There Will Be Blood
November 29th, 2007
There will be puns, there will be awards, there will be awesome. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson (whose movies I often failed to appreciate in the past) has made a magnificent epic about the price of the precious resources, liquid and otherwise, that we extract from the ground — and from other people. Daniel Day-Lewis is reliably fantastic as Daniel Plainview, a prospector turned wealthy oilman and all-around American monster, but the real stunner here is Paul Dano as his nemesis, the pimply-faced fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday.
This one’s got “movie of the year” written all over it, and I’m already itching to see it again as soon as possible. We’ll have much more on this before the December 26 release. I drink YOUR milkshake!
UPDATED: My gushing review is now up at About Worldfilm.
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****
- Karina Longworth found two tacks from the terrific score, and here’s the latest trailer:
The Long Goodbye
July 18th, 2007
“That’s a lot of entertainment for five grand!” Philip Marlowe’s talking about the questionable spectacle of a bunch of gangsters (including an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger) stripping to make a point, but it applies equally to Robert Altman’s time-traveling Chandler adaptation as a whole. Mumbling Elliott Gould is miles apart from Humphrey Bogart but drop dead cool in his own inimitable way, and all of 1970s Los Angeles emerges as his deceptively sunny antagonist.
The Long Goodbye. Robert Altman, 1973. ****
- Roger Ebert
- Terrence Rafferty revists The Long Goodbye
- Terrence Rafferty on the occasion of Altman’s 81st birthday
- Ill-Informed Gadfly
- Christopher Sieving at PopMatters
- The Long Goodbye at Wikipedia
The trailer:
Colma: The Musical
July 9th, 2007
The first surprise is that Colma: The Musical plays it straight. You might imagine a musical about teenagers in a suburb south of San Francisco in which the majority of the population is dead to be an ironic tongue-in-cheek affair, using bursting-into-song conventions to poke fun at metastasizing franchise culture — Mallrats with a groove. (”Shakey’s is now iHop!” the news announces during the opening number.) But Colma doesn’t deflate or abuse the conventions of the musical; it relies on them to tell three heartbreakingly honest tales about growing up.
Head over to About.com for the rest of my review.
Colma: The Musical. Richard Wong, 2006. ****
The trailer:
Entourage
January 4th, 2007
Breezy fun. For anybody with a passing interest in the lives of celebrities, the workings of the entertainment machine, and the conspicuous consumption of women, cars, and multimillion dollar houses formerly owned by Marlon Brando, this show is pure catnip. Over three short seasons, Vince and the boys have slowly revealed a little too much integrity to be entirely believable, but it doesn’t matter: the real star of the show is hopped-up super agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven). ***
[tags]tv, hollywood, celebrities, agents, 3 stars, hbo, california, los angeles, comedy, turtle, drama[/tags]
