he isn't dependent on the railways to transport his oil, which of course means he'll earn money. By the end of the film he'll succeed in his plans and will be a rich businessman living in a great house.

An oil rig is built and very soon a worker dies. Eli accuses Plainview, because he did not let him bless the rig. Plainview says that if the workers wouldn't have to go to Eli's preachings they would be less tired and make less dumb mistakes. This starts a lifelong conflict between Eli and Daniel which will come to an end in the ending scene of the film which some found way over the top, but I think it was pretty logical. More on this later.

Two other plot points are still important. After an explosion of the oil rig Plainview's son becomes deaf and mute. This frustrates Daniel a lot and he tries a lot of things to help his son. Mostly unsuccessful and eventually his son has to learn sign language and talk through a translator.

One day Daniel is met by a man who claims to be his brother from another mother and needs help. Daniel offers him a job and a place to live, but when it turns out this man is just imposing for his brother, Daniel kills him.

I've read when this movie came out quite some reviews of the film. They all talked about how Daniel Plainview was a great villain and used words like monster,inhuman and all kinds of other such words. People jokingly talked about battles between Anton Chigurh and Daniel Plainview (Since No Country for old Men and this were the big rivals in the Oscar race). Well I was flabbergasted while watching the movie, but Plainview is not a monster or even a enormous villain. Sure he is no hero either, but if you have to choose between villain and hero I'd choose the latter. Bust mostly he is a hard working human being with some flaws.

It is true that Plainview uses his son to gain the trust of the people. But he does not lie. When he tells them that they run a family business it is quite true. He always explains to his son what and why they are doing and his son does really help him a lot. And it's quite obvious that Plainview loves him, even though he is not technically his. And the son obviously loves what he is doing and he loves his dad. He surely has a better life now then if Daniel left him alone. It's very probable that his real mother is dead, since he was constantly with his father. Now you can put against Daniel that his son doesn't seem to have a real name. He is simply called H.W. Plainview.

In his conversations with his 'brother' it becomes pretty obvious that Plainview does miss his family, but he comes from a poor upbringing so he can go back there. He does everything he can to make some money and live a slightly normal life. Those first scenes are very crucial to the movie. They show that he is just a human being trying his best to make a living. So when he says to his brother that he doesn't like this people he works with we can understand. They work less hard then he does and some may even feel exploited and most hope God will one day save them from their troubles. But they are a lot better with him then without him. Sure Plainview doesn't work himself in the rigs and he earns most of the money. But his workers have better conditions then he ever had. And yes these better conditions aren't there because Plainview loves them so much, but because they are good for business. Plainview never pretended otherwise. Many movies have been made about brave people who stand up for the rights of those who are fragile. Well, this is not about such a man and most people at the beginning of the 20th century simply weren't like that anyway. For Plainview,like for most people back then, that is a luxury he can't afford. Besides no one cared for him when he worked his ass off and he never complained. He tries to do the best he can for him and the people he loves. And he does it all in a legal manner. Most of us would do the same, we can't blame him for that.

We can blame him of course for the killing of his 'brother', but even that is kind of understandable. He confides in him a lot. He seems to be happy that there is finally someone who really seems to understand him. Daniel also does his best to help him, since he had hit a rough patch. When his 'brother' tells him he lied to him we can understand that he is really furious. It was obviously important to have some family around.

After Plainview is insured he's going to get his pipeline, we cut to 1929. Plainview lives in a big royal house. H.W. now older says that he wants to start as an oilmen for himself in Mexico. This makes him Daniels' competitor. This enrages Daniel of course, but we can understand both people's reactions. The enraged Daniel asks H.W. to say it to him with his own mouth and not via his translator. H.W. does this with a lot of effort and this does enrage Daniel even more and tells H.W. he is really a bastard son. In the next scene Eli comes to Daniel and asks him for money. In a scene completely over the top where Daniel seems to be completely mad he kills Eli. Again we can understand his madness. First of all, it is 1929. Eli says he's lost a lot of money. Well it's very probable that Daniel has lost quite a lot of money. Earlier in the film we saw that he is willing to take risks if that's good for business. He probably still does that and taking risks in 1929 was not very rewarding to say the least. Plainview might have lost a lot of his fortune. For a man that had to work so hard to earn that can come as a real blow. In the 21st century the financial crash was a lot lesser then in 1929 and bankers who have worked a lot less then Plainview have committed suicides. But that's not all. Plainview's son whom he learned everything he knows about being an oilman is gonna start his own business, with money probably earned by Daniel and thus become his rival. What's more the first time in years H.W. said something aloud. And it was that he is gonna leave Daniel. Surely it must hurt him that his son only know put in an effort to do this. This after everything Daniel tried to make him speak again. On top of all this Eli comes to him to lend money from Daniel, while hypocritically posing as his friend.

Paul Thomas Anderson is a great director. Besides this movie I've seen Boogie Nights and Magnolia and all three movies are masterpieces. This one is his best. He seems to be interested in people that are not great minds and have no great jobs, but they all try to make a living by doing the things they can do in the best way they can do them. It was true for the porn people in Boogie Nights, it was true for specifically Don Cheadle's character in Boogie Nights whose dream was to sell radio's. It was true for the cop and the nurse in Magnolia and it is true for Plainview. This are not all great jobs, but they are necessary in our society. Anderson's strength is that he sees that this people are important too, without making a moralistic, sentimental movie about how we should all love cops or nurses.

Of course one can't end a post of There Will Be Blood without mentioning Daniel Day-Lewis who does indeed give a truly great performance. It's not one of the best ever however. He basically gives the same sort of performance as he did in Gangs of New York as Bill the Butcher. Of course that was a great performance too. What is more surprising in this movie is that Paul Dano as Eli/Paul acts just as well.

zaterdag 9 oktober 2010

All around the world

All Around the World (Lisa Stansfield, 1989) This is a fun song that's certainly not among the best on my IPod. The text is not very interesting on first sight either. But it is interesting that this is an objective song about a break-up. Stansfield just gives the facts of what happened and at no point in the song does she take sides about who was wrong or right. They both were equally wrong, she basically says.




Well, I've never seen this video before, but it's quite boring. What it does seem to say though is that the blame for the break-up lies more with her, then with him. When she sings 'I did too much lying' we see her surrounded by a lot of men, this implying that she slept around quite a bit. That she is not someone you can rely on becomes obvious that, while she sings that she'll go around the world to find her baby, in this clip, she doesn't get much further then her front door. Again like she says in her song, she says too many things she doesn't mean.

donderdag 7 oktober 2010

Advertising Space

I am going to write something about each song I've got on my IPod. I'll devote a post per song and I'll write about them in the alphabetical order they are on my IPod. Important to note is that I'll write very little about their musical qualities, because quite simply I don't know much about music. I can't read a single note, and I even often don't know exactly what instrument is playing. Instead I'll write more their narrative qualities. Because, despite the fact that we usually like songs, because of their melody or the singing of the artist, songs do have texts and we can't ignore these texts. I'll also analyze the video clips of the songs.

-Advertising Space (Robbie Williams, 2005) Williams is a little bit underrated. He has never made a really classic song, but he's also never made a bad one. You always know what you get with him. This is his best song. It's got a pretty interesting, but a bit vague text. It seems to be about Elvis Presley and how soon we forget even the best artists after they die. Maybe we'll get wiser by analysing the video.



We start of by seeing a pretty ordinary guy playing om his guitar in his bedroom intercut of him walking anxiously around his room. After a while we realize that the shots of him walking through the room happen chronologically after him playing relaxed on his guitar. And we realize that he is preparing for something. We have a hunch of what it is, but don't know for sure yet. Interesting to note is that his bathroom wall is full of pictures of naked women that are a bit more erotic then one usually sees on boy's/men's walls and are almost pornographic. Important to note is also that while he is first clothed in white and played a pink guitar, he now is clothed in black. We see him transformed into Elvis Presley and the lightning in the scene is just like the lightning we see when godlike heroes are presented in film.

We are now 1:57 into the video and we can look a bit into the meaning in the video. Due to the contrast of there clothes we realize that white Williams and black Williams have two different personalities. White Williams is a timid good guy that plays on his guitar and dreams of one day being a rockstar. When he dresses himself like Elvis he unleashes his inner rock star and becomes a little bit of a bad guy. In other words if you follow the footsteps of Elvis you might one day become a rock star even if you are just a timid guy. But you can't never reach to Elvis' heights. He is like a God of music. You can only admire him, perhaps even sexually. (The pink guitar in combination with the pictures might be a hint that our rock star has homosexual feelings for Elvis.)

Next we see him in a bus going somewhere again intercut with pictures from him in his house. But we see that there is more weirdness going on. At home he opens his closet and there is a huge doll inside by the name of Cylla, which he adores and sings to. We realize that the doll is probably the object of his fetish. Later in time he goes down a glamorous street to give a concert as an Elvis impersonator in a bar. The bar is pretty empty though and no one really seems to care. He leaves and the lights go out. In a pretty brilliant shot at the end the lightning on the doll changes too and the doll now eerily looks like Michael Jackson, after which we end with a cut to Robbie Williams.

Well we can get a lot out of this. First of all the unsuccessful concert. It can have two meanings. First of all it seems to say, no matter how glamorous you are or how much you try to look like Elvis there is only one Elvis and you just can't ever reach his heights. Secondly it might accuse the people of not caring at all about great artists like Elvis anymore. In the restaurant nobody gives a damn that someone is impersonating Elvis, not even in a negative way.
The line 'no one learned from your mistakes' is obviously addressed in this last part of the video I think. Elvis was on drugs and even though that messed him up horribly and eventually caused his death, it didn't serve as a cautionary tale for other pop/rock stars. And obviously Michael Jackson is one of the artists who couldn't resist the pressures of fame. And neither did Robbie Williams himself. Obviously Robbie Williams' character in this video is crazy too. But he is not a rock star yet. Perhaps Williams wants to say that you have to be a bit crazy to be a great rock star and that maybe the craziness of artists like Elvis and Jackson and himself wasn't caused by their fame, but their craziness caused their fame.

zondag 3 oktober 2010

The Matrix

Throughout history people have asked questions about the world. Why does this happen? How can that happen? What, actually, is the world? These are all pretty compelling questions and throughout history there have been been written many books and made many movies about these subjects, the most notable being of course The Bible, which I believe is just as fictional as the movie I'll be discussing here. I am an atheist, who believes that eventually the science will be able to answer this questions. That doesn't mean that they are not worthwhile and fun to discuss. And The Matrix addresses these questions in a very fun way.

In The Matrix the world we live in is a simulation. The Machines have taken over the real world and made it a very bad place to live. Due to a simulation though, they give us the people the idea that nothing's changed and that everything's OK. The Wachowski brothers are obviously heavily influenced by Jean Baudrillard's ideas of simulacrum and simulacra which they also acknowledge in a scene. They do seem to slightly misunderstand Baudrillard's ideas and take them a bit too far, something which apparently infuriated Baudrillard so much that he dismissed the whole film. The Matrix basically claims that nothing we see really exists. Baudrillard does not really claim that nothing we see exists, but that what we think to be the truth, really is not. When Baudrillard said that the Gulf War did not take place, he meant that that it did not take place in the way we saw it on CNN, not that there never was such thing as a Gulf War. Anyway, all of this does not make The Matrix less interesting.

Not everybody though has fallen for the tricks of The Machines. There are some people who know what's going on and fight against the Machines. They do this via a ship that, if I understand it correctly, inside a computer program. The crew we follow is the Nebucadnezzar crew led by Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne in a great performance. They find a hacker, who in the virtual world of computers (or in this case the real world of computers) goes by the name of NEO. This crew for, unclear reasons, believe that NEO is the one who'll beat the machines. By the end of the film they realize he really is the ONE. Something we already knew since he is NEO. The fact that the makers seem to think that they are very clever for naming the ONE, NEO is the only point of annoyance I had with this film.

The film does a lot of interesting things with world it creates. Before I start talking about them though I have to mention what I think is the biggest quality of the film. The story always follows the logic of the world the Wachowskis created. Everything that happens makes sense according to the rules that are laid out. When there are fights, they happen according to the rules, so does the humor. I am not a big fan of science fiction and fantasy and have not seen many such movies and read many books in this genres. But practically every one I've seen or read breaks its own rules of the fantasy-world it created to do something interested, whether it's to have a cool fight or to make the story even more interesting. The Matrix achieves something great by not breaking it's own rules and still having cool fights and managing to make the story more interesting.

The Matrix uses Avatars in a better and more exciting way then Avatar did 1o years later. And I must say that I am a bit dissapointed in Avatar after seeing The Matrix. Avatar only has new technology, but doesn't do anything really great or new with it. How different is this for The Matrix, whose action scenes made partly possible by the at that time new bullet-time technique are way more spectacular then any of those in Avatar.

It's now time to discuss some of the greatest scenes in the movie. One of the more mysterious things that can happen to us is when we experience a deja-vu. When Neo experiences a deja-vu this is a sign to our heroes that their enemies are close. Because what is a deja-vu according to The Matrix? A glitch in the system. It happens when the Machines make a mistake in their simulation and try to fix it.
These people that fight the machines are pretty much ordinary people who don't know how to do the things needed to beat the machines, like fighting for example. They of course need to learn fast. So they get the course they need (like jujitsu) downloaded into their head. At one point while fighting the bad guys, our heroes are in a bad situation and are only able to get away by flying a helicopter. Problem is, nobody can fly the thing. So one character gets the course flying a helicopter downloaded into her and the next thing we and they know, they are on the winning hand.
In a wonderful scene we learn that Nebucadnezzar has a spy inside it's crew. The man wants to stop fighting with the Nebucadnezzar and asks to became a part of the machines. The reason he gives is that despite knowing that the world is fake he misses to eat a fake tasty sandwich, to drink the tasty fake drinks and to make fake love to a fake woman. Because even though he knows that it's fake it just feels better than the real drinks, the real food and the real sex he gets in the actual world. This is a surprisingly poignant scene, also because we can really identify with the guy.
All of the fights in this movie are pretty spectacular, the last fight is absolutely brilliant though. It's made with surprising humor and it's choreographed and scored like it's a fight in a western.
My favorite scene in the movie though is a very simple scene. The machines have captured Morpheus and now he is being investigated by Agent Smith, the leader of the Machines. Agent Smith is played by Hugo Weaving who gives one of the best performance of the 90's here. He acts with such menace despite basically talking in only one tone throughout the movie, like a machine. In the scene I mentioned he is at his most menacing and due to the completely bizarre dialogue he is given in it, this scene is bizarrely great.

It's worth concluding in the end that The Matrix, together with Pulp Fiction is probably the most influential movie of the 90's. Even while watching I could immediately point out that it has influenced Harry Potter, the Kill Bill films Avatar and dozens of other movies made who tried to unsuccessfully copy The Matrix.

I saw this movie on my road trip in USA. It is a movie I was a bit prejudiced against due to my dislike of science-fiction movies. I loved it and it was not the only movie I saw there which I would probably not have seen soon due to my prejudices about it. And that I would have been wrong in not seeing. I am not a big fan of Pixar, but Up was a very funny movie with a brilliant first half an hour.
I also don't like horror, but the Norwegian zombie-film Dead Snow was a delightfully funny movie. It had so many funny scenes and it was obvious that the movie was made with such energy and fun by the whole cast and crew that I would classify this as a feel-good movie, despite the fact that every single living person in the movie dies.