jürgen fauth’s muckworld

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:

Words fail me. There’s a certain kind of twisted logic to it: a novel about the persistence of love has turned, in the hands of a mediocre director, into a a campy, puffed-up piece of rotten Oscar bait, a movie of such boundless badness that it would take somebody with a Nobel Prize in literature to truly fathom the extent of its wretchedness. Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel is an impossibly sustained lyrical romance of unfulfilled love that stretches over decades, set among the lush vegetation and brimming cities of the Colombian coast. With his adaptation, Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) demonstrates that there’s more to Garcia Marquez than extravagant plotting: without the master’s ineffable touch, even his most fertile fictions turn to dust.

The story’s all there: in the late 19th century, the young clerk Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) falls in desperate love with the beautiful Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but her father (John Leguziamo) interferes, and she marries Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) instead. Undaunted, Florentino decides to wait for her, no matter how long it will take. In the novel, Garcia Marquez fills the intervening years with outrageous and obsessively detailed anecdotes and labyrinthine detours rendered in extraordinary language, but Newell gives us nothing but a few dusty costumes, uninspired direction, and — instead of subtitles — Spanish accents that are supposed to communicate some sort of foreignness.

For the teenage Florentino, Newell uses a different actor (Unax Ugalde), but when the star-crossed lovers turn old, he just covers them with layers of ridiculous make-up. Were there no aging actors available that could have given the septuagenarian Fermina and Florentino a bit of desperately needed verisimilitude? Even worse, the film is completely tone-deaf when it comes to Garcia Marquez’s mingling of ruefulness and bawdiness. Newell plays all the wrong dramatic moments for laughs and mistrusts the romance to such a degree that he slathers every emotional cue with a syrupy score that makes identification with the characters impossible. As Fermina’s confidante, the wonderful Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) is not only wasted but, for the later part of the story, has to suffer the indignity of a fat suit.

But enough. It’s fruitless to count the ways in which Love in the Time of Cholera fails. Critics’ screenings here in New York are usually quiet affairs where you can get shushed for looking at the screen funny, but at the one I attended, people were talking back at the movie, Rocky Horror-style. Love in the Time of Cholera is scheduled to open on November 16.

Love in the Time of Cholera. Mike Newell, 2007. *

• Reading Love in the Time of Cholera
• The Painted Veil also features broken hearts and a deadly disease
• If you must, here’s the trailer

Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.

Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.

Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.

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D.W. Griffith’s epic about “Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages” is surprisingly compelling for a silent film from 1916. “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” four stories take shape. In the modern tale, a working family endures greedy bosses, meddling “uplifters” and false murder charges. The other three stories tell of Christ’s crucifixion, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the fall of Babylon. As the opening credits helpfully announce, the common theme, invoked again and again, is intolerance (you have to say it with a booming carnival-barker’s voice: in-tol-er-ance!). The accelerating back-and-forth between historical periods keeps things interesting, and of course you already heard about the unbelievable sets of the Babylonian sections. The gargantuan siege contains more than a few moments that will seem familiar from The Lord of the Rings, but hey, everybody’s ripping off Peter Jackson. Intolerance is recommended for anyone; if you have a taste for silent film, it’s a must-see.

Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages. D.W. Griffith, 1916. ****

• The entire movie on Google Video
• Intolerance at Wikipedia
• Tim Dirks’ Review at Filmsite.org

Here are ten minutes of the siege of Babylon:

Marvelous. We missed the 25th anniversary screening at the NYFF, where Warren Beatty held court afterwards, but we knew the DVD was on the way. I find it comforting that there are still great sweeping epics around that I’ve never seen, and this is one of the better ones. A love triangle between Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill, before the backdrop of the unfolding Russian revolution–how could this not be great? The “Internationale” montage that ends part one (oh yes, there’s an intermission) is enough to make Ayn Rand misty-eyed, but my favorite moment was Jack’s plea: “Honey, can’t we just get out of New York? Let’s just go somewhere and write what we want to write.” Reds is Jack Reed’s story, played as slightly goofy idealist by Beatty, but it seems that Louise Bryant’s life was every bit as fascinating–where’s her biopic?

Reds. Warren Beatty, 1981. ****

Epic, cheesy, delicious. At times, Spielberg doesn’t quite seem to know if he’s making a serious historical drama or E.T. with Japs, and the syroupy John Williams score isn’t helping. Some terrific shots though, and Christian Bale and John Malkovich make for satisfying viewing.

Oh god no. We walked out of Andy Garcia’s Cuban epic after about 20 mins.